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poems & stories spirituality sri lanka

Remembering

I know what it is like to feel peaceful and still inside. I have had this experience as a way of being for a good part of this last year. This year isn’t starting off that way for me. Yesterday, however, it came back, maybe for about 20 minutes, but it did come back and it was unmistakable in its ease, beauty and simplicity. I think the space was created by having gone through these recent periods of hate and sadness, going for a run on the beach, and taking a good nap and a shower. There it was. I was just there. Simply. Not having to do anything or think anything. There I sat at an outdoor table at a restaurant on the beach and the breeze flapped the tablecloth just so, the waiter’s hand was generous in serving up my food, and beautiful in it’s poised retreat, his smile reserved yet plentiful, my body felt easy and my mind was still. I was simply there, filled with gratitude for this moment which had returned, my mind no longer corrupting the space in front of me. An openness swayed with a potted palm frond in the breeze.

I need exercise to clear my mind. I need meditation to still my soul. I need openness to and with my experience. Add these together and I am so much more simple, clear, present.

I have had flashes of this today as well, but it feels less accessible. When I returned from India last year, I returned into an extended place of ease and stillness that I hadn’t known before. (see: As Me to read more about that experience back then) It was wonderful. I think being home for me is actually more conducive to this state, for it is so easy to exercise, do yoga, go for long walks along the beautiful shore where my mind quiets and my eyes and senses reclaim their openness, and their capacity to enrich my experience.

To me, it feels like the only true way to live, and all this time spent in my life filling and fulfilling my mind with concerns of future or planning seems like folly.

Today I remember. I had forgotten as of late, but I remember now, and want to do my best to get out of my own way, again. To relearn, to keep coming back, to remember like I am right now in this hotel room where I for the first time notice the mirror and how it reflects the curtain and the mid day sun streaking through, aware of my fingers as they are expressing my ideas through their own mindless typing capacities, seeing the 3 different colors of the tiles in the bathroom for the first time since I’ve been staying here, feeling my own happiness at having my own space here in this room, amazed listening to music how a musician’s moment in time can be captured and stored on a small portable player, excitedly anticipating laying down soon for another nap, etc., etc., etc., Everything unfolding before me with awareness. This is soooooo much more like it.

I aim to remember, and not judge myself when I forget.

Men are as forgetful and heedless
in their waking moments
of what is going on around them
as they are during their sleep.
Fools, although they hear,
are like the deaf;
to them the adage applies
that whenever they are present
they are absent.
One should not act or speak
as if he were asleep.
The waking have one world in common;
sleepers have each a private world of his own.

Heraclitus


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