The key to meaningful living is mindfulness. The heart of mindfulness, a simultaneous blending of love with clear-seeing-enquiry, arises out of the multi-levelled life and living that we are. 1 This is the music of the universe and it resounds in everything. Listen! You can hear the singing in your bones, your feelings, your perceptions and intuitive understandings. There is singing in the wind and rain, in cities and rural farmlands, in flow and difficulty, in climate change and political shenanigans. The words of this music are infinitely various, but the meaning is the same; “Everything interconnects!” Responsive relating is the warp and weft – the very fabric of beingness. In this we are both ancient, and continuously birthing afresh – each one of us, a cresting wave of now that always is, always has been, and always will be. Mindfulness is far more than a meditation technique. It is a way of wisdom; a breath of knowing that flowers naturally from the functioning of a perpetually evolving world. Cultivating mindfulness, we reconnect with what David Abram called ‘the wider life of this planet’. Such evolving, such journeying, such living, is the choiceless path to be realised. It has sometimes been called the Great Way, and with it, we find our way home.
Weavings #4 Two water colours – one cut into strips and woven ito the other.
One morning a few months back, similar ideas arose in verse form. Though short and simple, they felt like a pithy pointing out of what might be seen as a path of maturing humanness. I’d like to share them with you.
It begins as a stirring, a breath of wonder, a moment of intuition,
a quiet knowing of rightness,
an insight – you didn’t know you always knew.
Everything is interdependent with everything!
We sit with the implications.
We collide with a world that doesn’t see this.
And through such painful tragic crashings,
a yearning for refuge and a desire to live meaningfully becomes strong.
Details proliferate;
generosity,
wholesome relating,
patience,
skilled use of energy,
a blossoming of caring and enquiry,
an inherent inquisitiveness, precise and playful;
and we discover a new way of life and living.
Exploring embodiment.
Exploring en-mindment.
Dancings of knowings responding to and with dancings of knowings,
glimmerings of understanding –
this minding and knowing and interbecoming nature of experience.
Dawnings of confidence and capacity,
Solid in beingness,
Perfumed with loving wise relating
This life-long journey of maturing into humanness,
as we surrender into the mystery,
stridingbeyond paths and pathways,
seamless, ineffable, spacious and open,
this body of dharma – compassion unfolding
celebrating the ordinary with lightness and wisdom
we realize true home.
Endnote:
1. In general, ‘mindfulness’ begins as a practice that involves intentionally encouraging one’s capacity to simultaneously blend qualities of love/compassion with clear-seeing-enquiry while directing them towards recognising the presently arising inter-beingness of our physiology, emotions or feelings, mental processes and perceived outer world of objects and processes. When I say that mindfulness arises out of “the multi-levelled life and living that we are”, I am referring to domains or levels such as: molecular, cellular, multicellular organism, social, cultural, ecological, and cosmological. From the perspective of the way or path of contemplative science, there are potentially an infinite range of such domains depending on who or what is doing the viewing.