Community is a place where the connections felt in our hearts make themselves known in the bonds between people, and where the tuggings and pullings of those bonds keep opening our hearts
Parker J Palmer
Scientists tell us that all living things make connections with other life. Trees, for example, by way of roots. Humans, by way of hearts.
We’re all aware of the sometimes unwanted complexity of connections that involve, for humans anyway, ‘tuggings and pullings of those bonds,’ albeit that they ‘keep opening our hearts.’
But perhaps it’s the very complexity of lives lived beyond the edges of our own ego that really brings us to life, widens our horizons, shows us our place in what poet Mary Oliver called ‘the family of things’ – and stretches our hearts, souls, minds and bodies exactly where they need to be stretched, over and over and over again.
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