From the scented gardens of EveryNow

A heavenly space all your own

A kiss is not a kiss if it contains any thoughts of itself. It becomes a dictionary entry, or even worse, a cold stone kiss.

When I encounter a surge of any emotion, any emotion at all, I react with a movement of my mind, like a gleam of recognition at some passing flash of a recollected thought, or I react with a motion, like a smile or a frown.

Sometimes my reaction is physical and involuntary, like an adrenal shudder, or a thing close to a skipped heartbeat. With the reaction over, I am once more a blank sheet, like an unfurled sail ready to receive whatever wind may blow.

I have had the luck to be thrown up against my own company all my life. A life of many decades lived day by day in keener and keener awareness of my surroundings, physical, mental, and mystical.

It has recently become clearer to me that the act of experiencing anything, tiny, or regular-sized, or massive, or transcendental, or overwhelming, is entirely sufficient in itself as a confirmation and as an affirmation of life shared with all other sentient beings.

I invite you to try this.

…  …  …

Take a seat and be still for a moment, will you?

Place your hand palm up on the table in front of you.

Be at rest, and breathe as would breathe, only be aware of your taking breath. Hear it going in and out.

Now regard the palm of your hand as it regards you. You know it well. It knows you.

With a silent whisper of secretive familiar tenderness, ask your hand to make an inflection of any part of itself. A small, perhaps hardly perceptible movement will eventually come in response to your own quiet loving call.

With long and respectful pauses, try repeating this silent homage from yourself to your own hand a few times more. Each time, concentrate quite furiously on the delicate homage of the union between it and you.

This simple act, which can be full of a curious wonder, is you communing with you. Could it be more simple? Can you avoid smiling?

This connection of self to self, which translates perfectly as self to others, could easily be, for example, a kiss or an embrace.  It does not happen by a snap of the fingers.

It is unimportant that you want to skip into bliss as soon as yesterday, or maybe sooner. What matters is that you know there is a heavenly space all your own waiting for you. It always has been and it always will be.

Even though this space, this most sacred sweetest space is a mere breath away from you right now, it is not important that it may take you as many decades as it took me to enter it and to be entered into by it. The thing to do is to drop the impatience, because impatience is simply heavy to carry around with you.

~ Love is present EveryNow