Momentus

A totality available

This moment.

This moment is the reason I am alive.

If not for this moment, then why?

I want to live this moment as I want to live all of my moments. Relaxing into my body, grounding home into the soil of my flesh, blood, and bones. Tasting the reason for feeding myself. Seeing with the whole of my eyes. Not rushing ahead to some future experience I think might be better than this one. In rushing there is tension. In presence there is bliss. Let me hurry ahead so I can relax?

If I cannot open to this moment, then when?

My regard is for the totality of presence available now. Now is Crow calling, the ocean of traffic, the waning light on the ferns, the burning fire of the stove. Now is my body, now is my breath. Now is the textures, the patterns, the colors. Now is Blue Heron landing on the shore across from where I write. Now, like artist Robert Olds said, is the vision that is this life.

Healing, which is actually becoming whole - recognizing our inherent wholeness - has many paths. Paths that do not exist until we walk them. Paths that are well-worn by many travelers. In any case, in every case of whole-ing, we summon the sensate experience of fulfillment into our present moment. We draw fulfillment into our embodiment - into our heart, into our lymph, into our cellular matrix from our unseen source. This is not a fleeting idea of fulfillment. This is not fulfillment connected with form-based attainments. I’ll feel this when. This is radiant satisfaction, deeply personal, unattached to specific conditions. Radiant satisfaction emanating from the kind of connection that can only be felt by opening. Now.

I give myself permission to feel fulfilled for no reason at all. (For every reason that exists right now.)

I give myself permission to feel for fulfillment. To feel around and through the seen and unseen dimensions of my experience, until I find that whole body sigh into my prize. The feeling is what I am looking for.

It can always be found.

Presence
	My senses are my wealth

This morning the river was glass. I paddled straight upriver one mile without stopping. At coffee, I had seen Blue Heron fly past. Now on the river I decided to paddle until I saw them. Perhaps they are wading slowly in the shallows or standing stock-still on the rocks, turning a Pleistocene eye to the passing current of time. I also had another goal - the old bridge stanchions between which the current flows strong. From downriver they beckon - bones of the past. There the water is dark and deep, the shelf of rocks broad with tiny lakes and islands between which the spotted sandpipers flit.

I said I paddled without stopping, though I did pause to bow deeply in respect to the vultures performing their solar rite. Two were on the tops of adjacent snags, their wings outstretched. The others were perched on the lower limbs of the red alder skeletons. Living totems. Or, what seems more accurate to me, priests and priestesses of an ancient line, performing a ritual that has been transmitted for 50 million years via genetic light-codes.

Paddling. I was heading towards the heron, wherever they may be. I was also heading towards the bridge. The closer I got to the bridge, the more non-negotiable it became to go all the way. I felt determination in each swipe of the paddle into the clear-green water. Fifty-feet from the stanchions awe-laugher burst from my mouth. Blue Heron was standing on top of the support closest to the river’s southern edge. Who is summoning whom?

Sometimes the connection between self and Nature really is this obvious.

Just now, as I write these lines in the gathering dusk - my eyes drift away from the screen for a second, catching the grey-blue flight of Heron, taking off downriver from the opposite shore.

Sometimes the connection between self and Nature really is this obvious.

The more we know to look for this connection, the more often it appears. When our looking turns into steady expectation, we approach the rim of the Great Mirror.

Le grand miroir.

You know what I mean, I am sure. The confirmation. The communication. The recognition. The tug within your heart that causes you to look over your shoulder or around the corner or down at your feet - so you can witness the miracle of your own perception becoming the threshold of union between your inner and outer dimensions. Something calls to you, and the distinction between self and other all but evaporates. Not vanishing, but merging. Becoming the living tapestry of light-spheres that form the body, the breath, the air, and every other form taking shape through the lamplight of our eyes.

The body is Nature just as much as the table is. Can we feel for who we are as the infinite sea of awareness? And all that we see belongs to what is wild. Then what of our feeling dimension? Can we unhook our embodied sensation from the borders of our skin, and allow it flow throughout the entire perceptual field of this Now? Now, the totality of my sensefields. Now, the totality of my thoughtscape. Now, the totality of the vision that is this life.

The dynamic between Nature and who we are as Consciousness is like the relationship between the front and back of our own hands. A stone is cast deep within the utterly dark crystalline caves of mind, and the ripples undulate forth throughout the entire elemental fabric of space-time.

Mind perfuses matter, not because matter exists separate from Mind and is somehow animated by it like a puppet and a hand. Matter abides as the frank condensation of mind’s natural radiance.

I am not special in this kind of wild relating. I am saying these things because the deepest parts within all of us still remember how it is. Yes, I do feel special in this relating. But these feelings of pride, worthiness, and rapture are the inherent birthright of every single soul-spark looking out from human eyes. Why am I separating humans from the rest? Wild nature still lives in the original dream. As humanity, we have the pleasure of waking back up into this primal field of lucidity. What Stephen Buhner calls “the dreaming of the Earth.”

Everyone deserves to be held by the gaze of Nature and told how precious they are. To feel they are a cherished stone in the breast pocket of eternity. As cherished as the blue bird, the saw-grass and the snail. As cherished as the microbes, the viruses, and fungi. Everyone deserves to be told how much they mean to the world, because their consciousness wraps around and through the entire world. This is not about hierarchy between creator and creation. This is cocreation. All points intelligent, all facets aware. Consciousness wraps around and through the entire world, and we are each specific instances of this undulating, primordial foundation.

Everyone is worthy, there is not more or less blessedness assigned to the forms of manifest creation. Everyone is worthy because this interconnection is the inherent condition. Just as the tree is worthy of the sun. Worthy because it is in its very nature to receive and merge with that luminosity. There is no tree separate from the sun. Worthy is just a manner of speech, so we can feel the honor and majesty of that which we are a part of. That we are expressed from.

This is our wild inheritance. It is simply and only up to each of us to remember our original lineage. Summoning the blessings is as simple as asking -

and knowing how to receive.

Presence
	Is the ultimate state of receptivity

I have become obsessed with asking myself “what do I like about this?” What do I like about this moment? This question draws me deeper into my sensing, into the unique power of awareness focused within the present. In this case power is focus and focus is pleasure. At any point in time I can ask myself this question and find the open doorway into

spaciousness, deeper breath, more vivid sensory reception, the ability to take in more details, an increase in my physical, emotional, and mental enjoyment of the moment

Through this practice I have found a deeper devotion to the reason I am alive in the first place. To sense, to feel, to choose, and to summon the whole of me into this Now.

When you walk, just walk
When you eat, just eat
When you make love, just make love
When you dream, just dream

And while it feels like a summoning, the reality is that the whole of me is already here in this now. It is I, in my profound ability to narrow and widen the aperture of my perceived interconnection, who is being summoned. (To the bridge supports rising from the riverbed.)

I hoped the heron would stay. I really wanted to paddle through the old concrete stacks with the arrowed grey-blue sliver of gaze upon me. The approval of a heron is a treasure, precious indeed. An acknowledgment from the wildness in All Things. So I sang a wordless song to carry my intent of goodwill and thanks. I can’t say the song was a factor, but Heron let me pass without flying off.