Friday, April 29, 2022

Crime and Punishment

 




We are surrounded by an immensely complex and extraordinarily vast cosmos. 


The effort of creation that it took to bring this into its initial being was unimaginable; and its results are equally unimaginable.


In the midst of this staggering evidence of intelligence so high that our understanding fails, we fill our own world — the human world — with an endless series of opinions about God, about sin and crime and punishment and the necessity of this and that. Many claim to know what God thinks; and they have no compunction about forcing others to think that way with them.


Yet the whole cosmos was created as exactly that — a whole cosmos — and everything in it, every arising manifestation, every object, event, circumstance, and condition, was foreseen in the act of creation and is exactly as it is because it is necessary. Even the idiots who claim to know everything are necessary, as is the essential act of not knowing anything — of the two positions, the only realistic one.


So our notions of good and evil, crime and punishment, sin and salvation, are ultimately failures. God is too good and generous to create a world of punishment and hatred. That world is our world. Ultimately, as Gurdjieff says in Beelzebub’s Tales, every cosmic arising, every being, and every aspect of reality, is ultimately destined to return to the great goodness of God’s Being and to blend with it. Man is too small, in the greater sense of things, to commit any sins too great to be forgiven. This would be true in any case, because God’s love and forgiveness is infinite. Whatever hatred there is, whatever crime ensues from it, whatever punishment is meted out: that is of us, not of God. Love would have forgiveness prevail over all; love would demand that mercy be the only way.


It's in the small things of life that we need to learn this practice. 


Last week a woman posted a complaint on a local message board about cleaning woman who had broken an expensive marble sink she had just installed. She was furious and asked for advice on how she should approach the matter with her cleaning woman.


People had all kinds of ideas about how calculations should be made, moralities weighed and evaluated, payment negotiated and demanded. This between a woman who can install expensive marble sinks and someone who was raised in relative poverty and is struggling just to make ends meet.


I left a brief comment on the thread: 


Always be kind and merciful to those who have less.


Life could be that simple; yet we live in a world where the more people have, the less kind and merciful they feel. Our society is arranged that way. It’s clear enough that there is something desperately wrong with the feeling-parts of our society; we’re the ones that are broken, not God.


The question is whether we can admit that to ourselves. 


When Gurdjieff created his vision of a broken universe, the cracks in it were forming in us, not God. We're the ones who are responsible; and we're the ones who need to see that.


We can presume, from the fact that it is so, that the universe is broken for a reason. Perhaps it’s a call to us to see ourselves and to act, with voluntary intention, on behalf of the others around us to help bring goodness to where we are. It’s this act of bringing goodness to where we are in a given moment that is important; because if goodness is brought to the present moment, it will always be here and it will grow. It's the attempt to bring goodness to other moments and other places that so often fails; our vision does not reach that far. 


This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t think that way; but it's how we should act right now that matters the most.

with warm regards,


Lee


Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

I begin very directly within sensation

 


This post is related to something I wrote over a year ago.


I begin very directly within my sensation, as though there were nowhere else to begin.


At the beginning, I have to commit 100% to this idea, because when the rest of me is lost, this is my salvation. It is the crack in the gate to heaven— a barrier I erected myself — through which God’s wish for me leaks in.


I can begin here this morning very quietly, within a stillness that cares about life in a new and different way. 


My first and only obligation today is to be here. 


I fulfill my duty through my presence, not my actions. Every duty fulfilled automatically without the participation of my presence is just a sign pointing towards the destination, not the destination itself. The destination is always here in this moment, and the duty is always to that awareness.


I don’t have to lose myself. There is a perverse part of me that has the desire to do that, and this is where everything goes astray. That part is untrained and knows nothing about duty; it only knows about itself and its own selfish desires. Its desires are wandering around everywhere in the imagination, but only very rarely focused on what is taking place now.


My body knows how to focus on what is taking place now and it can help me a great deal if I stay with it. This produces a natural stillness which I can listen to, with ears that do not hear sound and see with eyes that do not see light. These are the organs of attention, which work in darkness to perceive what is true outside the realm of my own desire. To sense, to listen, and to see from within all help to create and maintain a soil in which the seeds of Being grow.


