Hello friend,
First, I want to update you all regarding this Substack’s annual ritual of donating 10% of all contributions to a different organization each year. In 2023, I selected Tewa Women United - a multicultural and multiracial organization founded and led by Native women as a support group for women from the Pueblos of the northern Rio Grande concerned with the traumatic effects of colonization, religious inquisition, and militarization leading to issues such as alcoholism, suicide, domestic/sexual violence and environmental violence. From their website: “The name ‘Tewa Women United’ comes from the Tewa words wi don gi mu which can be translated as ‘we are one’ in mind, heart, and in the spirit of love for all.” This is such a potent reflection of this very Substack’s intentions and I am delighted to share that we gave $170 to this incredible effort.
Thank you all for being here, for beaming your hearts out, for lending your attention in an increasingly overwhelming world, in any way that you are!
Join as a paid subscriber to not only support this Substack, this humble offering of profound devotion and love, but to spiral generosity outward in this way.
“The essential quality of the infinite is its subtlety, its intangibility. This quality is conveyed in the word ‘spirit’ whose root meaning is wind, or breath. This suggests an invisible but pervasive energy, to which the manifest world of the finite responds.
This energy, or spirit, infuses all living beings, and without it any organism must fall apart into its constituent elements. That which is truly alive in the living being is this energy or spirit, and this is never born and never dies.”
– David Bohm, quantum physicist, neuropsychologist, philosopher
Hi•ne•ni.
It is the day after solstice, a precious time of rebirth, and you already know: something subtle has shifted here. The ripple effect runs right through the infinite in an eternal instant. A jolt of the heart. Lightning laughing through a storm1. Everything is changed, and yet, perhaps nothing at all feels different, at least not right away, at least not the way we expect.
But it’s all a matter of perception. Do you know something about this? Where the quietest, tenderest moments of your life are the ones that change everything? Where the relentless storm has thrashed against the shores of your being for days on end and only the smallest fragments of your edges have slipped into the sea, yet your entire inner constitution has been soaked and dislodged and rearranged amidst the waves and you couldn’t possibly be who you were then, even if you seem just the same? When the bigness of the world rumbles and swells, but it’s the faintest strike of recognition alighting in the innermost chambers of your heart… ah, that’s it, and nothing will ever be the same.
Almost two years ago, I adopted a new name for myself. I reclaimed old ones and I refreshed them with new life. I reached high into lofty branches of my family tree and plucked them like peaches and became re-known as Rachel Simon Stark.
Today, I am adopting another new name, this time for this tender place.
Before exploring that with you here, just to get into some nuts and bolts – this place won’t change in its intention or dedication. I am not creating a new substack with a new theme. This space will continue to unfold in its wild and emergent ways, feeling into the edges, building a wider home for the fullness of our humanity. Indeed, perhaps, this new name just gets closer to that.
Hi•ne•ni.
This choice, this calling, carries the same texture of revisiting the past and recognizing the magic I overlooked. I run my fingers across the dust of disinterest and refresh the shine waiting to meet the light of re-cognition with revived attention.
Hineni, pronounced “he-nay-nee”, is Hebrew for “here I am”.
Hineni has much to offer us in these disorienting, capacity-exceeding, sometimes futile, always persistent, perennially resilient times.
‘Hineni’ is a word that first presents itself in an unfolding ethno-cosmological transmission in a moment of trembling before the unknown. It is pure and unassuming, available and unguarded before the mystery.
It is a greeting of the extraordinary animate aliveness in the mundane ordinary, of the magic of god (or the divine, or the infinite, or the sacred) in everything. It is humbling ourselves low to the spirit aflame in the windswept quivering bush or the silkspun drifting spider. It is meeting the awe-fullness of all of life with spontaneous, unconditional, unwavering commitment: “here I am”.
“Hineni” is pure, astonished, radically amazed and supremely undefended affirmation uninhibited by what was, is, or will be.
Here I am before the impossible.
Here I am before the unbearable.
Here I am before the irreconcilable.
Here I am before the miracle.
Here I am with all that I am.
Here I am with what I can give.
Here I am without needing to be anyone else.
