What's in the background;
what rests beneath.

I want to share something about how I understand the world, in the spirit of honest conversation. I've found that how we make sense of the world shapes everything: how we make decisions, how and when we rest, what we trust, what we value, what we allow ourselves to feel. And because the frameworks we inherit often do this shaping silently, below the level of conscious choice, it seems worth occasionally making them explicit. To simply say: here is where I stand, and here is what I see. And then to ask, sincerely: what about you? What are the underpinnings of your world, and what is it like for you?

I came to this stumbling, and clumsily. Through struggle, through leaving, through addictions, through flailing attempts to make sense of what for decades did not cohere. Through an eventual shattering awakening that utterly undid me but also cast me into something deeper, more inexorable, more true. What followed was a decade of slowly learning to live inside the resulting silence: the endless walks, the stillnesses, the gradual emergence of a quieter way of being in and orienting to the world.

Gradually an articulation emerged from the slow, patient experience of living in a particular way, and noticing what that living revealed.

The understanding, as plainly as I can state it: both this cosmology and the universe it describes are alive and dynamic. Not metaphorically, not as a comforting fiction, but as the most honest description I can offer of what I've found when I attend carefully to the bare experienc of life. I have found the universe to be relational in its nature, that things are what they are in relationship, not in isolation. I have found it to be intelligent and responsive. And I have experienced it, in some fundamental way, as deeply feminine: not in contrast to a masculine principle, but generative, complete in and of itself, a sovereign force that requires nothing outside itself to be whole.

Within this, the body is not a vessel for something more important. It is not a doorway to something beyond it. The body is itself the sacred substance: a local site through which the universe knows itself through a particular form. Sensation is instructive. Pleasure, rest, and silence are essential to the path. Presence is path.

I've come to call the animate, experiencing texture of that inner substance of reality the soulsoma — a word I use not as something defined but as a pointng-toward, the way you might indicate the quality of light in a room rather than try to describe it precisely. The apprehension of soulsoma is the recognition of that which already animates, already moves, already constitutes everything you are. It isn't an epiphany to be arrived at. It's simply acknowledged, and felt, and lived.

You might wonder at my spiritual practices, as I sit with both Buddhist and Quaker groups, and I find genuine nourishment in both. The primacy of direct experience, the gathered silence, the ethical seriousness, the attention to what is actually present — these resonate deeply with how I live. I'm grateful for these communities and don't take lightly what they offer.

I also don't belong to either tradition, and I've found it useful to understand why.

Buddhism, across most of its streams, begins with a problem: dukkha, the unsatisfactoriness of conditioned existence. The path is organized around liberation from this condition. Even where the body is treated with care — even in the most embodied Buddhist practices — it tends to function as a vehicle, a means, something employed skillfully in service of an awakening that ultimately transcends it. In Buddhism the body is honored but it is not who we really are, while for me the body is everything.

Christianity, and most of the Abrahamic traditions, tell a story of rupture and restoration. Something went wrong; the spiritual life is oriented toward repair. The movement is vertical — upward, toward what is more real, more permanent, more divine than this embodied and transient existence. Even in its most generous forms, the flesh remains something to be redeemed rather than something already holy.

My understanding begins with no rupture and no problem. There is nothing to be liberated from, no fall to be redeemed. Life moves and unfolds in myriad directions, exploring for the sake of exploring, adapting and shifting at whim. The path isn't toward transcendence, but rather moves into and through depth: into greater presence, greater permeability, greater capacity, for as long as we're here, to feel and be felt by what is alive.

What changes is not the world but the quality of attention brought to it. And that change turns out to be everything.

If this understanding, this framework, were to have a name, I'd call it an embodied interbeing: interbeing in that everything (including what is sometimes spoken of as mind and matter, soul and body) interdepends; embodied in that the body is the site and substance of knowing, not something to be seen through toward a more real reality beyond it. Or it could perhaps be described simply as a relational cosmology, foregrounding that consciousness and meaning arise between beings rather than within isolated individuals, that the more-than-human world is a partner in our unfolding.

To be clear: I'm not saying this is the correct view, a more evolved view, or even a view that others should adopt. I'm not interested in converts, and I'm wary of any spirituality that organizes itself around its own propagation, has history has demonstrated such efforts do not generally end well. This cosmology grew in the specific conditions of my life, my particular awakening and the years that followed it, the body I inhabit and the world it has moved through. It is, as honestly as I can offer it, a description of what I've found from inside my own experience.

I share it not to argue for it but because the cultural air we breathe is not neutral. In the absence of explicit cosmology, an implicit one fills the space, and the one most available in the Western world carries assumptions about hierarchy, transcendence, the body, and what progress means that don't fit my experience, and may not fit yours. Naming an alternative isn't a claim to have found the answer. It's simply an act of integrity and honesty in a shared space, and an invitation for others to create and share their own.