It's (NOT) All in the Numbers

Tending the Spaces Between Us (and the email links, now corrected!)

Image by Dmitriy from Pixabay

Every day, the news takes another polling guess at how we can be counted. Which is to say, sorted and divided, red vs. blue.

It is the season for casting votes, and I must be clear – the casting and the counting matter. In the U.S., as has happened and will in the future elsewhere, we are about to make a collective decision on which our futures turn. 

But haven’t we also learned? 

That when all has been counted and tallied, as if by a giant unseen hand sorting us like colored beans, red to one side, blue to the other, it’s not just which side has more, and which has less, that matters; but also how and where the two sides meet and what we do with the space in between.

Is it a line,
  a border?
     a wall?
        a moat?

Or is it
   encounter,
      conversation,
         a portal,
            a trade post?

Is it straight and certain?
Or the curve of a yin-yang curtain?
      The ebb and flow of tide
   of moon
of seasons turning?

Do the two
turn their backs 
to one another
in a hard/sharp line?
Or do they meet and mix,
making vibrant new colors
in shades of a bruise,
in shades of healing?

A paint-by-number kit
Tells you the exact shape 
and location 
of each color,
and precisely 
where the colors meet.
Advises the painter
to obscure the number 
before painting over it
so the numbers don't
show through.

These days
the numbers 
all
bleed 
through.

I’ll say it again: How we vote and that we do is all important now.
And every vote must be counted.

But what counts more
is how we meet
and where we banish shadows
when imagining 
and seeking
wholeness.
How we paint a picture
of tomorrow
where colors fuse
to make new hues
like sunrise
on a brand new day.

photo by Karen Hering

An Invitation

If you are compelled by the question of how we meet one another, consider joining me for a weekend in-person retreat: Cultivating Love & Trust in Times of Change. In late October, on the cusp of the U.S. national elections, we’ll step back from the numbers. We’ll look beneath and beyond and between them to explore what we cultivate in the spaces betwixt. How can we become more trusting and more trustworthy in times that put us all on edge? How to honor our own boundaries in an understanding of wholeness that includes us all? How to practice the sacred art of connecting, one to another and with nature, when so many forces are pushing and pulling us apart?

Come on your own. Come with a friend. Share this invitation with those you know who might be longing for more than the numbers that sort and divide us.

Information and registration are available here:

Because it’s not just our votes that count, but the part we each play in tending the space between us.

May we tend it like a garden, for it is there that our future is being planted.

Karen