Being Awake (but not in the good way)

I’m awake in the middle of the night and I can’t get back to sleep.

Ezra Bayda once wrote that he counts his exhales backwards to zero from fifty and that this activates his sympathetic nervous system which then takes over from his worried and anxious mind. I’ve been trying this sporadically for several weeks at night and I want to report that sometimes it works. Sometimes I’m asleep before I get to zero. Sometimes I can feel a shift in my brain where the energy moves from activated and anxious to stable and at ease. It’s quite nice. Sometimes.

But not last night.

I woke up at two a.m. to the sound of fireworks. For five minutes the successive explosions echoed through my silent neighborhood. I wondered about the young guys (my assumption) that were setting them off. Was their intention to disturb the easy sleep of the old folks? Did they set a few off then run to another location to avoid the police who might be coming? Were the police coming? (In that moment, I pictured the police as two reasonable guys in a car who would accost the perpetrators and restore quiet to my night—not, I’m aware as I write this, as a enforcers of a system of inequality based on skin color and economic class.)

I thought I would easily go back to sleep. It had been a long day and we were already packed to leave on vacation the next morning. But after a while, I turned over and realized I was awake. I tried to stay cool and curious. I’ve been sleeping through the night these days and thought this would be over soon. But it wasn’t.

For the next hour or two, I lay in a state of semi-consciousness. I did the counting backwards on the exhalation thing—I must have stopped and started three or four times. The instruction is, if you get lost to begin where you left off you don’t have to start again at fifty, you just begin where you left off. I would gather my intention and begin counting downward only to find myself some unspecified time later thinking darkly about some pressing issue of my life and relationships.

Realizing I had wandered away into a realm of anxious thinking, I tried another strategy I just read from a Buddhist teacher. He said, when you realize you have wandered away from a gentle focus on the breath to pause and calm your mind and relax the tightness in your head. I thought these were wonderful instructions when I read them and I almost wrote them down. But last night, my intention to calm my mind and relax the tightness in my head produced minimal to no change in my experience.

The things I think about during these occasional nightly rumination sessions are familiar. I am compelled to think about specific unresolved issues (content varies with the night). I strategize endless conversations to get to the heart of things and set things at rest. It’s hard work. My mind circles over and over the same territory. A lot has to do with locating blame. Something is wrong and it’s either my fault or someone else’s fault. I am the self appointed sheriff and my job is to find the bad actors and set things right.

I know, in these sleepless thinking sessions, that thinking is not the way out, but I can’t help myself. I am mildly curious about how long I will be awake. I try to ‘look around’ and learn what I can here in the underworld. I’m not very successful. I find some comfort in Norman Fischer’s phrase ‘Sometimes, this is how people feel.’ This at least locates my solitary burden squarely in the family of human beings.

I also try to trust that these places of obsessive thinking are my body’s way of working things out. I am chewing the cud of my life—trying to digest the roughage into useable bits of nutrition. I imagine how patiently cows spend a lazy afternoon chewing and chewing the grass they ate in the morning. Not one of them complains about the repetitive activity. They’re happy to stand there chewing—perhaps adding in the occasional pissing and farting for variation.

But me, I have to work to be patient—to realize that this is my only life—here in the dark and uncomfortable night. I look at the clock occasionally. I notice that this place is not continuous. I feel awake, but I suspect I am drifting in and out of awareness, even as I keep prospective track of ‘how long I was awake in the middle of the night.’

I open my eyes and it’s quarter after five—late for me. I have no idea how or when I got to sleep. It feels like I was just thinking about the many problems of my life. And I wonder, do I manufacture these problems to keep myself entertained while my brain just happens to be switched into worry mode? Or are these endless issues the roughage that sometimes need multiple chewing sessions?

Universal Movement

1.
Is everything growing
legs or is it just me?
These days when
I set something
down like my pen
or my watch
or my keys, some
universal force
of dispersion or
attraction seems
to lure it somewhere
else and I’m left
searching for every
thing on my own.

2.
Like a game of
hide-and-seek
the things of my
life wander away.

I try not to take
it personally as
I’m sure they delight
in their liberation.
I imagine their
wonderful adventures
unburdened by reason
and responsibility. They
must behave without
regard to their
parochial purposes—
freely dancing their
secret unclothed dances
and ominously chanting
their wondrous
incantations with
no witnesses to
remind them of
propriety and necessary function.