There is love in this place, but it is not my love. It is a privilege I encounter and and energy to be manifested. 


Duty begins here; and every time I forget that, the light of the soul grows dimmer.

with warm regards,


Lee


Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.

Saturday, April 23, 2022

West Point

 




October 16. 


I'm a single month away from my 40th anniversary as a sober person.


The photograph was taken at West Point this past Wednesday. We were up there for my friend Rip’s mother’s interment; and although from one point of view it was a joyful reunion of many old friends and family, from another one it was a sobering reminder of how we will all eventually die. 


Rip’s mother was buried next to her husband, Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the general who led the United States through the bitter, fractious, and deadly Vietnam War, which formed so much of the history of my own generation and marked the moment of divisiveness which has colored so much of the nation’s history since. 


Like those buried around him, the general did what he did because it was his duty. The graveyard at West Point is filled with those who did their duty as best they understood it, even though in many cases it led to their deaths. This is a level of commitment rare in today’s America. To stand amongst these graves was a deeply emotional experience.


I don’t have occasion to wear a jacket and tie very often anymore; in the circles I travel in and the life I lead, such uniforms have fallen well and far out of fashion. Yet to dress up in this way is a reminder that there are certain things in life that ought to be approached formally, with a respect that we too easily forget. When Robert Fripp dresses the members of King Crimson in formal attire for concerts, it helps us, because he reminds us that like life, this concert is a serious thing to be approached with respect and understood as a kind of work. We think everything should be fun; but life isn’t fun. It’s a serious business, and although joy and enjoyment have their place in it, we should not forget that it ends in death and that we need to have a sense of this around us in order to bring the appropriate gravity to our attention and our relationships.


Rip and many of his friends are musicians and they performed a spirited and enthusiastically improvised version of “When The Saints Go Marching In” at the graveside. It was by turns both perfect and appalling. I feel his mother would have loved it and his father would have hated it. It is, in any event, what took place, and like everything else on the surface of this planet in complete conformity law, no matter how bewildering its manifestation.


As it happens, Rip was the person who was there at ground zero when I got sober, and he steadfastly supported every moment of that effort. He also introduced me to the Gurdjieff work; and so I owe him my life on at least two counts.


It is been an unusually warm October; and although we continue to get somewhat more rain than usual — we’re often in the midst of drought in the fall here, or at least used to be —the month has produced some extraordinarily pleasant days. We have yet to come close to first frost, and the leaves are moving into their fall colors very gradually.


I find my soul pinned to the board of this life. The more subject one becomes to astral influences, the more stubbornly one is planted not in some extraterrestrial, heavenly transcendence, but in the simple and inescapable fact of this life and what it is. Heaven and hell meet here and they are both here with me inside myself; sometimes I channel one, sometimes the other, and sometimes– more often — they channel me, but I can’t escape the truth of where I am, in the chemical, molecular, emotional, intellectual, and physical sense of myself.


Although it is right here with me, in some senses the soul is a distant thing, because it lies so deep within being as the root of my arising. The stillness it emanates penetrates all the way through, it’s true, to the surface these days; yet these two parts are still getting to know one another and there's always an uneasiness. Stillness is cautiously distrustful of the agitation that life brings; and the agitation of life believes in itself so much that it holds stillness in perpetual contempt. 


A truce is formed somewhere in the midst of this mutual suspicion. In that truce, the stillness always holds the high ground simply by being planted in the lowest ground of the body.


This lowest ground of the body is not a subscriber to the agitation. To be sure, the body has its own forms of agitation; but they can be met in objective silence and tolerated. The energy that makes the stillness possible is stronger than anything else in Being.


In the midst of this inescapable existence (for as long as I am alive) on the surface of this planet, I see how I don’t know anything and what a fool I've been for most of my life. I have, however, no choice but to be clueless and no ability to be anything more than a fool. 


I embrace these two hopeless conditions filled with the hope of sensation and the faith of the soul, because they do know something and they are not fools. 


If I trust them, perhaps they can lead me forward through this mess to a more intelligent love and compassion — which, with every passing day, feeling instructs me as the greatest possible aim.


with warm regards,


Lee


Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Notes From October 12

 


Notes from Tuesday, October 12.


There's always chaos around me; the only difference is that with attention, I'll notice it. 


