Presence & Reality

“There’s something I said to you a few days ago that I regret,” I told him as we were grabbing our coats for a rainy walk back to the dorm.  “What was it?” he asked gently.  “When you came back from your trip and asked me how I had spent my weekend, I made a comment about making drama, and we laughed.  Then I realized I was making fun of myself to entertain you.  I actually put a lot of effort into not creating extra drama when things are hard, and I feel like what I said reinforced something that isn’t really true about me, at least not anymore.  It felt like embarrassing a good friend for a cheap laugh, and I want to be a better friend to myself.”  He smiled at me kindly and said, “You don’t ever have to do anything to entertain me.”

This practice of presence is one of the most difficult yet most liberating things I have ever done.  Several times an hour as I go about my routine, some sensation will arise in my core, usually fueled by a story that’s started spinning in my mind, and a little voice starts quietly chanting, “You can’t handle this.” Then an impulse arises to go do some work, or take a nap, or have a snack, or hide in the bathroom and cry, or find someone to complain to, or do something funny or helpful to get some affection, or start planning an exit strategy.  But because I believe that everything I am truly seeking in this life is found in being fully present, I stop.  I breathe.  I regard that feeling with tenderness.  Sometimes I even hold it like an infant.  If I am at leisure, I find a way to be alone with it.  If I am needed for other things, I still keep it first and foremost in my attention.  And, quite quickly, it resolves and I can continue lighter, with more clarity, and with more power to choose my words and actions instead of being unconsciously compelled.

Much familiar pain has resurfaced in this space, but I recognize it for what it is.  “Hello, Jealousy.  You are hurting because you think someone is getting something that you desperately need.  Where do we know love really comes from?  Let’s sit together.”  “Hello, Anxiety.  You are fluttering about because you believe you are going to lose something of value.  Where does real security come from?  Let’s sit together.”  “Hello, Outrage.  You are all set for a fight because you think someone is trying to take advantage of you.  What is it that we really have control over?  Let’s sit together.”  The more time we spend sitting together, and the less time I spend roaming out in the world for false comforts and fleeting entertainment, the more I notice beautiful things starting to resurface in the depths of the inner home I am tending.

I lay on my back this afternoon, tenderly holding the cramping in my belly and watching the mossy branches of the oak outside my window bowing in the rain.  I was not just looking at them, but feeling them.  Sensing the creaking of the wood inside me.  Feeling myself hung with moss.  And suddenly I saw the branches as towering coral in a clear blue sea, jaws of a giant parrot fish approaching to nibble a piece and me with my soft body safely sheltered inside.  A vivid memory came, followed by a swarm of images, of how I played as a child, accompanied by the realization that it was far more than play.  It was a spiritual practice.  I occupied an eternal space where nothing needed to be done or remembered and I simply embodied what surrounded me.  I didn’t just gather leaves to make cloaks for my Ewoks or tear paths in the grass for my Matchbox cars.  I was the leaf bent along the veins.  I was the traveler through 10-foot grass.  When I made a stick house in the hollow at the bottom of the alder tree, I entered into its heart.

No one needed to teach me that the natural world was alive and that we are interconnected, and that the lives of the plants and animals matter as much as we do.  Those things are said by people who believe themselves to be separate and need reminders of the deeper truth.  As a child when I stole out into the night to seek comfort from my cat, I was talking to myself.  When I lay under the moon’s eye, I was watching myself.  When I climbed inside the bushes, I was entering myself.  The world of people was scarcity and conflict, right and wrong, good and bad, fact and fantasy.  Humans were always trying to cultivate, or educate, or rehabilitate – always fiddling with everything and never seeming to coexist in reverence with everything as it was.  The mountains and moonflowers and mockingbirds were real because we were whole together.

Last night I was moved to what threatened to be inconsolable tears as the memory of my marsh rebuilt itself in my mind.  It has been nearly a year since I walked that familiar path, and I do not recall it visiting me this way before.  As each element returned to me like a lost soul mate, the pressure of the longing squeezed my breath from me.  The yellow blossoms of the skunk cabbage pushing up through the ice.  The narrow walkway past the fallen tree with the river running between its roots.  The duck nesting on a little tussock in the middle of the lake.  The leaning alder tree.  The barred owl maneuvering soundlessly between the branches.  The otters rolling over and over one another with tiny clams in their paws.  The field radiant with bluebells.  The bumblebees circling menacingly.  The cherry blossoms bursting with dizzying fragrance.  The popping of a thousand tiny unseen mouths busy among the reeds.  The wild raspberries.  The branches heavy with conspiring crows.  How many times I went there and remembered and was healed!  How many times I rediscovered myself and emerged overflowing with what was true and right and kind! No person has ever touched me in that way.

I would survive as merely a husk without these wild, tangled places.  Everywhere I’ve thrived has held a singing river, a wise tree, a hidden thicket whispering at dusk.  I ache without them and forget myself.  Green and alive is not enough.  I recoil from manicured and cultivated.  I want no touch of man’s presence separating me from what I am.  People often comment on my bravery, or my foolishness, for writing as intimately as I do.  That always surprises me because these things I write are not what I am.  These fears and heart-breaks and longings and victories are the musings of the vehicle this soul occupies.  Sometimes I feel lonely despite the abundance of affection and appreciation directed towards me and I realize it is because it is all directed at the shell I have chosen to live in.  My soul absorbs so little from these faces because I do not know how to bring the truth I embody when I am those wild places with me when I come back inside our human world.

So much I do has a flavor of falseness, motivated by confusion as to what ultimately fulfills, and I know I will always feel a degree of loss and dissatisfaction until I integrate what is buried in my past with what I experience in this present moment.  I visit that marsh in my memory and it is charged so much more vitally than it felt when I was there in my body with my mind drifting elsewhere.  What does it matter whether I dedicate a lifetime to activism when I cannot hold the feel of this tender place in my own awareness?  All these outward things I could tear myself to the bone raging against – they are all within.  This isn’t about doing any of the things my mind recommends.  It isn’t about studying or teaching or practicing or imitating.  It is simply about fully being where I am and what I am, right now, about not mistaking the forms of this world for the beauty I feel through them, and about not letting my desperation to protect and serve them block my ability to receive what flows through them.  Perhaps we humans were never meant to be Doers, but merely Witnesses, even of those things that suffer, and especially when what suffers is part of ourselves.  There is nothing to do but see, and listen, and feel, and slip inside – to let our hearts grow warm and swell large enough to hold the world, absorb it all, become it, and be in awe.

Am I speaking from the place that feels ancient when it stands in the chill of midwinter moonlight?  Do I see others with the same tenderness that flows from me when I watch a beetle circle once, twice, and again around the lights that hang over my bed?  Do I feel the rush of the river plunging through me?  Are my toes nestled deep in warm soil?  Do I sway, do I trot, do I tumble and drift?  Am I in awe of in the world in miniature tucked inside square inches of bark?  Do I remember how small we are?  Do I remember we all are simply what we are – no more and no less?  Do I remember we breathe together?

Nancy