I’m happy for their
independent escapades
but sometimes I worry
and wander to where
I saw them last.
I look carefully and call
out softly. When they still
don’t come sometimes I
have to take a deep breath
and pause so as not
to get upset. (That just
encourages their
bad behavior.)

Eventually, most things
come back. I don’t ask
too many questions or
make a big fuss when
they sheepishly reappear.
I’m happy to see them
and have them with me
again. Their increasingly
frequent excursions remind
me of the days to come
when our mutual
wandering will increase
toward full entropy.

I suppose in that
wondrous darkness we
will all dance endlessly
together without containment,
but for now I’m happy
with our limited partnership—
temporary though it may be.

Studying What Has Happened

Mayor Jorge Elorza [Providence, Rhode Island] signed an executive order Wednesday to begin examining the feasibility of establishing a reparations program in Providence for residents of African heritage and Indigenous people.

City leaders have no estimate on how much a reparations program would cost or how it would work, but Elorza said studying the issue will be the “first step in accepting the role Providence and Rhode Island has held in generations of pain and violence against these residents and healing some of the deepest wounds our country faces today.”

“As a country and a community, we owe a debt to our communities of African and Indigenous heritage, and, on the local level, we are using this opportunity to correct a wrong,” Elorza said in a prepared statement Wednesday.

I was delighted to read this in the Boston Globe on Tuesday morning. Like so many others, I have been at a loss for what concrete steps can help us move from where we are as a country to where we long to be. The depth of our collective problem is daunting. Centuries of brutality and inhumanity directed against Blacks and Native Americans.

Of course, anywhere we look in history we see humanity’s capacity for brutality. Peoples of all skin colors and origins colonize and enslave each other. To outsiders, the ‘others’ may look exactly the same, but from the narrative of supremacy, we are the chosen people and they are the ones who are preventing us from having what is rightfully ours.

Perhaps the thing that is most astonishing about human beings is how morally justified we can feel we are doing the most horrific things to each other. How we can compartmentalize our lives so completely that we can make a value of being kind and hospitable to some small subset of people while we enslave and degrade others without a second thought.

The complex interwoven world implicates us all in this web of subjugation and oppression. The growing and morally unjustifiable income gap in our country means that children here in America grow up with food uncertainty – not knowing when or how they will get their next meal. Health care is already rationed according to the color of your skin and your capacity to pay for services and insurance.

Of course, humans have always done this to each other. Some are rich and some are poor. I don’t have a problem with inequality, but I do have a problem with a society that claims to be based on freedom and equality where the basics of shelter, medical care, food and dignity are not given to everyone.

I’m fully behind the movements to reform policing in our country—not just a few new rules to bar especially heinous police behavior, but a rethinking of the function of police and how they are held accountable to the communities they serve. And this bold move that Providence, Rhode Island and other cities across the country have announced toward conversations of truth and reparations seems to be another step in the direction of hope.

Whatever reparations might look like – from policies that favor the people who have for so many generations been actively oppressed to payments of cash to allow people to buy houses or begin businesses – to begin to talk and listen is most important.

As Mayor Elorza says: [this will be the] first step in accepting the role Providence and Rhode Island has held in generations of pain and violence against these residents and healing some of the deepest wounds our country faces today.” The first step must be to talk about, to hear, to listen, to see some of what has happened. Until we, collectively, begin this painful conversation where we speak and listen to the truth of peoples’ experiences, we cannot move forward.

Personal Practice – Search out some stories you have not heard–particularly stories of Black Americans. It could be an op-ed in your local paper or from friends or in books or films. The point of listening is not just to feel guilty and powerless—though this may likely happen. The point is to listen, hear and acknowledge. There may be steps you and I need to take, but the first step is to open our hearts to stories we have not yet heard.

Relationships, Problems and Turtles

A couples therapist once told me that there are three kinds of problems in relationships: the problems the two of you solve without even thinking about, the ones you have to work at for a while before they resolve, and the problems you never solve. These insoluble problems, he added, are the ‘bridges to intimacy’.

I remember being quite relieved when I first heard this. This model of three levels creates lots of room for the messy realities of living with another human being. I think I unconsciously believed that at some point, my partner and I would really get to the bottom of it. If we worked hard enough and were authentic and compassionate enough, everything would be clear and easy.

But the reality is much more complex and it turns out: ‘It’s turtles all the way down.’ This phrase is the punch line to an old joke about the man who confidently claims the world is supported by a giant turtle. A friend asks him, ‘What’s underneath that turtle?’ He replies: ‘There is another turtle.’ The friend persists and asks again ‘What’s underneath that turtle?’ Undaunted, the man says: ‘There is another turtle.’ Once more the friend repeats the same question. Finally, in exasperation, the man said ‘It’s turtles all the way down.’

I love the humor and truth of this story. It points to the fact that our minds simply cannot grasp the concept of limitlessness. The conscious mind is a brilliant innovation of the universe, but has some congenital limitations. The mind’s main function seems to be recognizing and giving names to patterns. The mind is a kind of ‘thing’ maker. Out of the vast web of mutuality and interbeing, it names discreet parts and wonders about the connections between these seemingly separate things.

Looking more closely, we can see that the physicists and the Buddhist appear to be more correct than our everyday minds. Everything is constantly moving and changing. Even things that appear solid are 1) composed of innumerable atoms and electrons and quarks and things that aren’t don’t even appear to have any substance—probabilities floating in vast space and are 2) in the process of rising up and falling away. Trees, houses, mountains, stars and galaxies are all processes that are endlessly coming into being and disappear. Left to its own devices, the house you slept in last night will slowly fall back into the earth. At this very moment, it is ever so slowly falling down.

Walking through the woods, you may sometimes come across a depression that might have remains of a wall or a fireplace—where human beings like you and me once lived and loved and did their best to understand themselves and the world around them. Without their constant attention, their house disappeared just like them—generously giving way for the next arising of organized energy. Beetles and molds and bacteria of wondrous variety transformed the solid walls and stable foundation into usable bits for the trees and other life forms now growing where the kitchen table used to be.

But these minds we all have are incredibly useful and fun. They have created systems, stories and objects of great beauty and complexity. They allow us to meet the many challenges of our limited existence – to grow food and find shelter, to protect our fragile bodies from the heat and cold, from the saber toothed tigers and from the cars that rush by us on the busy street.

The congenital problem with minds, however, is that they think that what they are perceiving is the world itself. As philosopher David Bohm once said ‘The mind creates the world, then says: I didn’t do it.’ The mind naturally sees discrete objects and must become very still and subtle to perceive the interpenetrating nature of reality that is only temporarily embodied in these seemingly separate objects.

The mind wants clarity and resolution. We often prefer a simple solution to the complex truth. In relationships (going back for at least a moment to where I began), we want things to be settled, clear and easy. If there’s a problem, we think that is a problem. But the reality of every relationship I have ever been in or come in contact with is that the problems are endless—the problems that arise are the relationship itself.

Of course we do the best we can. We act with kindness. We acknowledge and apologize when we have acted poorly. We enjoy the moments of intimacy when all our ideas of problems and solutions drop away and our hearts open to the sacred presence of another human. Perhaps the maturing in relationship is simply the growing realization that the dance of life includes everything—it’s turtles all the way down.

Personal Practice – As you move through your life today, see if you can remember that every thing you see is in the process of change—everything is transient. The floor you walk on, the toothbrush and the faucet and the sink—it is all here only for a short while. And with all the people you come in contact with, remember that they too are in the middle of appearing and disappearing—they too are only here for a brief time. Notice how this awareness of transience changes your experience.

Fingers Ease Rocking Beads

1.

Fingers finger
this precious world—
pointing, jabbing
and touching
everything possible
while torsos rock
forward and back
mumbling the infinite
prayer that mysterious
ease might flow
like a mighty river.

Beginning as a trickle
it tickles everything
it touches—
urgently bearing
every soft thing
along to
the laughing sea.

Each life a single bead
of the bracelet God
wears on her wrist.

2.

We are God’s probing and loving fingers.
Our prayer is gently rocking the world.
Beads scatter when the bracelet breaks.
Ease breaks out all over.

Personal Practice – Ask a friend to give you two words. Go dreamy and find two words yourself. Without thinking, write an essay or a poem using all four of these words. Wonder what your essay might mean*.

*special thanks to long-time friend, colleague and teacher Tamara Scarlet-Lyon for her continuing inspiration and companionship on the journey

Adventuring Together

This is the last morning of our virtual retreat. We have been weaving formal Zen meditation into the fabric of our lives. As Zen retreats always are, it has been challenging and wonderful. Though I have been on countless of these rigorous training retreats, I am always surprised by what arises—both within me and within each person that participates.

Who would think that sitting still and meeting what arises with compassion and curiosity would be so wild and difficult? But when we slow down enough to be where we really are, we discover that all of life slows down with us and meets us in each moment. And all of life includes a range far beyond any image or plan we might have in our mind.

