“We only have this one life to live, are we going to sleepwalk through it, lost in our thoughts and narratives and our emotions? Or are we going to find ways to wake up to the fullness of this moment and of what it might portend if only we were more in touch with and accepting of it and of ourselves in the face of anything and everything that can arise during a single moment or over the course of a day?”
I love all this. It is the gentlest, most thorough, most abundant wisdom I have found. I have internalized this as prayer and breath. It is a lot of words for the simplicity mindfulness teaches, but if we could just practice it, we could change the world. Our brains are evolving away from this mindset, perhaps, but we can always come back to it. It is always there.
The invitation is always the same: to stop for a moment—just one moment—and drop into wakefulness. That is all.
Drop in to your experience of experiencing, and for even the briefest of moments, simply holding it in awareness as it is—in no time, or to put it differently, in this timeless moment we call now, the only moment we actually ever have.
Another way to put it is that mindfulness is all about being, as in “human being,” and about life unfolding here and now, as it is, and embraced in awareness. Therefore, it takes virtually no effort because it is already happening. All it requires is learning to reside in your direct experiencing of this moment, whatever it is, without necessarily thinking that it is particularly “yours.”
Later this afternoon, the field and the walk I will take along the same trajectory will be entirely different, and that difference will make me different, will require me to be different, meaning present afresh for what will be offered up to the senses in whatever moment I arrive. And it is always so, summer or winter, spring or fall, yesterday or today, in rain and gloom and snow, at night under the stars… I am always arriving. It is always already here, just as it is, always the same field, but never the same.
Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?
Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now?
Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts?
When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse
that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day.
This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life—
What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here,
right in this room, when you turn around?
WILLIAM STAFFORD, “You Reading This, Be Ready”
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space, even the outracing, expanding thought. Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches everyone’s dream, and the result is the world. If a different call came there wouldn’t be any world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.
Being a Person (William Stafford)
For a time we are immersed in a world that is probably little different from the way it was five or fifteen thousand years ago or more, a vast and primordial silence, ebbing with sounds. Bald eagles cry out, ravens squawk, smaller birds on the water and in the air all contribute their various calls and cries, the waves lap at the shore, the wind blows through old-growth Sitka spruce and western hemlock temperate rain forest that has known the force of the brutal winters but never the clear-cut saw. We sit here, opening to this world, to this soundscape, to its ancient memories.
The realization has crept up on me that it is indeed just air, but what a gift. What a sensuous gift, this invitation to feel what is already offered to us, to experience that we are being perpetually embraced and nourished, at all times both touched by and touching the spirit of Ariel, the very air itself. We are breathing and being breathed. We are living in air, like Chagall figures, and living on it and off it too.
Everything that unfolds unfolds now, and so might be said to unfold in the nowscape. We’ve already observed how nature unfolds only and always in the now. The trees are growing now. The birds are flying through the air or sitting in the branches only now. The rivers and the mountains are in the now. The ocean is in the now. The planet itself is turning now.
May all beings near and far be safe and protected and free from inner and outer harm May all beings near and far be happy and contented May all beings near and far be healthy and whole to whatever degree possible May all beings near and far experience ease of well-being…
And it need not stop here. Why not include the entire Earth in the field of lovingkindness? Why not embrace the very Earth that is our home, that is an organism in its own right, that is in a sense one body, a body that can be thrown off balance by our own actions, conscious and unconscious, in ways that create huge threats to the life it nurtures and to the intelligences embedded within all aspects of that life, animal and plant and mineral that interact so seamlessly in the natural world?