Service

Service

With our ability to receive information about world catastrophes and possible

pandemics, it is increasingly important for us to be aware, understand and know what

service means in our time. There is an immense amount of attention put on the resources

that are needed in times of crises and the fundraising that is necessary to make those

resources available. It is also necessary to raise awareness so that our help is built on

compassion and relationship rather than fear.

Service is connected to awareness because true service is our self serving the whole. Raising awareness reminds us that our service is to the larger landscape and as a detail of that landscape it’s also necessary to maintain the health and wholeness of our selves. Service isn’t about being a whole and healthy healer before healing anyone else, It’s being aware that if one piece of the whole isn’t whole and healthy, then there’s illness in the whole, and service is to the whole.

There are these two amazing figure eights, and one is about being the detail of the landscape and being whole; otherwise there’s an illness in the landscape. And the other one is understanding that each of us came here to fulfill a unique need, to do our work and fulfill our unique self and the Whole.

The Earth is a medicine bundle, and in it is everything that the beings on the earth need to live a whole and healthy life. Each one of us is one of those medicines. So we’re like a plant, and aiming to understand ourselves in that way keeps us from falling into arrogance. It’s the uniqueness of a particular weed or a particular plant that feeds a certain insect that allows a certain reptile or other insect to survive. If it does something else it’s interrupting the circle of those relationships, and that’s where our uniqueness resides, in this work that we have to do in the world. What is the medicine we bring into the world?

Service is breath rather than something heroic or the better path. It’s a natural activity of being and it’s essential for the Earth and humans on it to survive,. In the unraveling of our understanding of service, we begin to remember and re-weave ourselves in our natural state and place in the Web of Life.

Two leggeds, humans are gifted with a developed sentience that includes awareness of self and context and the ability to choose. Unlike our relatives, the ants and the animals and plants we think of ourselves and think about our place in life and choose how we will be. Our sentience has so developed, it’s very difficult to train that sentience back into correct proportion to who and what we are on the planet and to our being as well as thinking and doing. It is very difficult to train that sentience which has developed as I centered back to the relational thinking of the Web of Life that is we centered. And so at each opportunity to retrain that sentience to both the larger picture and the smaller uniqueness, we have space for the moment, for remembering and remaining aware that you are choosing and that you can choose differently at every breath. And that’s a retraining of sentience so we can remember our moments of choice.

You train your sentience to expand that moment rather than trying to set a heroic standard, which puffs up the idea of service, too. Every choice has the possibility to assist us in re-training our sentience if we expand our awareness of the choices we are making. Now is the moment. When we’re standing like this, when we’re sitting like this, when we do this it’s a time to remember our place in the world.

Plants, animals, insects aren’t laying on the couch wondering where am I and how do I fit. They were doing their work. So how do we train ourselves so that kind of effortlessness comes to us on our breath, and that we can help each other do that?

In this place, service is a natural state of being. Just as we can make breath become an act of awareness, we breathe to become aware. We become aware to appropriately serve.