Without it I begin to dream that things are organized and might go the way I want them or expect them to.


Sometimes I need to use force within myself for my aim. The question is, when should I do this, and how? There are times when concentration needs to be mustered with a greater effort because of some specific situation. I should be prepared for that.


There’s more than one attention in me; to speak of “attention” as though it were a single thing is absurd. There are multiple attentions in me, among them specifically an attention of thought, an attention of the body, an attention of feeling. The moment that I speak casually of attention and don’t understand the different attentions as individual entities, I mush everything together and I'm unable to understand within myself whether I am thinking, sensing, or feeling. 


My work is characterized by such laziness because I refuse to focus when I need to.


When everything is mushed together, identification is the result. The attention of the body, however— provided it is developed — is not so easily subject to identification.


It’s useful to avoid thinking about the work. I should just do it. Allow the psychology, but avoid confusing it, mixing it in. 


I move from one point to the next in an ordinary way, attending to duty, awaiting what comes next. 


I need to see the way in which my functions and my consciousness are different things. 


Again, if I don’t discriminate, if I'm not specific, I’m always confused and I think that my functions are conscious. They want me to believe this, because each of the functions is a machine programmed to get its own way if it isn’t supervised.

with warm regards,


Lee


Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.

Sunday, April 17, 2022

October 6


Beach Stones
Prout's Neck, Maine 



October 6, 2021

How can I come to rest in a quiet place within myself that isn’t disturbed by my ordinary manifestation?


My sensation needs to become much more focused in such a way that it supports me.


I can’t afford to be vague and disorganized about my work. I need to be quite collected. The entire point is to gather the parts together with more intention, not approach myself in a scattered way.


Eventually I come to rely on my sensation as the consistent guide that leads me towards a deeper sense of being.


Where do I discover intentionality if the head is weak? I can’t really use it; it doesn’t actually work, and it’s usually not there.


I begin my work in a new relationship with my sensation.


How to become more whole?



with warm regards,


Lee


Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

The Other Birthday Essay

Schist at the Cliff Walk on Prout's Neck, Maine
Sept. 2021

originally posted this on Facebook Oct. 1 2021.


It’s my 66th birthday today.


Thanks in retrospect — and in advance, for it is early in the day — for all of the birthday wishes, for which I am very grateful. Without you friends, and my relationships with you near and far, old and new, life would have nothing worth being here for.


I’ve been busy with the ordinary things of life for the last month or so, and had little time to post on Facebook. That is to say, more honestly, that there was plenty of time to post on Facebook, but I had other priorities. 


At the same time, I’ve been engaged in a little project that I think I will post on Facebook, a travelogue about our recent trip to Maine.  It began with a single introductory essay which I enjoyed writing, so I thought I would continue, and it has expanded into an extended rumination about not just Maine, but the process of living. I’m not quite ready to post it yet, but I’ll get there.


The process of living is of perpetual interest me. We’re like solar systems inside; over the course of a lifetime, the dust cloud of impressions we take in coalesces into planets as the gravity of the different things that happen to us attracts the material of our life. In the process, we form an inner solar system. Some of the planets we form in ourselves are cold and distant from the center; they lack compassion. Others become enormous but have atmospheres that are hostile — this is our negativity, which can come in many different flavors. 


One of them, the inner earth, gives birth to life which evolves and eventually produces an environment of extraordinary beauty and complexity. This planet is our inner soul. And then, of course, there is a sun inside of us which gives light to everything. Sometimes that sun is faint; at other times it is brilliant, because its light is erratic and the energy it emits isn’t always consistent.


Yet there’s more than one sun that can illuminate our inner life. The dawn of a new light and a new sun can fill us. That new sun has a unique gravity and is capable of things that exceed our own knowledge and the knowledge of our sciences. It exceeds, in fact, everything that man is, just as our ordinary sun in the physical world does. 


I’ve been reading a book on the geology of the earth, centered around North America, called The Way the Mountains Grew, by John Dvorak. It’s a very good book, but a bit technical and perhaps best suited for those with a real fascination for geology and the biology of evolution, which plays a significant supporting role due to its presence in the fossil record. I think the main point the book brings across (which I don’t think the author was aiming at, actually) is the enormous amount of work, struggle, effort, and suffering that this planet has gone through during the course of its being. 


