It is not easy to be fully in the moment, every moment. What we notice is that we have a host of thoughts, ideas, expectations, preconceptions, hopes and fears working as a filter between us and the moment – or the person – that stands before us. The ability to be right-here-now is what we practice each day; the capacity to choose between the world in our heads or the real world before us. It is true that we rarely see the world, or another person, as they actually are, but we see them as we are in that moment. So in order to be right here with whatever is going on we need, in one sense, to empty ourselves, to create space. The best way to do that is to pause and focus your attention before beginning something, such as a new task, or a meeting, or indeed, a conversation. Take a few conscious breaths today before you begin something, to allow a gap to open and the mind to relax enough in order to have the space to welcome.
If my eye is to receive an image, it must be free from all other images; for if it already has so much as one, it cannot see another, nor can the ear hear a sound if it be occupied with one already. Any power of receiving must first be empty before it can receive anything.
John Tauler, 14th Century German mystic and preacher.
No writing on the solitary, meditative dimensions of life can say anything that has not already been said better by the wind in the pine trees. These pages seek nothing more than to echo the silence and peace that is “heard” when the rain wanders freely among the hills and forests. But what can the wind say when there is no hearer? There is then a deeper silence: the silence in which the Hearer is No-Hearer. That deeper silence must be heard before one can speak truly of solitude.
