Interwoven

What are your practices for connecting with others through what makes your life meaningful?

Ezekiel 37:7-8

So I prophesied as I had been commanded, and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. I looked, and there were sinews on them, and flesh had come upon them, and skin had covered them, but there was no breath in them.

I have a love/hate relationship with mindfulness. On the one hand, I know its value. On the other hand, I know the vapid ways we try and plug it into every situation as some panacea to all that ails.

I view our dependence on mindfulness as knitting together the bones and getting the blood going, but lacking life. In this mindfulness, we breathe to restore personal groundness, never realizing the air we breathe is part of a symbiotic relationship to the world and people around us.

There is no one mind in mindfulness, there is only connection. Connection to the world, to the suffering, to the hope, to the possibilities and deaths of our dreams.

If mindfulness only calms our singular bodies and minds, then we are nothing but reconstituted human forms. We are without breath, lacking movement, connection, creativity, and hope.

What are your practices for connecting with others through what makes your life meaningful? How might you imagine your breath is interwoven into the breath of the world?

—Jason Whitehead