THREE
Nearly fifty years ago. Looking back, I realise how I only walked close to the foothills. Of course, the rolling hills are not to be knocked as they offer some comfort and beauty but the harder work, climbing the mountain, the face up to just be yourself and the elements and the frailty of your body and breath – now that’s the real test. Along the way I have failed miserably, lacked courage and insight. You may suspect that this is still the case and you would be right thinking so but those fifty years have been signposted with surprise and joy and excellent prospects, not all of my own making.
I have been lucky along the way, and I have had a chance to meet myself. I wish that meeting had taken place earlier, in those foothills I speak of. It was not to be the case. Initially I drifted along, overcame obstacles and the stresses and strains of life, but with a dearth of insight, a smaller lens, a narrow perspective, I had lived on a narrow frequency of life. Until a few years ago, before the ascent and even during the ascent, I would have kicked myself for my lack of awareness. Railed against my limitations, even hated myself. Now I think I simply accept that we all have our blind spots, our frailties – we just need to work at not leaping to them when we are under pressure, or caving into them as the easier option.
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Poetry is the place where there is a chance to make some sort of sense of things. I am struck how a poet is thinking what I am thinking or tugs at a mood that allows a breaking open. It offers a being present and a widening lens of the human experience. I can be in a valley at the same moment experiencing the summit of an invitation for other conclusions. It ‘forces us to be alert to the possibility of the moment, to experience and capture it fully’.[1] And, if it doesn’t, it starts the journey for us, deepens the path, deepens the wind as we walk along the shoreline of hope and brings an awareness of what we are/ have been going through. I love how it offers the angle of light, alternatives, second chances - and is not afraid to call out our delusions. It works at our feelings of smallness without acting big. It doesn’t see me as a project to save me or fix me. It touches those parts of me that I can’t reach. It helps to free me and understands what obstructs the mind. It just is.
★
This exploration is a chance to pause, to slow down, to examine and investigate. It is a fathoming – a kind of checking how much water we have under our keels. The Buddhist teacher, Akincano Marc Weber reminds us how ‘Sailors would drop a weight on a piece of line from the bow to see how deep the water was. They would fathom the ground. Fathoming the ground is touching the earth. It's connecting with the greatest degree of reality this being and this mind is capable of holding’.[2] With poetry we have this chance to discover what we cannot yet see, how shallow or deep lies beneath.
★
We are squeezed between what has gone before and what is headed our way. Perhaps we can open up to a new present where there is no pushing and shoving from either end. When we sit in silence and focus on the breath we can quickly forget how long the present is. ‘We are present when we are not identified with the narrative of the moment.’[3] I am trying to work out what that means. Is it that we are not tracking the present? Where we do not tell stories of ourselves as we breathe into our bodies and get out of our heads. Is that where we are curious and sit in wonder at the moment by moment. Is it the end of chasing the past and dropping out of a hyper vigilance for the future? What has happened and what will happen next ceases to be important. Here I want to drop the sense of me, the ego, how well I am doing in this arising and passing of the moment by moment, no longer caught up with a metric of my progress.
This present is providing a wide open space, landing here feeling the thoughts and seeing that they are just thoughts, that they mean nothing in reality and require no action. If they are about the past, they have gone, they are history. If they are about the future … well they will not necessarily happen. They could happen but it’s all about bridges and crossings. We will meet them later in the new present.
This meditative work, of being present and using love and wisdom to suffuse what has gone before is helpful. It has meant that I can revisit the panic attack, the cross word, the hurt, the experience and not be driven by the old story, ending the self-flagellation, the whipping, the sense of failure, the sense of being stupid but now look with compassion and kindness. In this moment, the future doesn’t take on the hold it once had. That it no longer pulls us like a tug. There is a naturalness to what comes next and an understanding that I cannot control forces outside my agency.
Hot wired to be vigilant, we see the threats that are headed in our direction, to be awake to dangers. It has been part of our survival as a species. It’s our very biology. It has helped to keep us safe, to be alert to the sabre tooth tiger and looking for the means of escape. Those dangers are extinct now, wiped out by our ancestors and have been replaced with other threats. The uncertainties remain, we have no idea of what will happen next and never have been able to do so.
Our modernity has provided the gloss that we have fewer uncertainties but it is a scam. Sitting in the present, feeling the warmth of the summer’s day, being aware of the light in the room and the crow burping outside gives a feeling of expansiveness and an ending of the narrowness of a present that once did not really exist because we were too busy leaping around old stories from the past and wondering about the call of the future, that tugging I earlier spoke of.
This new present no longer is squeezed. It has spread out. It is wider, higher and longer. It is gorgeous where butterflies come to play and kites visit. They only live in the present. Here I can put down the past like a book that I have been reading. It is a kind of surrender really, an ending of habituation, a conditioning. End of the scrolling too of future scenarios of coming struggles, battles, difficulties and decisions. Deal with them as they arise, moment by moment. Because you have found yourself in the midst of it all, discovering what you know what you think and believe - that will be the guide on this path into the unknown.
My words are like legs that have sat too long. Only when we jump up, stride out, give them blood can we begin to form them. Here, less serious, a chortle, a guffaw how lost they have been. They can become light if we work hard enough. Like the sun – not heavy weight. They can wrap themselves around the listener in a warm embrace of wonder in letters of the morning bird song.
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