We never know what will arise during our Saturday conversations in the Online Gatherings. We begin with one of five possible ‘launch pad’ topics and go from there. Sometimes we stay ‘on topic’. Sometimes we wander into distant landscapes of exploration and discovery. This week offered a bit of both.

Our launch pad was ‘What’s going on in your life these days?’

In answer to this, someone spoke of grief.

The atmosphere, as one might imagine, was quite weighty to begin with. And while this texture never vanished from our discussion, it was, as time wore on, joined by other tones and shadings. A sense of curiosity, for one thing. A sense of openness and welcome. A sense of empathy, commonness, gratitude, appreciation. A sense of ease.

Responding to this gathering multitude, someone commented that experience somehow alters when we come together and share in this way. When we witness. It doesn’t become something other than what it is, exactly. It becomes instead something increasingly fluid and dynamic. Something porous and malleable. Something more inclusive and alive.

Hours later, it struck me one could say this of meditation too. As we slow down and settle, arising experience is given more room to be just what it is, to be simply witnessed. And when this occurs, something that once seemed so singular and definitive, becomes something…well, something more.

This has me wondering if the gathering of sangha, the gathering of community is a kind of meditation practice. We come, we slow down, and settle. As experience is born and arises in our midst, we witness and – to bring the Tibetan term for meditation, gom, into this – we familiarize. In so doing our lives are given opportunities to unfold that they might not have otherwise. Our lives are given opportunities to breathe and reveal.