We walk across the rocks and stones of our landscape taking them for granted; we take nature as it is for granted. The immensity of what it took to put everything here as it is is rarely, if ever, a thought in our minds. Yet the processes are complex and astonishing, the results unexpected and infinitely complicated. The very fact that you can sit here and read this is highly dependent upon the physics, chemistry, geology, and billions-of-years-old timeline that has already taken place.


What forms in us is equally so. There is a geology of being in us. That gives rise to our essence, our personality, the soul. We engage in equally momentous processes in the formation of who we are; the analogies are extensive.


We are part of something much larger than anything we can understand with our minds.


Life flows into us; and in itself it is a force of mystery which we participate in most of the time without a second thought. But, if for just a moment we become more alive, if we sense the vibration of this strange and beautiful life of ours in the molecules of our being, one sometimes catches a whiff, experience a fleeting taste, of how unusual and inexplicable all of these processes are. As one grows older, this becomes more possible. 


So while age brings its own new forms of suffering in terms of the gradual deterioration of the body, the aches and pains of arthritis and all the ordinary complaints which people in their later 60s tend to share with one another, greater glories also arise. A new light dawns within being; understanding deepens, and a sense of reverence for this process of being expands through the cracks that appear in the assumptions that personality plasters itself with in its efforts to pretend that the house is already whole as it is.


These are my thoughts for this morning.


with warm regards,


Lee


Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.

Sunday, April 10, 2022

The Chakra of the Whole Body

Barred owl at Crawford Pond
Union, Maine Sept. 2021

Let’s speak for a moment again about why one needs to care about one's inner sensation and begin to develop a new relationship with it.


Our inner parts are arranged in a hierarchy. Let’s speak allegorically as though we were looking at one of those chakra diagrams with a vertical line down the center of the human body that has little dots on it.


Now forget about the dots for a minute and just imagine that there is a top, a middle, and a bottom. The top is the intellect; the middle is the feeling; the bottom is the sensation. The sensation is the anchor, the foundation upon which the entire structure rests. If it's not firm, everything above it flops around, back-and-forth. The center of the building has no feet under it to stabilize it; the top is top-heavy and drags the building back-and-forth in one direction or another. No foundation, no structure. The hierarchy is disrupted and my whole being flops around like a fish with no water to swim in.


The moment the sensation is present, the foundation is put right and life flows into it in the way it was meant to. Sensation receives life objectively, without interference from the mind, which wants to color everything it encounters. If sensation is deep and comprehensive and permanent, then — only then — the mind can begin to engage with it in a new and more constructive way. This is part of what I mean when I speak of organic sensation.


Once this process begins, it's possible, over time, to deposit enough finer material from the perception of being to create a magnetic attraction to feeling, and feeling is drawn naturally to this material. I don’t speak of emotions here, I speak of feeling, which is a finer quality.


Once enough work has been done, real feeling occasionally arrives and one sees the world as it is, which is an entirely different world than the one that one usually sees. It is also, paradoxically, exactly the same world; only feeling reveals truths about it that are not available to sensation or the intellect when working on their own. Let me just say that very high things can be seen with relative ease, almost effortlessly, under the right conditions.


Return for a moment to the little diagram of the person with the seven chakras. There's a certain truth to this and there's a certain truth to the whole teaching about chakras; but it has been trivialized and marketed and illustrated too much for anyone to understand it organically, as is absolutely necessary. So better leave it alone. The interesting thing is that the seven chakras, like the notes on Gurdjieff’s enneagram, are actually a single whole thing, a comprehensive and unified system of which each chakra is only a single note. When the hierarchy of the inner structure re-acquires its foundation and the parts begin to work normally, it's a step in the direction of that unified system.


At the point where real feeling enters in its whole state and with all of its ability, one does not open a single chakra. (In fact, of course, if a chakra opens it's best it do so most naturally and without my interference, simply because conditions for it are correct. But that’s another discussion.) With real feeling the chakra of the whole body, the entire system, can open, and for a moment a much higher influence can enter. 


This can’t take place all the time, because, like ordinary flowers, the blossoming should only take place for a moment—at which point Being is fertilized. Then it all ends; and it is time to do the work that grows new seeds for the benefit of Being.


