Select pieces written over the past few years. Click here to see the Newsletter Archive.
When what we usually consider to be ourselves (our self-referential thinking) is rendered ‘insignificant’, we taste a brief moment of just being. Not just in nature, but as Nature. The distinction between us and nature collapses. Maybe this transcendent experience frees us to merge with the beauty that floods our sensory awareness. To be reunited with the larger, indivisible nature seems to bring a sense of relief.
Often in life I’ve been too ADD to meditate in the usual seated way – too jumpy, too agitated, too busy-brained. When this happens, I’ve learned to turn to these sorts of active absorption practices. This is a path of concentration, but not the Buddhist kind, or not exactly. More the athlete’s or the artist’s kind. Its external form may look like going for a run, or drawing on a canvas, or even moving the vacuum around the house.
I sat. I learned some stuff. How to turn towards those feelings I’d been pushing away, that my emotions were only an aspect of a larger experience, and that nothing, even the hardest feels, lasted forever. These new ways of noticing gave me space where once there was none. It went on like this for years, incremental bits of breathing room that kept me alive. Then something strange happened.
“That the world is loveless results directly from the repression of beauty, its beauty and our sensitivity to beauty. For love to return to the world, beauty must first return, else we love the world only as a moral duty: Clean it up, preserve its nature, exploit it less.”-James Hillman In Douglas Rushkoff’s newest book, Team Human, … Continued
We make choices all day long to either stick with a plan, a decision, a career, a person…or Surrender, and let go of the control. See how your day unfolds when you aren’t attached to a particular outcome. Trust comes in here, in a big way. Trust that your best intentions are being served, even when you’re not in charge of every decision. Step outside of being your own micro-manager of every minute and every hour. Surrender and see what presents itself. And if you have trouble doing that, I’ll lend you my daughter for a day…