It turns out that we humans are travelers through a vast geography that moves from landscapes of ease and delight, to dark lands of fear and anxiety. Ordinarily we meet this flux with attempts to protect and control. We automatically think: ‘I’ll just try for more of the good stuff. What I don’t like, I’ll fix, avoid or pretend it’s not there’. From this perspective, our life becomes the exhausting and endless work of fixing, avoiding and pretending.

In our Zen practice, we make the unusual vow to let things be as they are. This is not a matter of believing some special doctrine, but of being willing to be an explorer in our own lives. The teachings of Zen are not to be studied, believed and held onto. Rather they are signposts to suggest places to look and areas to explore.

When we allow things to be as they are (including ourselves) we find that life is far beyond whatever we thought it was. Though words are a wonderful part of life, life itself is far beyond anything we can say about it. The mysterious aliveness of life equally resides beyond the edge of infinity and in this very moment. Whatever we call this mystery—God, Allah, Buddha nature, universal love—only points to something beyond our conception.

Everything is included in this vast and shimmering web of vibration we call life. Each thing arises from the inconceivable source, lives and maintains itself with support of everything else, and disappears back to the inconceivable source. Now it appears as the sound of the bird. Now as the fathomless sorrow that lives in my heart. Now as the ease of leaning my head back and looking up at the morning sky.

Everything is sacred. Not one single thing is left out. Our problems and our anxieties. Our failures and our terrible flaws. Our secret joys and our unseen sorrows. Everything is included.

In these still unusual Zen Zoom retreats, we support each other to do this deep and essential human work. Alone together and together alone, we each dive into what is already here to learn how to be who we already are. We get lost. We get found. We begin slowly and quickly to realize what we have always known.

Life is a precious gift and we are all part of the vast and wondrous river of life.

On Virtual Retreat

The first day of our virtual retreat. Our second virtual retreat of the pandemic here at the Boundless Way Temple (on-line).  We’re calling it The Distant Temple Bell.

As far as I know, these virtual retreats are a new form of practice in the history of Zen. For thousands of years, Zen practitioners have gathered in temples and monasteries, in retreat centers and in individual’s homes for in-person intensive training periods traditionally called sesshin. During these gatherings, we live together in silence as we follow a simple routine that supports us in consciously doing the challenging and mysterious work of waking up. Sitting still together alternating with periods of walking are always the core of the schedule.

It is rigorous and wondrous work, this sitting together in silence and stillness. These next three days, a group of us will do this ancient work through periods together on Zoom alternating with time on our own. Though the form is different, the intention is the same – to withdraw from the busyness of the world in order to break through the fierce and mindless inertia of our lives—to find ourselves right where we are.

I’m reminded of St. Paul’s injunction to ‘Pray ceaselessly and rejoice in all things.’ This is a good description our intentions during intensive periods of Zen training. The ceaseless prayer is the seamless container of practice. We do our best give up pursuing the endless mind roads of desire and accumulation. We turn instead, moment after moment, to the source of life which only resides right here in this instant—this breath, this sound, this sensation. Life is always generously arising and offering itself to us, only usually we are too busy to notice.

Our vow on retreat is to practice appreciating what is actually here—to rejoice in whatever arises. Of course we have our opinions: ‘I like feeling like this. I don’t like that.’ But beyond what Rumi calls ‘the field of right and wrong’, there is a vast freedom that we touch only when our habitual objections releases us to be present to what has been here all along.

Life itself is nowhere else. There’s nothing to search for and nothing understand. Life itself is continually and effortlessly presenting itself to each one of us. All we have to do is wake up to what has always been here.

Personal Practice – Consider joining us over these next three days in consciously turning your attention to what is right in front of you. If it’s possible, allow yourself to sit in silent meditation or prayer more than usual. Don’t try to quiet your mind or achieve peace. See if you can appreciate life in whatever form it arises. No special tricks necessary.

Dividing Ourselves

‘I think we are finally at a place where we can accept the truth that no one escapes from oppression, not one of us. Everyone is deeply wounded.’ Rev. angel Kyodo williams

Everyone is deeply wounded by the collective trauma of racism. No matter your part or your role, no matter who you ancestors were, we are all woven together by the horrors of our past. This trauma, like all trauma, lives on in the present—haunting our every moment and manifesting in all our actions and institutions.

Slavery, lynching, mass genocide and violence are part of our American heritage. They stand alongside visions of freedom and righteous struggle—people of all backgrounds who have worked tirelessly—who have given their lives to fight against bigotry and cruelty. But until we can collectively acknowledge the fullness of what has happened and how it continues, none of us are free.