This is actually happening mechanically and without our participation all the time, which has something to do with the biblical parable about the seeds that fell in many different places, some in barren ground and some where they could grow effectively.


I think I'll leave it at that for this morning. It’s enough to think about for one day.


with warm regards,


Lee


Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.

Thursday, April 7, 2022

The Light of the New Christ


Sunrise, Crawford Lake, Maine 
September 2021

I woke up this morning touched by the light of the new Christ.


I don’t expect anyone to understand what I mean by this. However, the light of the new Christ shines in the distance and is already alive with the promise of the new day in that light. 


I can only see it from a great distance, like a faint galaxy, because I am at that distance from the light. But it touches me as it touches everything on this planet.


On each planet, God is engaged in great works. Within each sun, God is equally engaged in great works; and so within each galaxy. All of those great works are aimed at bringing the light of the new Christ into each corner of the universe so that it can be born and shine into the hearts of the creatures of creation. 


This is a true thing which, once again, I don’t expect anyone to understand; I don’t quite understand it myself. Yet I have been shown that it is true, and I thus testify to this, as is my duty.


To us, the planet Earth looks like an ancient place, over 4 billion years old. The record of its creation and the life that has grown on it—complex, mysterious, and intimate facts that have been pried with great effort from the geological and fossil traces of its action using our sciences—seem ancient to us. They represent the annals of a great struggle which has culminated in life as we know it on the planet today. Yet all of this has taken place, within the eye of God, in a mere instant. It’s a single passing thought in the mind of God, a casual nod of the head in the direction of all creation.


I say this easily; yet there is nothing truly casual in the action of God, because all of it is precisely calculated according to plans and desires beyond our understanding. 


So if we are touched by the light of the new Christ, so is our feeling deepened and so is our understanding illuminated that we begin to see these things, and how tiny we are. One does not see with one’s eyes or hear with one’s ears; when the light of the new Christ comes, one sees and hears and feels and touches with the soul alone, which has all the organs needed for Being. This question of Being cannot be served by our ordinary organs, because they are mere tools for existence. Being is from a higher level than existence, because it’s aware. A rock exists; things that are alive can Be. In a certain and absolute sense, existence ceases if there is no Being to perceive it; and thus this great (to us—for God it is done with ease) struggle which took 4 billion years to produce our planet and the creatures on it, including myself and you who read this.


Yet in the midst of all of this deep examination of time and the cosmos, the simple and true thing is that the light of the new Christ not only can come and will come, but does come, according to the preparation of the soil. The light of the new Christ does not belong to earth or the sun or this galaxy, but to awareness itself. And this is a deep light from within the soul that speaks truth and nothing else. It has no other language available to it because it was created only for this purpose, and there is only a single truth.


As an individual, without the help of this truth, I don’t see the extraordinary scale of the privilege which has been granted me—to live and to breathe. This is not a small thing but the greatest one; to live and to breathe is the beginning of the opportunity to receive the light of the new Christ, of which I know nothing and can only bow my head in awe. Even here, from within what I receive of this light, I realize that I will have to let go of it and move on into my life this morning in the most ordinary of ways, holding this secret within me. 


Its beauty is immeasurable; its truth is immutable. Each fragment of creation is vouchsafed with its personal portion of this glory and this responsibility; and yet we human beings walk away from it without a thought, for the most part not even sensing its presence.


 A week from today I will be 66 years old; and despite the fact that I am “a large presence” (I have been told this, anyway) I see that I know nothing and that the only validity I acquire is through the birth of the light of the new Christ, which I do not deserve and cannot honor appropriately. 


When the light comes and the truth is born, I suffer greatly, because it shows me where I am and what I have done, and I am not good enough. Yet it is only through suffering that that any goodness can come, because the anguish of my insufficiency brings me to my knees in such a way that the light of the new Christ loves me not less for my failures, but more because of them. This deepens my grief and increases my wish to honor that light with a compassionate intelligence. 


Even then, I do not know how to do this and must ask for help.


These are my impressions from this morning on September 24, 2021.








with warm regards,

Lee


Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.

