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Sponsor |  rumisong | Jun 10, 5:38am | From UUWorld.org
"Living at the edge
By living in the present moment, we can find ourselves at the gateway to eternity.
By Philip Simmons (1957-2002)
September 2000
I've always loved edges: the edge of night when color drains from the land, the edge of an argument where a fixed idea adjusts to other points of view, the edge of a body where skin meets air or my caress. I love edges for the vantage they provide. If you invite me to a backyard barbecue, you'll see me drift away--as discreetly as one can while riding a 400-pound motorized wheelchair--to check out your property line and look for signs of history there: a broken fence, discarded tools, a change of grade where a neighbor added fill. From such edges we can see past and present together, and thus get a glimpse at history.
One night last spring, visiting friends northwest of Chicago, I sneaked away to the edge of their new housing development and gazed across a mile of cornfield gone fallow and waiting to sprout more driveways, lampposts, houses, heartbreak, bliss. An alien spaceship hovered (a water tower, actually), its red lights flashing, having lowered spindly legs and a long tube to feed on the rich topsoil--10,000 years in the making. A cultivator rusted in the scruff at the field's edge; the night sky glowed purple with city light; on the horizon the mountain of a landfill loomed, tongues of flame licking out of methane vents. Highway noise, distant and unstoppable, washed over all. I was seeing the beginning and ending of a world.
Here in New Hampshire the fields have suffered a different fate, taken over by woods when farmers fled this bony soil 100 years ago to work the very fields now sprouting shopping malls and subdivisions near Chicago and throughout the Midwest. To build our house, on part of the 200-year-old farm my parents own, we had to reclaim some territory from the woods, restoring what had once been pasture, and before that, primeval forest. The cabin where I write sits in the woods near the property's edge, within sight of a stone wall that once kept cows in but failed to stop the woods' advance once the cows had gone. From my cabin window I can see the shallow pit of an old farm dump, a settled heap of broken bottles and rusted cans, punctured pots and flayed rubber boot soles.
We stand in awe before such junk, staring at the mute, recalcitrant wreck of time. The past is there before us, rusted, cracked, peeling, sinking into earth, and yet it is not there but unutterably gone, absent as the dead. You hoist a rusted bucket, its bottom a hole through which you peer at all that's vanished.
I want to think about those moments when we stand at the edge, when we feel the presence of what has gone before, when we sense the onrushing promise--or threat--of things to come. Maybe it's just the time of year. We pick our last tomatoes, not knowing they're the last until we wake one morning to see frost blanketing the fields and our petunias slumped in their beds. Trees catch fire, whole hillsides burst into flame. Armed men roam the woods; we're wakened by rifle shots. It's as if every year at this time the world imagined its own ending. Maybe, too, my interest in edges is personal. I stand at the edge of a life made shorter by illness and can't help being pulled out of the present moment into mourning my losses, courting my fears.
But we all stand at the edge. The present moment is itself an edge, this evanescent sliver of time between past and future. We're called away from it continually by our earthly pleasures and concerns. Even now you may be thinking it's time for another cup of coffee and one of those blueberry muffins. Seems it's always time to be doing something other than what we're doing at the moment. Like the spotted owl or the sea turtle, the present moment has become an endangered species. Yet more and more I find that dwelling in the present moment, in the face of everything that would call us out of it, is our highest spiritual discipline. More boldly, I would say that our very presentness is our salvation; the present moment, entered into fully, is our gateway to eternal life.
Now, when I say this, you could accuse me of being a mystic. And I am, but of a very ordinary kind. I don't doubt that some people throughout history, and some living today, have heard voices and seen visions. But my mysticism involves no access to other realms, only the deeper experience of this one. Mine is the mysticism of everyday life, of the heaped laundry and the bruised toe, of overcooked broccoli and dew-spangled leaves, of sunrise and sorrow, laughter and linguine, music and mold. This everyday mysticism requires no special powers, only imagination, a doting and practiced attention to the ordinary, and a willingness to be surprised by grace.
Still, when I say I'm looking for eternity in a pile of laundry, you might wonder if I've been going a bit heavy on the Tabasco sauce. But I'm just being pragmatic. I don't know what, if anything, follows this life. What I do know is that I'm here, now, in a world of worn shoes and rose petals, seeking eternity wherever I can find it. You might say that I want my eternal life now, before it's over with.
