Dare I say it: the risk to be sincere will find us our place, and once in place, which can happen anywhere, our tendency to Unity will empower us with a holistic use. The kind that humbles the part with its being inconsequential and yet indispensable to the Whole, the kind of understanding of purpose that has an old soldier drop his gun and stare into the sun as he realizes his place in the scheme of things.

Still, the quandary of relating to others. Legend has it that in the 1300s, after spending the first half of her life in a convent, Catherine of Siena was called by God to enter the world. She questioned, “Why? How?” Jesus came to her in a vision and said, “There are two commandments. Love God, and love your neighbor as yourself. You have only done the first. You cannot walk with one foot. You cannot fly with one wing.” And so she entered the world, aspiring to be integrated: loving the God in others and the God in herself until the commandments became interchangeable, until loving others was loving herself was loving God.

All very nice, but still no clue as to how. This brings us back to Martin Büber who recalls walking through a meadow at dusk, and as the light vanished, he moved with his walking stick toward the trunk of an oak. Slowly, he reached out with the stick till it was perched between his palm and the thick bark. He could feel the skin of the tree in his hand, and in that skin-bark moment, living dialogue occurred to him. For it seemed clear that he was, through the feel of that stick, in two places at once—in himself and in the tree. The stick made it so, conducted it so. Through the stick he could feel that oak. Then he realized, the stick was no different than the genuine conduit of true speech, a bridge placed directly between two living things by way of a lasting impression of light.

How to live like this in our palms? How to be so fully where we are? Can genuine direct exchange let us feel the bark of who we’re talking to? Can sincere perception let us touch with our eyes? I believe so, for when, by courage or accident, I’ve found myself nakedly in dialogue with another, we uncannily enter into the Way of Things. It seems simple enough, if not always simple to find. Through the same sincerity with which we risk entering the Whole, we must risk the very thing we often fear, that is, the unpredictable impact of another.