A MILLION SMALL MOMENTS
“ In a million small moments, life shows up!” Adyashanti.
Living is like unwrapping a gift…curiously… slowly. Like now. My eye falls gently on a small note in these small moments when I’m alone and inspired to jot something down. This particular old note from the Bible reads: “A holy life has a voice it speaks when the tongue is silent.”
Well, right now, I am moved to find words that express this silence a little. Even though my writing all this has no point, no goal, no call to serve an idea as a means to achieve an ideal end. This writing is an exploration in living in fidelity to life – a life that’s actually unpredictable because unknown. A dancing of a dance while always finding our feet!
We record an experience about what is happening after the fact. In truth, there is only alive experiencing. That is, our experience is still-born once our minds label it. Similarly, these words are already dead; they bear no important message, no secrets. They simply show up without a motive. They contain no truth whatsoever, or any designed outcome. They flow like all words as an expression of the One Self. Not from mind to mind perhaps in this case, but from Source to Source, from Me to Me…here to here, in a million small ambitionless moments.
There’s a rising –a writing –out of inaction, to action, and then a settling back, like a wave rises out of the ocean only to fall back into itself. Form collapses into formlessness.
It’s like searching for your next step in a dark staircase, with a fragile candle flame that simply indicates a movement in an unknown direction. And somehow there’s a finding of notes as you go along; they’re scattered up and down the stairs! And there’s a fine and constant joy when action appears, followed by a resting in truth when action disappears.
Turns out this truth has no sides to take, no opinions to present, no virtues to represent. It’s ungraspable, like water running through your hands. It never stops flowing long enough to get a good look at it. So you quietly give up knowing and follow where ever it leads in a million small movements.
That’s not to say that the truth is evasive – ego evades the truth.
Some of us spiritual guys even seem to “succeed” at evading truth with huge efforts to achieve Enlightenment…to become some sort of Spiritual Celebrity, usually with a plan to serve a mission that spiritual ego has crafted, often with good intentions. But whatever happens… happens. As Nisargadatta said: “there is nothing wrong”. We simply mislead our Self when we imagine any naturally arising event including ourselves to be special, to be other then what we are and this is. We are prone to worship other gods, thinking they know, or can help us know. Thinking that others have, and can give us what we don’t have. We line up to buy bottled water beside a river.
And that’s OK too.
Michel de Montaigne, in his pioneering essays about life circa 1580, put it this way: “ …life is material motion in the body, an activity by its very essence, imperfect and unruly: I work to serve it on its own terms.”
Who knows what the terms will be?
Without a future and a plan, we end up …living! When we extend an empty hand, we go live! Life touches life, and we feel it like the soft wet nose of a nuzzling deer…in a million small delights. Now.
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