Here I am as you found me.
Here I am all of me.
Here I am attentive.
Here I am available.
Here I am to receive.
Here I am to respond.
Here I am to offer.
Here I am to serve the call.
Here I am to meet the moment.
Here I am without reservation.
Here I am to experience whatever is unfolding.
Here I am as undiluted presence.
Here I am as unbroken devotion.
Here I am with the full spectrum of life.
Here I am as I am.
Here I am.
In Hebrew this is one word. In English it is three.
I try to imagine the elegant bravery of one word holding the immensity of: “here” “I” “am” - each of these a universe unto its own. I try to imagine the inextinguishable eternity of this concept, the subtlety of it, the energy and spirit breathing life into it beyond birth and death.
Today, let’s reckon a bit with “I”. “I” is important. Here we are incarnated into this Earthly realm in bodies to be here, to bear witness, to transform what it is we’re here to attend, to tend to. “I” allows us to exist in the tangible, and “I” is the ineffable uncontainable invisible mystery beyond physical form.
I lean into a relationship with the “I” that is not the persona, the avatar, the image, but the “I” that is the vessel, the conduit, the channel. “I” is the structure, the architecture, the form for the formlessness to flow through.
“I” the one who can take action.
“I” the one who can show up.
The “I” in me who can recognize the divine in the “I” in you.
I am because you are. I am because we are.2
This “I”.
I spoke so confidently of change and how it happens above, but I want to end with the truest thing I know: that I don’t know. I don’t know what change is, what it takes to change, how change happens. I only know that change is constant. As Octavia Butler wrote: “The only lasting truth is Change. God is change.”
I don’t know what dilates a heart, transforms a lineage, liberates a people, though I endeavor toward all of those in my life.
The most incarcerated amongst us can teach us everything about liberation, the most ill amongst us can teach us everything about wellness and why is that? Why do we live in this world of contrasts and polarities, why must the most excruciating suffering show us what exquisite freedom feels like? Is that necessary?
I don’t know. All I know is that my life’s greatest teaching has consistently been to somehow be here. Be here, through it all. Be here in the unknown. Be here, companioning myself and all I am lucky to walk beside through this great mystery.
“Here I am”. What does that conjure for you? Especially in these times of great responsibility?
Thank you for bringing your heart here. If you liked reading this, please click the ❤️ or 🔄 button on this post so more people can discover it on Substack. Or help widen the circle, by sharing WCC with someone in your life.
Thank you to all my subscribers! If you’re not a subscriber yet, I would love to have you officially on the list. Please consider a paid monthly or annual membership. 10% of all contributions will go to a new organization to be shared soon.
This substack will always remain free, but your subscriptions and financial support make that even more possible to pour into this devotion. You can pay what you can to honor any benefit you gain from this place through venmo.
Your Laughter Turns the World to Paradise by Rumi
Your laughter turns the world to paradise.
It tears through me like fire.
It teaches me.
Reborn in emptiness,
I emerge laughing,
here to learn from Love
new depths of laughter.
I’ve been short on courage,
but I have a heart of sunlight,
straight from the king’s hand.
I stir up laughter even in those who fear joy.
Crack open my shell. Steal the pearl.
I'll still be laughing.
It’s the rookies who laugh only when they win.
Last night, the spirit of dawn came to my room
and gave me a lesson in laughter.
Our blazing roars lit the morning sky.
When I brood like a rain cloud,
laughter flashes through me.
It’s the habit of lightning to laugh through a storm.
Look at the furnace. Look at the stones.
See the glowing red veins?
Gold-laughing in fire, daring you,
“Prove you’re no fake!
Laugh even when you lose.”
We’re fodder for death so learn to laugh
from the angel of death.
He laughs at the jeweled belts and crowns of kings—
all that splendor’s just on loan.
Treetop blossoms erupt in laughter.
Petals rain down.
Laugh like the bud of a flower,
Hugging the ground.
Its hidden smile opens to a laugh that lasts a lifetime.
“Ubuntu” is a Bantu term meaning "humanity". It is sometimes translated as "I am because we are" (also "I am because you are"), or "humanity towards others" (Zulu umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu).