Earth and Moon from the International Space Station, September 2014. Image Credit: ESA/NASA/Alexander Gerst.

Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star’s stories. Remember the moon, know who she is. Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time. Remember sundown and the giving away to night. Remember your birth, how your mother struggled to give you form and breath. You are evidence of her life, and her mother’s, and hers. Remember your father. He is your life, also. Remember the earth whose skin you are: red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth brown earth, we are earth. Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them, listen to them. They are alive poems. Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the origin of this universe. Remember you are all people and all people are you. Remember you are this universe and this universe is you. Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you. Remember language comes from this. Remember the dance language is, that life is. Remember. –Joy Harjo, United States Poet Laureate, 2019-2022, Muscogee Nation (hear the poem set to music >>)

Re-membering is to reconnect something that was cut off or severed, to become one body.  Whenever I renew my membership with the universe, stars, sun, moon, plants, community, friends, family, I also re-member myself as a unique expression shaped by all these relationships. Zen ancestor Dogen put it this way: To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things. –from “Actualizing the Fundamental Point” The closer we look at our self, the more we find how each element of our being: thoughts, feelings, flesh, blood, and bone, are sourced from beyond our self. Our parents (and their parents and theirs…) gave us genomes and words and carrots and potatoes and water and sunlight and love and kinship. Without any of this we could not be. In a Zen meal verse, we say: Innumerable beings brought us this food. May we know how it comes to us. Receiving this food, we eat to support life, and practice the way of awakening. When remembering these things, alongside everything else that may be going on, I am filled with gratitude and give thanks. May we all renew our membership in the only living world we know.