Phases

To the mind there is such a thing as news,
whereas to the inner knowing, it is all
in the middle of its happening.
To doubters, this is a pain.
To believers, it's gospel.
To the lover and the visionary,
it is life as it's being lived. - "The Mystery of the Moment" by Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks)

Day 246. I have discovered "Easy Listening" on one of the higher numbered cable channels I never before investigated. I stream it constantly. Read between the lines: I am listening to elevator music voluntarily. Surely this is just a phase.

Speaking of phases, (how I love a good segue!) I seem to have entered a couple of new ones. I shall call them my Poetry Phase and my In The Moment Phase. I would highly recommend them both. Since viewing the video on David Whyte, I took his advice and have been reading some poetry each evening. Whitman, Rumi, Kabir, Merwin, and (as soon as I buy his book) David Whyte himself (OMG!)

Poets speak to a part of my brain that has been laying dormant for quite some time. Some sleeping gray matter deep in my right hemisphere is waking up, coming alive, shooting sparks into the dark night of my soul! I think poetry is like history: most of us have to get a few decades under our life belt before we arrive at a place of deserving receptivity. There are some advanced beings, like my eldest nephew, who emerge from the womb spewing poetry with their first coos and gurgles. He happens to be a musician and an oracle, and probably read Rumi while me and my son entertained ourselves with the Berenstein Bears. He clearly inherited the bulk of the family right brain genes. I bet he doesn't major in accounting.

I have come to the conclusion that the current societal fuss about "living in the here-and-now" has been highly underrated. It is the best perspective EVER! Ironically, it is entirely antithetical to how most Americans live. I have been purposefully attempting it for 245 days now, and it continues to baffle and escape me. Seems so simple when it is viewed via the written word. So straightforward when it is painted on cheesy souvenirs. So frustratingly elusive when I pursue it for longer than a heartbeat.

My new theory is that the world may not be ready for seven billion people to comprehend living in the here-and-now. All that ecstatic whirling could potentially alter the earth's gravitational pull. Because that is exactly the sensation that accompanies truly understanding what In The Moment means. Ask Rumi: "He would spin round a pillar in the mosque, absorbed in the depths of his loving, and words would fly out of his mouth like honeybees. A scribe would catch them on the wing with his quill. Out of his spinning, the Whirling Dervishes arose . . . " (from Roger Housden in Ten Poems to Change Your Life, page 44). Rumi knew the beauty of The Moment. So did Whitman. Now that I am mindfully tending to my "In the Moment Phase," so do I. A tiny bit. I go in and out, in and out, in and out (of the here-and-now). The mind habit of swirling everywhere else is incredibly difficult to break. But those heartbeats of communing with Reality, exactly as it is, are rapturous indeed. No wonder Rumi spun around pillars with honeybees flying from his mouth. He lived from the sweetest place imaginable.

This is the focus of my practice. The days of sitting melt into one another, and the profundity of change in my life shows no sign of abating. The shift from my lofty goals and exaggerated impact on the world to ecstasy in the ordinary is something I never saw coming. Wonder how long I will dwell in the Poetry Phase and the In The Moment Phase? No way of knowing. Like everything else in the galaxy, I'm sure they will run their course.

Gassho,
CycleBuddhaDoc