about the present moment

I am here. Wondering. Feeling. Noticing what I want to read. What I listen to and don’t. How words matter. How ideas and being are different. Un-layering this. Allowing the unravel. Thinking about what it means to act, to react, to be informed, to be present. To breathe, to create, to transform fear. There is data and science of what is. And there is how we react, the stories we tell or do not tell.

Here are two things I re-read today:

One—

Toad by Mary Oliver

I was walking by. He was sitting there.

It was full morning, so the heat was heavy on his sand-colored head and his webbed feet. I squatted beside him, at the edge of the path. He didn’t move.

I began to talk. I talked about summer, and about time. The pleasures of eating, the terrors of the night. About this cup we call a life. About happiness. And how good it feels, the heat of the sun between the shoulder blades.

He looked neither up nor down, which didn’t necessarily mean he was either afraid or asleep. I felt his energy, stored under his tongue perhaps, and behind his bulging eyes.

I talked about how the world seems to me, five feet tall, the blue sky all around my head. I said, I wondered how it seemed to him, down there, intimate with the dust.

He might have been Buddha—did not move, blink, or frown, not a tear fell from those gold-rimmed eyes as the refined anguish of language passed over him.

Two—

“You want peace. There is no one who does not want peace. Yet there is something else in you that wants the drama, wants the conflict (Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, page 77).”

Since I often think in terms of Venn Diagrams, here is an overlap I’ve found between these two things:

We create the peace that is ours to have. There is no scarcity. It’s for us all. We can choose it in every moment we are present with delight in the small things right in front of us. This is not naïve or Pollyanna-ish. It’s not mutually exclusive with being informed of facts or noticing struggle. We can accept the data of the moment and not react with opinion or story. Our joy in noticing small things is a radical and transformative act.

If you find yourself inside the spin of a news story or engaged in an opinion-sharing debate or feeling some sort of worry, just stop. Breathe. Find a little silence. Then look around, listen, and start to notice all the infinitely beautiful things all around you. I promise you, this matters.

love and light, melissa