The Mystery of Happiness

How to live a soulful and spiritual life.

T. Byram Karasu, M.D. is Silverman Professor of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. See full bio

October 14, 2009, Philosophy

Boundless Communion

The universe [is] the divine womb -- Matthew Fox

Here are two poems, one from an ancient Welsh text, the other from a Sufi poet, thousands of miles and decades away from each other, revealing that same mystery of being in communion with the world.

I am the wind that breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave on the ocean,
I am the murmur of leaves rustling,
I am the rays of the sun,
I am the beam of the moon and stars,
I am the power of trees growing,
I am the bud breaking into blossom,
I am the movement of the salmon swimming,
I am the courage of the wild boar fighting,
I am the speed of the stag running,
I am the strength of the ox pulling the plough,
I am the size of the mighty oak,
And I am the thoughts of all people,
Who praise my beauty and grace.
--"The Black Book of Carmathan"

I am dust particles in sunlight.
I am the round sun.
I am morning mist, and the breathing of evening.
I am wind in the top of a grove,
And surf on the cliff.
Mast, rudder, helmsman, and keel,
I am also the coral reef they founder on.
I am a tree with a trained parrot in its branches.
Silence, thought, and voice.
The musical air coming through a flute, a spark of a stone,
a flickering
in metal. Both candle, and the moth crazy around it.
Rose, and the nightingale lost in the fragrance.
I am all orders of being, the circling galaxy, and the falling
away.
What is, and what isn't. You who know
Jalālu'l-Din, You the one
in all, say who
I am, Say I
am You.
--Jalālu'l-Dīn Rūmi

In the ancient image, a drop of water in the ocean is indistinguishable from any other drop. The ocean exists only in convivium (living together) with all the drops. With humans, conviviality requires some degree of sacrifice of one's self-centeredness and joining as part of the communal life. It means focusing not on one's own success but that of the community at large, striving to own things not individually but commonly. That means investing one's energy and resources in communal properties, such as parks, museums, forests, lakes, clean air and water supplies. IT means appreciating simply life, honoring virtues, promoting a measure of asceticism in the large sense of the world and, yes, even as simple an act as recycling. We do have extraordinary examples of such convivialtity by a number of individuals who would not consider themselves more than ordinary: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and John Cronin, Susan Seacrest, and Veer Bhadra Misha's fights to protect the world's waterways from being polluted: Mary Barley's work to save the Everglades from human plunder; Christine Jean's attempts to establish an estuary to harbor wildlife; David Kopenawa Yanomami's effort in the Amazon.

T. Byram Karasu, MD is the author of The Art of Serenity