The violence and inhumanity of our American history are a bitter pill to swallow for a country that has prided itself in its exceptionalism and its self-image as a beacon of shining light. Just like individuals, countries create images of themselves and then defend these images as if they were the truth. If I imagine myself as a kind and sensitive person, I will unconsciously do my best to deny any actions or accusations that indicate otherwise. We all erect walls of the self-protection to defend our illusory self-image and to keep us safe from all that we would rather not see.

These fabricated self-images are necessary and helpful and only a problem if we hold them as true and unchanging. Then we spend our time defending a picture of who we think we are rather than being able to look around and respond to what is actually present, both within us and outside of us.

We all know people who seem particularly oblivious to the world around them. Regardless of what they are confronted with, they tell the same story about what is happening: ‘I never get a break.’ ‘Everyone always turns against me.’ ‘Why do people blame me for things that are not my fault?” ‘Why am I so broken?’ ‘Why don’t people see how kind I am?’ ‘Why does this always happen to me?’

These stories, even the negative ones, protect us from information that might be dissonant to the image we have created. Even when these self-images no longer serve us, they can have a fierce hold on us—unless we actively work to acknowledge our self-centeredness and open to that which is disturbing and unknown, we will be forever held within our own self-deception. This is part of the woundedness that Rev. angel Kyodo williams speaks of above.

Of course ‘those people’ are always, in some way, us. Though each one of us lives in a bubble of imagined exceptionalism, this is simply part of what makes us all fully human. Each one of us contains the full range of grace and pathology. Each one of us has the capacity for acts of courage and acts of cowardice – acts of mercy and acts of cruelty. When we create groups and classes of people, then start calling them names, it is a sure sign that we have divided ourselves against ourselves.

This self-splitting happens at every level. I can wonder why my partner is so self-centered and mindless while I am so virtuous and attentive. I can wonder why Republicans are the bad things and the Democrats are the good things. I can think New Zealand’s political leader is wonderful and our current leader is horrible.

There are different positions and roles. Everyone is not equal. Some actions hurt others and some are more helpful. But we’re all entangled together.

In the cycle of abuse, everyone suffers the loss of their humanity. Breaking out of the patterns of terrible woundness require all of us to engage—to look at inconvenient and outrageous truths about ourselves, our history and the hidden realities of the country in which we all live.

Personal Practice – How do you divide the world? Think of three qualities that most describe who you are. Now think of three qualities that describe who you are not. Write them down. Take the list of the three things you are not and consider how, sometimes, you are these things too. Now pick one of the things you are not and consider how it might serve you to incorporate some of this quality into your life.

Learning (again) to See

Now, well into July, the garden marches slowly toward maturity. Even as the days grow shorter, the marigolds grow and throw out their blazing orange blossoms. Hydrangea bushes proudly hold aloft their fantastic blue. I’ve tied up the gangly tomato plants, built a rustic support for the zinnias and run strings up to high places to guide the heaven-reaching morning glories. We’re all ready for the full heat of the summer predicted for today.

I’ve recently completed a wonderful biography of Thoreau by Robert Richardson. (Just as I’m writing this and checking on Wikipedia, I’ve learned that he married Annie Dillard (another of my heroes) in 1988 after she had written a fan letter to him upon reading this very biography.) In Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind, Richardson reports that, late in his short life, Thoreau was greatly influenced by the English art critic and philosopher John Ruskin’s writing on art and how we see things. Ruskin was a wonderful writer and Thoreau was moved by his descriptions of paintings as well as his observation of the infinite subtlety of color in nature.

Though we have words for colors, when we look closely we can notice that we see a wide range of hues that we might call by one name. In the eye, in the mind and in nature there is a wide range of experience that cannot be conveyed in words. We say the leaves of the tree are green. But look closely at the leaves on any tree and you will find a wide range of shades of color. And you will see that the color is constantly changing through the day as the quality of light shifts and varies.

Even the walls of one room that we say are one color, are actually, when we look closely, always many colors. The play of the reflection of light creates a multitude of shades that we easily cover over with the idea of ‘one color.’ Our minds have learned to edit out the variation. The wall is white—never mind the greenish reflection of light off the plant or the gray-blue shadows around the edges. Words and convention innocently obscure our direct experience.

Painters and artists must train themselves to see again. Perhaps we ordinary folks should do the same. As I look out at the crab apple tree near where I am sitting, I notice the outer leaves are almost transparent in the soft morning light. The inner leaves are darker and more solid. Though the sun is hidden in the morning mist, some leaves shimmer a golden green while others hold an opaque and steady green.

