In Buddhism, everything is connected. I had a teacher once ask, in a workshop, how my breath was distinguishable from someone else’s. Another learner asked where ‘I’ began, and ‘other’ ended. Or vice-versa. And the truth is? Even science isn’t really sure. If my breath commingles with yours (the Arabs have a saying for close friends: so close they taste each other’s breath), then who is to say where you begin & I leave off?

As I’ve noted in several other posts (here, here, & here, among others),  each of us is part of a web that includes animals (hence my on-again/off-again efforts to eat more vegetarian; I guess I’m at the ‘flexitarian’ stage!), the planet’s waters, trees (which I have been known to name…), and passersby. We really are each other’s connection to the universe, and to each of its other elements. I still grieve for a mimosa who saved my sanity, I’m certain — offering me her blossoms well into October one particularly bitter fall.

With the news full of ersatz leaders who would lead the country on a rollercoaster ride to hate and war, I’m turning inward. Revisiting old comforters like feeding the birds, watching the little Carolina wren check out the busted teapot I hung as a possible nest cavity for her. I bought a new deck of Tarot cards, a return to a time in when my life when I actually made money teaching the cards. It’s my first deck in decades, and hearkens to when I tried hard to live mindfully. Not that I don’t these days, but it was a simpler time.

My younger son — who, like me, sees no contradiction between our mutual love of science & the mysteries of the universe — bought me the book that goes w/ the cards. Cool, huh? And in the best of days, the book came while my beloved & I were helping host our grand-nieces’s first bday. A house brimming with family & friends, all to help a beautiful baby barely able to stand on her own two wobbly feet become a toddler. A soul who wasn’t, a year ago, and definitely IS today.

It’s all connected, I assure you. By ties of family, by threads of wonder. By the Buddhism that animates my beginner’s heart, and the Christianity that animates my sister’s. The gentle agnosticism that colours my niece’s best friend, and the rowdy laughter that bubbles from a a rabble of grandchildren clomping overhead, on the 2nd floor. Each puzzle piece fits somewhere, I’m certain. If no where more exciting that my own kaleidescopic  life. Because certainly each of us is the centre of our own web. And we weave it every moment as we reach out, breathe in, and move forward.

There you have it: a unified field theory of spiritual connectedness. And you didn’t even have to pick up your Einstein…