She looks at me gaze unblinking, transmitting memory. Mother Kundalini. I bow, hands folded, to insects, worms, and bacteria the silent architects of our gut. How we treat them shapes the soil of our body. How they live shapes the state of our mind. Gut serotonin sings the song of our sanity. These bacteria rainbow beings veiled in darkness, deities disguised, turned against the ego only to remind us of our place in the vast, woven web. May we remember our Rainbow Body. May our visions clear see flowers in our shit. May our waste become the fertile ground from which gardens rise. On this graveyard let compassion bloom. Let us dance with the indivisibility of the sacred and mundane. She looked at me, gaze unbroken. She called me home to Prajñā Pāramitā, to Primordial Wisdom, to Emptiness, to Dependent Origination, to the Dance of Union.
Growing up as a Tibetan refugee and a Tibetan Buddhist in India, I used to believe that compassion was a choice—and that we, the marginalized, had to beg for it from the rest of the world.
But in light of the current state of polycrisis and the collapse of familiar systems, I now realize that compassion is the only currency we, as a collective can truly afford. Everything else is a debt. We will not survive this era unless we recognize our shared fate as one interconnected world.
Every war, every addiction to consumerism, and every pursuit of material success comes at the cost of exploiting the Earth and all her beings.
There is an invitation now to reconnect with our innate enoughness—a wholeness that predates capitalism and the patriarchal propaganda of endless expansion. There is a quiet contentment that arises from deeply remembering our belonging in the greater web of life, a web sustained by interconnection, community, care, and resourcefulness.
It is time to lay down our weapons and defenses, to lie on the Earth, and to dream with the earthworms and snakes—so we may rise again, rooted in a vision that includes everyone.
