Stop Look and Listen
Don’t underestimate the life changing force of a day or a moment. I call these forks in the road, where you blindly walk down a well traveled route, or decide to head blindly down an unknown trail that suddenly seems too quiet, where shadows portend mountain lions or rapists and color the senses, with your heart pounding in your chest, you have to try to locate yourself. There is a big draw to walk quickly back to the familiar path. The pulling away feels like shedding skin, the stomach lurches, and somewhere here is what separates the the conscious from the not – a toe kicks into the pine straw littering the trail, a smell of clean open forest rises from the earth, a hard pack of dirt, fragments of light filtered through another lens, a twig, a stone, eyes of a newt.
The noises are your noises, breath, movement, clothing on skin, swallowing, and the heart that beats more rhythmically. Do you meditate along this pathway, as you move, as you embody it, as you have your eyes wide open, could you channel down into the softer noises, look beyond the shadows of your mind to the one the egret throws, and moss will be out there, hanging, sympathetic, not violating its host, which seems more solid than anything you could imagine, able to withstand water up to its arms and not move. We shall not be moved.
A bayou, a park, a lagoon, a trail shall not be moved.
Nor shall you.