So how to go about it? How can we cultivate this eternal present? The Buddhist practice of mindfulness, as explicated by Thich Nhat Hanh and others, offers one model. Dwelling in the moment, on our breath, on the work of our hands immediately before us, we're drawn into life's luminousness, into the mystery at the heart of ordinary things. Dwelling in the present, at least at first, involves forgetting past and future, stopping the mind's whirlwind of memory and expectation, giving ourselves a blessed hour's calm as we meditate, bake bread, walk through the forest, or play games with a child. But with further practice we may find past and future returning to our awareness, only now without bringing anxiety or distraction along with them. Instead, we become aware of living in eternity. The present moment enlarges, drawing past and future into it, until we are dwelling not just in the moment but within the whole of life."
From the Learning to Fall webpage:
Philip Simmons was Associate Professor of English at Lake Forest College in Illinois, where he taught literature and creative writing for nine years before being disabled by Lou Gehrig's disease. He was a frequent speaker and workshop leader for churches and civic groups, and was contributing editor of the UU World, the journal of the Unitarian Universalist Association.
He earned his B.A. in English and Physics from Amherst College, his MFA in Creative Writing from Washington University in St. Louis, and his Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan. |
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Sponsor | | anitab | Jun 10, 6:09am | thank you for that rumi.
"can't help being pulled out of the present moment into mourning my losses, courting my fears."
this is why i can't fall... too much fear.
but there is still time.. lots of time to learn.
i hope.
:) |
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Sponsor | | rumisong | Jun 10, 7:20am | "this is why i can't fall... too much fear.
but there is still time.. lots of time to learn."
ah, yes ... too much fear ...
but,
(dont ya just hate those "buts"?)
I think its the whole notion of "too much", which is the same as "not enough" - that is BORN of fear ... and I think this is a very important thing to see - to actually SEE the nature of it - that in order to lose the fear, one must stop trying to lose the fear! - because the very "wanting" to be fearless, is still from a fear of being fearful ...
this is not a mind-trick, an intellectual paradox for geeky types to play around with - for those who are really serious about learning the nature of the self, this is an actual alive thing, that one can hold up, suspend in the air, and really LOOK at it ...
in the very LOOKING itself, that is where there is no fear ... that alone, is what will see the ending of fear - because that alone is what is fearless - fear cannot exist in LOOKING - fear can only exist in measuring - so, when we look at our situation in this, and we say "too much fear", the measuring has already taken place - its gone over, too far ... back up, and just LOOK - do not measure what you are looking at -
when you find that you have (and you will ... you will say "have I backed up far enough to see this?" ;) ha ha! and so it goes!!!) then THAT is what to LOOK at - one then says, "oh look! there was another measurement again!" ... "and look, another!" ... and another - and another ...
but that IS meditation ... its never to vanquish what its looking at (that would only be born of more measurement again) ... its just to SEE the very Nature of itself - and love that - love the seeing of that ... no, not even that ... the Love IS the seeing of that ... it need not even effort to "love" - the Looking IS the love ... its that simple - its so simple really ...
the end of measurement - that is love ... the end of ALL measurement, even to that which says "am I still measuring?" ... even to that which wants to measure itself - or those who what to measure you - their outward measurements need not be yours ... love is the ending ... to see how it is, that the self will always see only itself in whatever it measures - that relationship is a mirror for the self ... and in that complete seeing - love is the end ...
I think that is why, when someone faces death - an ending to all one "knows" (and thus, measures) and looks into the face of that, of oneself, and the nature of what the self IS, then love comes in that looking ... thus, it is called "the edge" by some ...
I love the last paragraph from this article:
"Some of us go willingly to the edge, some of us are driven to it, some of us find ourselves there by grace. But all of us get there at some time in our lives, when through the gateway of the present moment we glimpse something beyond. And when we do, may we open ourselves to wonder, may we surrender to the mystery that passes understanding, may we find ourselves at the threshold of this eternal life."
there is a documentary film out of this chap, btw
the man who learned to fall |
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Sponsor | | anitab | Jun 10, 7:50am | i guess i have much to *see* and learn, then.
i need silence.
:) |
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|  Slotus | Aug 9, 4:59am | "Time weighs down on you like an old, ambiguous dream. You keep on moving, trying to slip through it. But even if you go to the ends of the earth, you won't be able to escape it. Still, you have to go there - to the edge of the world. There's something you can't do unless you go there."
Kafka On The Shore
Haruki Murakami |
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