“The gift of becoming aware of the simple, astonishing beauty of anything, even as we recognize that it, and we along with it, will one day be no more. This moment of awareness holds everything.”
– Douglas Christie
I want to muse about the line “this moment of awareness holds everything” and how it spun me round in relationship between my sitting practice and the fierce reality of the present moment.
I think the present moment gets shortchanged by lazy quips and sophomoric slogans – YOLO and all the rest. And sitting practice can be misunderstood just as easily… it does not lock our minds away from our bodies writing a future in disappearing ink…nor does it cement our hearts in disembodied thoughts.
Let me begin with a bird’s eye view…
Being in the present moment is direct contact with the unitive ground of shared, unguarded reality. My sitting practice is the radical desire to sit on the unitive ground with the intent to perceive and become that which I sit on. Easier said then done. I want to walk through the unfolding of this as I see it. (Which is when the questions of why do I sit? What is sitting? And how do I sit? become questions that actually answer one another)
First, the desire to take a posture of prayer. It is a radical choice to freely embody in and with the world in your flesh, breath, B.O., and bones. From this base, a unity with the world begins. We acknowledge our bodies and everything they carry and exchange; emotions, memories, love, and so forth. We release ours bodies into the mercy of the physical world in a unity not of our imagination, but in the pace of the world’s turning on its axis.
Second, a unity with ourselves is now an invited possibility. Our breath entices the mind to drop in the heart. In this unity of body and breath in the world as it is … the conditions for perceiving unity are set in motion.
Third, In the settling of this hidden stillness, the surface can quake while the depths holds. The perception from this obscured unity is a stillness that transcends the thoughts of what we can buy, sell, or become. Detachment is a good word for this. Hadewijch writes “To be reduced to nothingness in Love / Is the most desirable thing I know.”* It is this “nothingness” that is crowded out by our preferential clinging.
Fourth, we humbly accept ourselves as the conduit of the present moment in the sharing of the world in our very being-ness. Plopping down on the present moment that sits on the unitive ground bubbling up history and potentiality channeling through us all at once.
Our practice is to sit on this point vierge. It is as sharp as it is razor thin. Practice is uncomfortable…until it isn’t.
For this we must give the present moment more credit, for it is the Kingdom of God presenting itself in the here and the not yet here.
The present moment is fiercely divine; for it shares the mystery of life, death, and resurrection with the world, with us all, and all at once.
And practice is all grace. A grace to desire, to drop in, to detach, in the grace of the present moment that endarkens and embodies love. We become a hurricane lamp; light hidden and blazing, and shining out from within.
Gary Snyder writes,
“This present moment
that lives onTo become
Long ago.”
This is why I sit in the fleeting eternal present moment, to carry the fragrance of the Beloved in the Kin-dom of God.
*Christie, Douglas. The Insurmountable Darkness of Love: Mysticism, Loss, and the Common Life. Oxford Press: 2022, p. 15.
Photo by Contemplify
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