Monday, April 4, 2022

A New Basis For Understanding My Own Nothingness


UGC 2885 ("Rubin's galaxy")
Image credit: NASA/ Hubble
This galaxy contains an estimated 1 trillion stars.
Thank you, Vera Rubin.


Lying in bed this morning, attempting to become as responsible as possible to the entire sensation of the body, a few things occurred to me.


First of all, the organic sensation arises everywhere within, from the sum total of the microcosmoses from which the body is made. 


This microcosmos extends from the quantum state up through the atomic and molecular levels and into the cells. The microcosmos is, in its totality, the source of sensation; so sensation — organic sensation, the sensation of presence — does not arise within a particular center. In fact it includes all the centers and is the foundation upon which their activity rests. 


In this way it forms a field, a plasma or aether, from which all activity arises. Because everything that exists arises from within this field of vibrational awareness, to participate in it more directly and more responsibly is to become a more complete and whole part not just of oneself, but of everything that happens in and around one.


Secondly, this is a mirror of the action of God himself. In the same way that I (perhaps) come to an organic sensation of myself which contains the fullness of being through the action of the microcosmos within which my awareness arises, so too does God come to an awareness of His own Being. 


In this sense, within our universe, every galaxy — that’s correct, galaxy — represents a cell. Or, perhaps even only a mere quanta of the arising fabric of His Being.


So perhaps this particular image selected for the post and this brief set of thoughts begins to establish a new basis for understanding my own nothingness.


God in His Being-body also has to make an effort to be in relationship with it and to understand the subtle cosmological underlying fabric of his transcendental material body through the same kind of sensation – awareness that I do. 

My own effort in that direction supports His effort. 

If one wants to understand the “fabric” of Beelzebub’s Tales to his Grandson perhaps one could begin with this set of premises, that throughout the universe and all the universes every being is engaged in a responsible action related to this requirement.



If you have time, think about this post in the context of the below post from 2021:

Wish and the Force of Holy Denying



with warm regards,


Lee


Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.

Friday, April 1, 2022

Something

Beach Stones
Prouts Neck, Maine 

No matter where I go or what I do, I think that I’m something. In this sense I don’t have a clue about my own nothingness. It takes work, real inner work, to confront my nothingness, and most of the time that’s not present in me.


If I have a moment of real insight, I see that I’m not even close to understanding this question. I carry the conviction in me, unconsciously supported by everything I am and do, that there's something to me and that my life has a great significance that matters much relative to the planet and the cosmos. 


This is something like a single bacteria in my own body thinking about how great it is. It forgets that its power is only earned and exercised in context, in relationship with its brethren and the society of viruses, bacteria, and cells that it inhabits. Or, rather, more aptly put, it doesn’t even forget it; it never knows it in the first place.


Even the word ego is empty, because I use it to define a situation I don’t understand. By using it, I pretend I know something about the situation; and that already deceives me.


All of these questions come to a point in me and I begin to know that I know nothing; my helplessness is apparent. I ought to see this more clearly. It could help me. Real humility might be born of that; and real humility provides a gateway to conscience and remorse.


In the midst of this colossal misunderstanding which I live, it’s my duty to attempt to bring a positive force which most of my being resists in favor of its own conceits. Positive actions which are automatic and don’t result from a struggle are relatively worthless. It’s the moments of relationship and positivity which I earn by overcoming my resistance that matter. Every shred, every gram of resistance comes from my belief that I am something and know something. Convinced of my own value, I refuse real value and I refuse relationship. If this blackboard could be erased there might be a real relationship; at least, the formula for it might be scrawled in chalk on the surface.


Perhaps one might say that these are things to think about today; but, even more than things to think about, these are facts that need to be sensed by the grains of organic being. The texture of them needs to be felt and appreciated; the touch of the needs to be as real is the sensation of bark on the fingertips. 


The understanding of my nothingness could be a tree that grows in me. The nourishment that it gains from its roots and from the light that falls on its leaves are both distant from me where I am; I merely stand on the ground here and touch the trunk, which is strong and supports the enterprise from the center. 


It has already grown by itself; yet it lives a separate life from what I am, and I know little of its biology, its species, the creatures that live in it. 


The nothingness itself inhabits and supports a community; it is in its selflessness itself that strength can be found. 

with warm regards,


Lee


Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola magazine.