Month: May 2020

It is a relief to look outside and see that the destruction and mayhem has not spread to my neighborhood.   I can only faintly imagine what it must be like to live in parts of the city directly affected by the rioting.  The fear and trauma must be very hard to bear.  

As much as I think outsiders have had some role in the destruction, I am deeply concerned that many local people joined in the action.   It is so hard for me to understand.  I wonder about the societal conditions that have brought about this departure from basic humanity and conditioned such actions.  I wonder how accountability will be acknowledged or assigned.   Where do I fit in as part of the cause of it all?

Today I am hearing people who want to own the destruction because it signifies their rage and the depth of their frustration. I understand what they are saying, and I suppose I can understand that someone would self-immolate as a sign of protest. But I don’t understand how harming someone else is a suitable way to show your own anger.

Above all, on this day after a day of danger, I want to be aware of my part in this whole affair. The urgency of the situation has intensified. I want to be attentive how my patience about changing an unjust system is contributing to the continued problem. The time for being patient for change has passed. The best time for change is now.

Every moment, I am moving in a sea of air, and yet I am scarcely aware of its presence. I cannot see air, and I am about as aware of air as a fish is aware it lives in water. I become aware of air when it moves across my skin, but I typically ignore its reliable presence. I may see the effects of air, but I never see air.

I know air when I feel its movement or when its warmth or chill contacts my skin. I know in my head that I do not live in a vacuum but in a sea of air no less real than a sea of liquid water. However, this reality is easy to be as invisible to me as the unseen realities that exist altogether outside my senses.

I depend on the substance of the air to supply my body constantly with the oxygen it needs to survive. I rely on the movement of air to carry wastes from my body, otherwise I would quickly die.

I cannot see the air, but it makes its presence felt in ways I only occasionally notice. I am convinced it has substance because birds and airplanes can use it to move through space. Unlike me, they can tread on the buoyant substance of air.

Air obviously rushes around because trees respond it it by waving their leaves. I turn my face to air or away from it depending on whether I find its presence pleasant or not. I sometimes bundle up to shield my body from the chill of air. Other times I bask in the warmth of air against my bare skin. In these moments I have a glimmer of awareness of the sea of air in which I live.

It must have weight because if I move outside of my heavy atmosphere, my body would expand and explode because of the unfettered air trapped inside. If air were compressed into a liquid or solid, as people sometimes do, I would be able to see it. As it exists around me, it is totally transparent except for particles it carries. It can make its presence known to my eyes by air bending light to color the sky blue or create a rose sunset.

Air is such a common, natural part of my living that I hardly notice it. However, there are times I become focused on air passing through the ends of my nostrils. In those moments, the awareness of air becomes for me a door to deep concentration.

What is typically so elusive in my ordinary experience becomes a means for the most extraordinary experience of concentration. Having experienced the air in my nostrils, I am truly able to leave the experience of air and become aware of my world in a more exciting way. Even as much as I need and rely on air, there are these moments I deliberately leave air behind.

Each new morning has so many familiar aspects that I seem simply to be repeating what I have done before. It is an experience I have often these days. The pills I take, the warm water of the shower, my sliding razor, the rug under my stretches, the cushion on which I sit and quietly concentrate. They all seem so familiar, such a soothing repeat. I’ve been here before.

Each day seems at times to be a revisit of familiar terrain. The continuity is so impactful that I begin to see each repeat as the same continuous action. Each repeat seems almost so seamlessly connected to what went before that they begin to murmur that this is a continuous, flowing NOW. The repeat quietly suggests that there is no before-NOW, no future-NOW. Just NOW.

The margins, the fading distinction between yesterday NOW and tomorrow NOW is beginning to be more blurred. The repeats say that there is no need to rush forward, no need to regret what is revealed by a backwards glance.

I only have the present moment to experience, and the repeat underscores that notion. I will do this again and again until the realization sinks in that this is one enduring experience.

I only have the present moment to experience. What seemed a repeat of again and again is becoming a deep well of an undefined present. The repeat is full of no longer real past and of not yet real future .

It is not yet time to repeat. There will never be a time to repeat. There is only the continuous NOW.