## Resilient Koan 23 - Here and There ### _Koan_: How can you get the benefits of being there, while still sustaining the contribution to and relevence of here? ### _Discussion_: Does access to the ocean and waves have anything to do with why we don't live anywhere else in the world? Visiting cities and communities with a different culture to our own communities is making me re-consider the value to the kosmos of me persisting in the place I live. This may be a question you've considered yourself. What are your thoughts on living in the most remote city on earth...far from your friends? Is moving to a larger city a half-step closer to 'heaven'? ### _Inquiry_: What is this place we call home, and does our work in the world need to be in that place. Do we build community in places that our not our community of support, simply a community of work, and how do these divisions divide us? ### _Insight_: In a worldcentric or kosmoscentric reality these divisions are meaningless. There is no local in a non-local perspective. There is only one field of activity. In a community of humanity, which part are you not a part of. That said, we all have a place we go in retreat, a place that is less expansive than where we are stretched and pulled to our ultimate giving of self. The irrealism of being away from home while traveling is an escapist sense of 'other place', where by living on anothers sofa, using their kindnesses, where they pay the rates, contribute to the infrastructure, we become but the parasite tourists living offf their kindness in an avoidance of our own senses of obligation. From this characterisation, we understand that the 'there' is not other than 'here'. The benefits of another place without the obligations are the illusion of the holiday from self. ### _Resolution_: Are we only talking about physical benefits and detriments of place? Or are we talking about where we experience community, which is where our heart calls us? Or are we talking about the illusion of separation between the place we learn and the place we are called to apply what we know in love? I returned to western Australia almost 20 years ago from a sense of family and community from a place where I had connections and community. My work became non-local while being practical in the locality of need. In this there is a finding of what we need to do what we do. Disconnection with place is the pathology of a missed aspect of self. Finding this is a second obligation in the apithological self-senses. ### _Practice_: In doing Big Mind/Big Heart practice the other day with Musho Hamilton the kosmoscentric self maintains that expanded space and when translated into smaller fields, such as the world, the ethnocentric identity, our closest dependent beloved and even the single self, the nature of that held engagement and care does not change, yet there is a different quality to it. The joy and pain experienced is equisitely different for each, and in other ways only ever the same. This practice reminds us that the location of enactment is only ever an illusion and boundary of our own mind and inadequate heart. --- This is one in a series of 25 'Resilient Koans' documenting "an apithologue into the koans of practice discovered while creating resilient sustainable communities", in 2010.