I have not been writing for awhile now as I am going through some challenges with some relationships, with money, with marriage and with self to name a few challenging places.

The quote I will post shortly has long been a help to me. I find it similar to Martin Buber's advice from I and Thou, a classic philosophical book in which Buber suggests that the end of depression can come through the re-mystification, as I call it, of relationships.

When I meet someone I do not ever really know them or it. Buber suggests that when we/I engage with any part of nature as if it were sacred, or as I have mentioned a mystery, and interact from that not knowing, we can over come depression and sadness. We can fall in love again with the world.

We make objects, Buber also teaches, and this is a powerful way of mankind. We objectify and create. But creating, a sacred act for many, we also make some "thing" and many of us/I find that afterwards there is no sense of satisfaction in that thing. Consumerism I believe thrives on this. We obtain or create one thing, find it not enough, find it, as Buber said, a "dead" object and we move on to the next, living in a constant state of wanting as Buddhists would teach about our being "hungry ghosts."

Yet in these very things we can find mystery and a sense of respect if we shift our relationship to one of curiosity and one of participation with good intent. In fact, I would say none of us exist outside our relationships and it is how we are in relationship that creates a sense of self.

Here is James Hillman's quote, from Dolores LaChappelle's Deep Powder SNOW, that has sustained me for so long. I consider it a small miracle that today, as I was feeling sad, the book was found on my shelf after a long sense of it being lost. I felt as if the book found me, not the other way around.

"Self is the interiorization of the invisible God beyond. The inner... [but] it's still a transcendent notion, with theological implications, if not roots. I would rather define self as the interiorization of community. I would be with myself when I am with others. I would not be with myself when I'm walking alone or meditating or in a room imagining or working on my dreams. In fact, I would be estranged from myself.

And others would not include just other people, because community, as I see it, is something more ecological...A psychic field. And if I'm not in in a psychic field with
others -- with people, buildings, animals, trees, I am not."  -- James Hillman, A Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse.

I can now remember several authors, John Heron, Charlene Spretnak and Theodore Rozak are a few, who also ask us to re-enchant ourselves via nature. The key is the word RELATIONSHIP. Native people knew this even as they too often degraded the Earth unknowingly.

My point here, to you and to me, is that all knowing is relational and how we are in relation creates the quality of being alive. You and I exist because of each other. May peace be with us all. And may we each know a truer sense of self in relationship.