This Ordinary Moment

Ordinary things… we’ve been talking about ordinary things for a few weeks now… small drab brown things that embody the sacred as much as anything else, the echoes of what we put out into the world coming back to us, the teachers by our side at every moment, even Jerry’s message last week about how we speak to each other. The spiritual in the everyday, ordinary stuff of life.

To me, the hardest and easiest ordinary thing to appreciate is this moment right now. It is the hardest because there are so many things that get in the way of appreciating the present moment: distraction, worry, regret, planning, multi-tasking, busyness, pain, grief, expectations, phones!

But, of all the spiritual practices, this one of the few where we don’t have to do anything special. We have everything we need always.

This is also known as the Buddhist concept of mindfulness. Buddha said clearly, “Don’t get caught in the past, because the past is gone. Don’t get upset about the future, because the future is not yet here. There is only one moment for you to be alive, and that is the present moment. Go back to the present moment and live this moment deeply, and you’ll be free.”

Why are we free if we live deeply in the present moment? Because now we are free from the guilt, regret, anger, shame, and embarrassment of the past. And free from the fear, worry, and anxiety over the future. We have freedom from wanting something we don’t have in the moment. And we’d be free from experience greed, as Mark Nepo calls it, or perhaps the new jargon is FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

Nepo wrote that once he wanted everything – to experience and understand everything! But getting sucked into this constant drive for more meant that he had trouble really experiencing or understanding anything! When we divide ourselves between too many things, it is hard to fully experience any one thing well. But when he stopped, stopped striving, stopped wanting what he didn’t have in the moment, and let himself “collapse before the moment” that he found that the moment offered everything.

When we want for nothing we must have everything. Dwelling completely in the moment so as to be fulfilled by it grants us everything.

We put a lot of time and energy into our beautiful backyard, cultivating flower beds and a vegetable garden. When I finally sit down to just look at it, I last about ten seconds before my enjoyment and peace turns into a to-do list of what still needs to be done. Clearly, I need to learn to collapse before the moment, so that I might fully appreciate and experience the beauty around me.

In Christianity there isn’t a good, clear teaching about any of this in the Bible. So, I chose a passage from the Song of Songs. It’s a book in the Old Testament that is known as a great romantic poem, but what struck me about this passage was that the author of it seemed to be fully immersed in the moment.

Here comes my lover, running down the mountains like a gazelle,
leaping the hills like a stag in search of his doe.
Look at him, standing out there staring in through the window lattices like the moon.
He is calling me: “Come, sweetheart, my pretty one, come out!
Winter is over, the rains are gone, the flowers are blooming.
It’s time for singing; let’s walk out through the valleys and listen to the song of the dove.
The fig trees are setting fruit; and the air is full of the smell of grape blossoms.
Arise and come, my pretty darling, come away with me?”

~ Song of Songs 2:8-13

The lover has come to entice the Beloved to celebrate the day and everything in it – the doves singing, the fig trees ripe with delicious fruit, the smell of grape blossoms. It evokes our senses. In this passage we hear and feel and see and know that the lover and Beloved are so very present to the moment.

If we could live more like this perhaps more of our moments would become poems! We would see things we don’t usually pay attention to, we’d be aware of sound, smell, texture and feelings.

OK… I agree it is next to impossible to do this every moment, but the goal is to have more and more moments of mindfulness, of freedom.

Nepo, in The Exquisite Risk, tells a story about being on vacation one summer. Each morning he’d sit on the edge of the lake and watch the far shore. He could see the early morning light flood the water in the distance, somehow making everything on the far shore seem very exotic. Every morning he imagined that something mysterious and wonderful was awaiting him on the other shore. With each passing day, this feeling grew stronger until, on the seventh day, he had to go there.

He got up earlier than usual and set out across the lake in a small rowboat. He beached on the far shore in exactly the spot he’d been watching all week. But now, as he looked around, the aura of mystery and magic was gone. He said he was “somewhat undone, for though this far shore was beautiful and peaceful, the wet clump of earth I ran my hand through was the same as where I’d begun.”

Then he laughed at himself, because, looking back at where he’d been sitting every day, he saw that the early light now flooded that spot in such a way as to make it seem exotic and mysterious.

If he had been fully present in his morning moments, appreciating the view, the peace, the light on the water without craving more, feeling like he was missing out by not being over there, feeling short-changed somehow by sitting where he was instead of somewhere else… perhaps fulfillment would have found him. Perhaps he wouldn’t have gone searching for more only to find that he had it where he was.

To truly live and live deeply, I encourage all of us to practice being fully present in as many ordinary moments as possible.

Love & Light!

Kaye