Now-Ever
During all your years, all your life, you'll only experience one now.
Most of the time, for most people, flash by without note, day after day, week after week, year after year. Life only briefly punctuated with others, like this, that seem to make the world screech to a halt, force us to stop, be present, and to gaze with awe and yearning at the dying of the glaciers.
What makes these moments so impactful, such a direct conduit for true seeing? What is it that wakes us up and makes the world appear actually how it is?
The more I've chased these rabbits, the more I'm thrust into experiences that force me to look and not look away, nor pass by the present moment.
Peak experiences, near misses, flow state, breathtaking vistas, psychedelics... All of which brought me in one way or another to HERE, NOW. A forced vision, forced perspective. That worked for me but maybe not for all. That showed me what the world really is and how often we let it pass by.
These days I still do most all the things that have forced my vision before, my clarity filters, I might call them, but now I spend more and more time practicing true seeing, breath by breath, minute by minute, day after day, so that it won't take me almost dying to wake me up, it might be a shadow cast on paper, a birds song from a darkened hollow, or a waterfall deep in the forest that I will never see.
Each time reminding me that I am here, I am home and a witness to this beautiful complex happening.
Maybe one day I'll truly wake up but until then I'll be grateful for each and every moment I get to truly see, whether alone or with friends, in traffic or my inbox, in sunken misery or on top of some majestic peak in the middle of nowhere. For without darkness, there can be no light.