A thousand colors reveal themselves as I take the time to look more closely. The light bounces off pigments in the leaves then activates the receptive cones in my eyes which send impulses to some remote corner of my brain and I ‘see.’ We work together, me and the trees and the all photons dancing in between us all.

There’s not as much to do in the garden these early summer days. The planting and rearranging is mostly done. Now it’s the tending and befriending time—taking it easy in the heat, drinking lots of fluids and appreciating the riot of subtle color that appears before me.

Personal Practice – Take a break from your life to look around. Find a comfortable vantage point (it could be right where you are), settle in and take a breath. Then look around at the color that surrounds you. Notice the subtle variation of hues and shades. Notice what is shiny and what is dull, what reflects and what absorbs, what colors infiltrate and what reflects. Appreciate the world beyond words—clearly evident and ever changing. This is your true home.

Responding Quietly

Cool morning. A very light rain falls in the half-light. A large construction vehicle floods the Temple garden with noise though it’s not yet five thirty in the morning. Birds sing sharply, adding the descant to the rumbling bass.

The nasturtiums in the corner wiggle ever so slightly in response. Is it the sonic vibration or the unseen breeze that moves them? It you didn’t look carefully, you’d think they were still. Easy to miss this subtle responsiveness of all things to each other. Now that I look closer, I see each round leaf and each golden blossom moves independently—each one positioned and shaped to dance with the winds of its unique life. One plant with a multitude of separately sensing lives.

I feel tired and slow this morning. The great winds of conviction and inspiration that sometimes blow through me are quiet. I try not to panic and cover over. I trust something smaller. I wait and listen louder. I begin to sense the zephyrs that move silently and leave only the slightest trace.

I look around me and try to find my way into where I am. I sense my place. My weather app said ‘foggy’ this morning. I didn’t realize it was talking about my inner weather. Curriculum this morning: moving slowly in the fog. I may not be thrilled about it, but it’s better than pretending.

I started up the weed-whacker yesterday for the first time this year. The gas-powered noise-maker started right up. I was so excited to have it when I first bought it ten years ago. But I like things fairly disorderly here in the garden so I rarely use it. I can’t tell whether it’s because I don’t like noise and hard work or it’s really an aesthetic choice.

I appreciate formal gardens with nothing out of place, but I don’t find them relaxing. When nature is used for show, I appreciate the mastery of the gardener and the work of those who maintain it, but it doesn’t help me cross the space between me and the natural world. The plants and paths are used to express the pattern in the gardener’s mind. It’s simpler, more geometric and sometimes easier to understand and appreciate, but rarely inviting to my soul.

I like the wildness of things to be a full partner in the design. Of course, the wildness of life is present within even the most formal garden, all you have to do is look close enough. The branching of each of the row of carefully trimmed shrubs is actually quite different and each of the blossoms of one hundred tulips is a different slightly different shade from its neighbor.

But I like it to be more obvious – where you sometimes can’t tell what is intentional and what just happens and aren’t quite sure who’s really in charge. This feels more encouraging to me—this intertwining of plans and actual life. So much of the content of our lives comes from the billions of actions that have come before this moment—ours and others. The past fully invades the present to constrain and guide what is to come. And each moment invites us to participate fully. Each action creates the world that we move into.

What we choose to do and what we choose to pay attention to joins with all that has come before in an interactive feedback loop that we call a life. Each moment is wild and constrained at the same time. Not a problem.

The leaves of the nasturtium like to bounce and jiggle. Their morning exercise in the twilight waiting for receive the photon packets of light later to power their green factories. I bounce and jiggle in my mind, learning to be still enough to catch the small breezes of delight that pass through.

A two-inch hummingbird comes by on her morning rounds. Buzzing like a small diesel, she carefully sips the nectar from one or two golden blossoms then wheels away. I sit still, then go on tapping on the keyboard.

Personal Practice – Sit still for a few minutes with your eyes closed. Let your mind go dreamy. Now open your eyes. Look around notice what catches your attention. Whatever it is, spend a few more minutes just looking carefully at it. Notice its shapes and colors, textures and sounds (if any). Let yourself sense the qualities of what you see. Imagine yourself as this object. What does it feel like from the inside? What might the wisdom of this thing be? Imagine that it has some tip for you today. What is the wisdom tip this object has to give you? [aka ‘flirts’ from Process Work and Arny Mindell]