DW's Blog

Kinship Within

by DW Green — December 17, 2025

“Learning that the mind and the body aren’t master and servant—they’re kind.”

The Total Organism

This morning my Zen calendar offered me Toni Packer: “Seeing is never from memory. It has no memory. It is looking now. The total organism is involved in seeing. Not thinking about what is said from memory, but listening and looking openly now.”

The total organism. That phrase stopped me mid-coffee.

Packer was a teacher of what she called “meditative inquiry”—a former Zen student who eventually left even the Buddhist frameworks behind to get at something more naked. Just: What is actually happening right now? That’s the pathless path if I’ve ever heard it.

Six Inches Behind the Eyes

It was “the total organism” that kept ringing. Because I realized how much of my life I’ve spent concentrated in about six inches—the space behind my eyes where I think I live. The body? That’s just the vehicle I’m piloting. I notice it mainly when it complains. Or, as happened on February 12th of this year, when it suddenly stops cooperating altogether.

Lorenda saved my life that morning. My wife of 43 years, my Loving Presence returned to me in form. A stroke. And in the months since, I’ve been learning something I apparently needed to learn about the body I’d been treating like a rental car.

The Body Has Been Waiting

In Richard Rudd’s Triple Flame meditation, he speaks to the intelligence of the entire body. Not the intelligence in the body, like it’s stored there somewhere. The intelligence of the body. The body AS intelligence.

That reference—experiencing with the wisdom of the entire body—has always called me to attention. I notice the full body immediately when I hear it. And here’s the thing: it feels wonderful. Wonderful to include and recognize my whole person in meditation. In walking. In sitting here with coffee. In being alive on a Tuesday morning in December.

Why wonderful? I think it’s because the body has been waiting. Like a family member ignored at the dinner table, suddenly seen, addressed, welcomed back into the conversation. The body responds to being included. It’s been here all along, participating in every moment, and I’ve been acting like it’s just the help.

Before the Label

Packer points to something important: the difference between seeing and recognizing. Recognition is re-cognition— knowing again. Matching this moment against stored patterns. When I “see” a tree through memory, I’m not really seeing this tree, now. I’m seeing my accumulated concept of “tree” projected onto what’s actually here. The mind is doing its filing, and I’m missing the tree entirely.

True seeing happens before the label. Before the comparison. Before thought intervenes. It’s the -ING without the noun. Pure looking, not “I looked” or “I will look.” And—here’s what Packer is pointing to—it’s not just the eyes that see. The total organism sees. The feet know the ground. The belly knows the breath. The skin knows the air.

Where Kinship Comes From

Earlier today I wrote to my friend Connie. She’d reminded me of my mother this morning—my incredible, amazing mother—and as I wrote back, the word kinship arrived. That word has been central to my recent explorations of time and consciousness, and I’d been wondering where it came from. Now I know. It came from family. From Connie. From the memory of my mother. The concept that became so important arose from the most intimate place: actual kin.

And now here it is again, asking to be seen in a new way: kinship within.

I’ve been exploring kinship with time, with consciousness, with the loving Presence, with ancestors and descendants. Rovelli’s filiation—the light cones of past and future. Rumi’s field where we meet without separation. But what about the kinship between mind and body? Not the mind ruling the body. Not the body carrying the mind. Kinship. Distinctness within intimacy. Two family members at the same table, both fully themselves, both profoundly connected.

Field, Not Container

In my time explorations, Rovelli taught me that spacetime isn’t a container holding things apart—it IS the gravitational field itself. The container and the contents are one. And I’m starting to see the body the same way. The body isn’t a container for consciousness. It IS consciousness expressing itself in form. The body as field, not container.

After the stroke, I couldn’t ignore this anymore. The body wasn’t just the vehicle that broke down. It was me, breaking down, being tended to, slowly coming back. Lorenda wasn’t nursing my body while the “real me” watched from somewhere inside my head. She was caring for me. All of me. Because there’s no “me” hiding behind the eyes. There’s just this—the total organism, aware, alive, grateful.

The -ING Returns

And here the -ING returns, as it always does. Not having a body but bodying. Not doing meditation but meditating. The whole organism isn’t a thing that does seeing—it IS the seeing. This is what Packer means by “seeing is never from memory.” Memory requires a fixed “I” that was there then and is here now, comparing. But pure seeing has no such anchor. It’s just the see-ING, whole, happening.

Coming Home to the Whole

I wrote earlier about how time contracts with speed—Rovelli’s insight—and how humans contract with fear and forgetting. Both are contractions away from spaciousness, from Being. Concentrating in the head is another contraction. Shrinking from the full field of the body into six inches of thinking. But Rudd’s invitation reverses it. “Come home to the whole.” And the body says yes. It’s been waiting for this. The feet want to be known. The belly wants to be included. The skin is already sensing, already participating, whether I notice or not.

Called to Attention

“Calls me to attention.” I love that phrase that arose when I thought about Rudd’s meditation. Not demands attention. Not forces attention. Calls. An invitation. A gentle summons home to the whole of what I am. The body has been calling all along. I just forgot how to listen. Too busy in the six inches, narrating, recognizing, matching patterns from memory.

But here I am now, at 75, in the winter of this form called DW, learning to listen. Learning to include. Learning that the mind and the body aren’t master and servant—they’re kin. Family. Sitting at the same table, finally, with nothing between them.

The total organism, seeing.

The total organism, meditating.

The total organism, being.

Welcome home. The body’s been waiting.

— DW, December 2024