The tendency to demand ever more signs to replace symbols..makes our lives more and more factual, intellectually strenuous, wedded to the march of mundane causes, and beset by disconcerting surprises…A life that does not incorporate some degree of ritual, of gesture and attitude, has no mental anchorage. It is prosaic to the point of total indifference, purely casual, devoid of that structure of intellect and feeling which we call “personality”
Susan Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
Sometimes ideas can give us insight. Some other times, it can be simple little encounters, when for a brief second, the mind is stilled and we see into the heart of things. Their newness, or their beauty, shock us briefly, giving us relief from the preoccupations in our mind, or the routine of daily activity, and we are nourished within. We try to create some space for such moments today.
There is the heaven we enter
through institutional grace
and there are the yellow finches bathing and singing
in the lowly puddle.
Mary Oliver, Yellow
We have what we seek, it is there all the time,
and if we give it time,
it will make itself known to us.
Thomas Merton
For all of us, the experience of our entanglement differs from day-to-day. I know from personal experience how strong the habitual mind is. The discursive mind, the busy, worried, caught-up, spaced-out mind, is powerful. That’s all the more reason to do the most important thing — to realize what a strong opportunity every day is, and how easy it is to waste it. If you don’t allow your mind to open and to connect with where you are, with the immediacy of your experience, you could easily become completely submerged. You could be completely caught up and distracted by the details of your life, from the moment you get up in the morning until you fall asleep at night.
You get so caught up in the content of your life, the minutiae that make up a day, so self-absorbed in the big project you have to do, that the blessings, the magic, the stillness, and the vastness escape you. You never emerge from your cocoon, except for when there’s a noise that’s so loud you can’t help but notice it, or something shocks you, or captures your eye. Then for a moment you stick your head out and realize, Wow! Look at that sky! Look at that squirrel! Look at that person!
Pema Chodron.
What we normally perceive as concrete objects and discrete events emerge from interwoven relationships, our very act of seeing a part of the weave. When we recognize this, rather than feeling locked in by a state of mind, an encounter, an occurance, we see that the essential nature of all that is happening is not that of a wall but of a web. When I see only suffering and unfulfilled possibility, I need to remind myself of the mystery of life’s unfolding – the many linkages that are carrying my efforts through currents of connection to results that I may never see. In order to know the truth of interconnectedness, we need to look at the world with what Robert Thurman calls “quiet eyes”. It might be through silent meditation that we see the hidden patterns of connection that make up our inner life. It may be through pausing long enough that we realize where a plate of spaghetti comes from. However we do it, softly receiving reality with quiet eyes, rather than pinpointing objects and events as separate and distinct, opens up our view rather than closing it with predetermined boundaries. We take in what is appearing before reactions and conclusions get fixed. When we relax into this mode of perception, a different perspective on reality becomes available to us.
Sharon Salzberg, Faith
Another writer, Eugene O?Neill, describing a moment – when he looked up at the stars in the night sky – when he saw something as if for the first time. Although difficult, we try to bring some of this quality to each encounter and each moment, not meeting them through the filters of our conditioning, fears or preconceived notions:
For a moment I lost myself – actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the…high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life.. – to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way…. For a second you see the secret – and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning!
Eugene O’Neill, Long Days Journey into Night
