Krishna Das says we can’t pour from an empty cup. What’s your go-to practice for refilling your cup so you can continue to serve others with compassion and love?
Ironically, pouring from an empty cup is theoretically the only way to refill an empty cup. We simply need to be boundless, and this sort of classic Zen word problem (is this a Koan?) is about the sillyness of concepts, or at least an invitation to use them skillfully… that which refills the cup is mysterious, and in regards to behaviors available by which we can refill it…in application they are all mundane and incredibly sensible (meditate over a cup of tea…soak in the tub and reflect on things you enjoy…slice a garden grown cucumber, salt it, and put the little wedges in your eyes…) but these are rituals… self care “rituals”…these are acts of mysticism the mechanics of which are identical as when the altar boy rings that crazy little bell thing and the priest saying the Mass calls down the Body of Christ into the Eucharist… there’s nothing you can do, and yet there is…these rituals…they work, in faith…
And at some level, to truly be great at refilling my cup, I realize I need to be able to pour from an empty cup. In the potentiality surrounding the air both inside and outside of the very frame of my cup is Infinity, and from it wine could spontaneously spring forth, and does in each successive moment/breath humanity works through. The circuit is not a perpetual motion machine yet. It runs on a battery/gas/a source of fuel… hence the encouragement of devotional practice…meditation and the such.
The world…is not enough.
Which is to say…in regards to dynamism, the world always must be regarded as enough. One of the classic debates I’ve seen, somewhat arising from more Monotheistic vs. Secular framings of wisdom systems, is whether everything being enough/whole in dynamism means there is or is not a Source with a Subjective Personality. There is. And often times dynamism drives people away from the world as a means of driving them further into their inherited value systems, so that they may commune, and then become an effective force of change in the external world.