So, how do we find the sacred in the ordinary? How do we make sacred shit out of the stuff in this day? That stuff can range from attending the funeral of a friend who over-dosed to cutting our toenails. In my case, it's being snowbound for a couple of days and not knowing what to do with so much time on my hands.
Thich Nhat Hahn says enlightenment is being present while doing the dishes or gardening. I'm not so good at that. Yesterday was about shoveling. The snow was heaped high and pure white all around. While I did have a passing thought about the power and magnificence of nature, I mostly was aware of being very wet and exhausted. After the shoveling which was completely unsuccessful in extricating my car, I spent the rest of the day playing video games and binge watching taped episodes of "Bull." I ate popcorn with cheese and numbed myself generally to my housebound state.
Here was a day when I could have read sacred books, meditated, journaled, and even prayed. Or, I could have sat and pondered that magnificence of nature noted before. It could have been my own private retreat, a spiritual time. It wasn't, alas. Behind the game playing and numbing out was a nagging worry about the stuck car and the loneliness.
And the more existential worries about life and the insignificance of my existence. This manifested in thoughts like: "What if I have a heart attack?" Followed by a quick return to video games. Sometimes I forget that the universe, the creation, is a wave made up of just such minuscule, sometimes frightened, particles as myself. With Robert Frost, sometimes I feel like "I am too absent-spirited to count."
Sometimes, as today, I know me. My kind and all the millions of other kinds make up the great wave of creation. Feeling the pull of dark matter, like Einstein we know there's a worm hole out of darkness into an alternate universe of light. I know that today. Yesterday, not so much. Roxie
Thich Nhat Hahn says enlightenment is being present while doing the dishes or gardening. I'm not so good at that. Yesterday was about shoveling. The snow was heaped high and pure white all around. While I did have a passing thought about the power and magnificence of nature, I mostly was aware of being very wet and exhausted. After the shoveling which was completely unsuccessful in extricating my car, I spent the rest of the day playing video games and binge watching taped episodes of "Bull." I ate popcorn with cheese and numbed myself generally to my housebound state.
Here was a day when I could have read sacred books, meditated, journaled, and even prayed. Or, I could have sat and pondered that magnificence of nature noted before. It could have been my own private retreat, a spiritual time. It wasn't, alas. Behind the game playing and numbing out was a nagging worry about the stuck car and the loneliness.
And the more existential worries about life and the insignificance of my existence. This manifested in thoughts like: "What if I have a heart attack?" Followed by a quick return to video games. Sometimes I forget that the universe, the creation, is a wave made up of just such minuscule, sometimes frightened, particles as myself. With Robert Frost, sometimes I feel like "I am too absent-spirited to count."
Sometimes, as today, I know me. My kind and all the millions of other kinds make up the great wave of creation. Feeling the pull of dark matter, like Einstein we know there's a worm hole out of darkness into an alternate universe of light. I know that today. Yesterday, not so much. Roxie
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