Can you just look?

Salad bowl in front of me, clean vegetables strewn across the counter, I happened to glance up from what I was doing and saw the big tree on the other side of the driveway and noticed that its branches were bent as it bowed before the blustering wind, and the bottoms of the leaves made it seem as though the tree was a paler shade of green. The rain blew against those branches, blew against those leaves and they glistened as they tossed and thrashed. My hands paused at what they were doing as I stood quietly, motionless, and made a conscious effort to look, to see, but not to label or allow names or descriptions of what I looked at, to come into my mind. And all around the edges of my consciousness it was as though those words that describe what we look at tried to slip themselves in through the cracks, to force me to allow them, to consider them.

Later on, when I called Don in to come and eat, I told him about my little experiment. I said to him, "it is a very hard thing to look at something without getting involved in a conversation with yourself about that which you see". To just look and not think about how big it is, how many small branches are bending in the wind, what color, what texture......to just look at it. And his response was priceless. He looked for a couple minutes to test my theory, and then he said "not if you are a man". And I laughed, and was reminded of a comedian that I watched once. He said to all the ladies in his audience, "girls, next time you ask your boyfriends what they are thinking about.....and they say "oh nothing"........believe them.

Enjoy your day, and don't forget to look.....just look.

Enveloping, enshrouding and encapsulating....

To arrive at this moment in my life, at this time in the worlds journey seems a curiousity. We humans have all careened through our days and years, on auto pilot, with some vague destination in mind that for far too many of us, turns out to be unreachable. We live in the belief and the hope that some future date will bring us the joy that our spirit seeks and discover repeatedly that it is still somewhere down the road, somewhere on the time-line of life, ahead of us. Our failure is that we don't look to this moment, right now, for that fulfillment. We neglect to stop and experience what is. To let it roll around us, bump up against our legs, rising higher and higher, enveloping, enshrouding, encapsulating us until we are forced to inhale it in, so that we are filled and covered with the now, part of - what is. This moment, right now.

Over the years I've enjoyed writing letters to various members of my family, letters to the editor upon occasion, and of late, writing posts on various forums that have held an interest for me. My appreciation of the written word when I was a child, bordered on obsession. And from time to time, I've entertained the occasional impulse to write my memoirs, such as they are, and I tell myself, for the sake of my children. So that they will know who I am. But, and doesn't there seem to be a "but" far too often, of late, I've come to a new realization that as humans, we are all compulsive thinkers and that we have reduced and limited our lives to words and thoughts which are really only more words, just rearranged differently to accomodate the newest mood that we find ourselves in. We live in the past, which doesn't exist any more and base all of our hoped for tomorrows on it.

Too often, thoughts moving at a hundred miles per minute, we forget to just "be" in this moment, to be in the now..........................can you feel your heart beating and when did you last sit and just experience it doing what it does each and every moment of the years that you have alloted to you? When was the last time you sat, with no tv on, no music, no one talking, and gave your mind a rest? Turned the "thinking machine" to off. When was the last time you tried to just sit and "be"? In that quietness lies a link to the divine, in that silence lies the link to the peace, if only for the briefest of moments, to the peace that your spirit craves. In that moment,.............but only til the words begin again.

There will be no memoirs because they are only words and are not the real me. I am not words, my past no longer exists and my future is only a fantasy and I only exist in this moment, right now. We each have a single opportunity to experience each other in this briefest of instances. Let's not obscure what there is to know with a muddle of sounds and labels and old stories that only tell what kind of image we each see and want the world to see. Instead, feel this moment, the two of us, as it bumps up against our legs, rises higher and higher......