Tread across any terrain, any darkness, and stop. Kneel down by the creek. Your hands comb over the cool moss on the ground and you do nothing else other than feel and hear and see. Take it all in. Curiosity absent any agenda.
Might our senses offer more capacity for Knowing than fickle and capricious thoughts?
It's an ongoing lifetime education for any of us bold or foolish enough to sit in the teacher's seat — learning to look at a room full of differently 'posed' bodies. With instruction cues focused less on the gross outer forms and more on the imperative to breathe into harmonious, liberating alignment from the inside out.
It's temping, common, and understandable that in the closing days of 2020, our attention and conversation revolves around overwhelming evidence of disunity. Yet we're bound together not only by common wounds, but also by the brief, indispensable mercies that can appear out of nowhere when we need them most.
In 1665, an ailing Dutch scientist named Christiaan Huygens was recovering in bed from a brief illness. Inspired by Galileo, nine years earlier he'd invented and constructed the first pendulum clock. Bedridden and bored, he became entranced with and mystified by two pendulum clocks swinging in the same display case.
Earlier this month I spent a week at the Feathered Pipe Ranch sharing the “Mindful Unplug Experience.” It's a retreat I was involved in co-creating but that only came to life thanks to imaginative co-guides and the spectacularly brave people who took the leap and showed up. Here's the miracle: everyone shared a commitment to finding ways not only to "better tolerate” our stricken and confused human condition, but to being willingly present to life for the sake of its full flowering.
I scored a dreamy, old, dog-eared, and fragile-faded-pages first edition copy of the book for under $2 online. There's romance in well worn used books, especially library gems with those manila pocket inserts into which hand-stamped due date cards sit frozen in pre-Kindle era time. It's the finest winter mindfulness reading investment I've made in years.
