Single point focus on joy.

Where the dust speck dances, there dance I. Lean towards a flower. Smell it.

No answers are on your computer. Whatever the place and at whatever the time of the night or day, dear Friend, you will find the times and places with ideal perfect opportunities to develop focused attention.

Why in such random places and at such unpremeditated times?

Why? The key component of the awareness you are tempted to study seated in a solo walled setting at your computer is joy.

Joy at the moment you deliberately allow yourself to recognise entry into your heart of any colour, sound, movement, smell, sight, taste, associative thought, flitting fly, tumbling dust mote lit by sunshine.

We are indeed talking about disciplined enquiry. The enquiry is not the means. The end is the means. Enquire all you like, you will simply discover more to enquire about.

You know full well what makes you smile to yourself or when in company. When you walk outdoors, immediately your radar sweeps wide and offers you more mild delights than any supercomputer can put in a list.

This is all about choice.

You choose to believe in the presence of the familiar things that meet the radar of your awareness from your first step out of your home. This offers security in the predictability of the familiar. You know your own mind. It will take the first step with you from the front door, and yet you will let it walk you with no thought of what it truly is you are doing. Billions do the same.

I say begin with a different set of choices. At the door, deliberately set your gaze on a living thing. A clump of green, a leaf that hangs. Look out for the questions this moment of contact can possibly trigger. Yes, I hark again to the valuable practice of Chatting With Things. The more you do this, the more joy you will notice around you and in you. This joy is of the same timid kind that is shared between friends who meet and walk together.

We are born to joy. In our newborn incompleteness, we are joy. It’s not necessary, in this earliest time, to parse joy.

Determine the way gravity and the breeze act on the growing thing. Would you be moved in these ways, too, if you were the leaf, the green clump? Ask the question, then take your second step from your door.

Everything, small or not, light or dark, that meets your gaze as you step along is as sacred as you, as relevant and as full of potential meaning as you.

Your light thrives when it is noticed and seen by another. Your atoms and molecules are of this same after breakfast world you walk into.

Be the giver of your attention to those green things taken for granted by so many others.

The attention another gives to you, specially by some stranger, makes you quiver in your sacred inner space. Therefore, offer to those on your path, whether animate or not, the same impetus of your presence as you pass close. You can do this honour to them. They deserve it in their Gentleness of Being. And so do you, with the open heart you bring into their presence.

The world is singing, alive, rich in ancient history. No history is as venerable or as scintillating as the history of atoms. Take your integrity with you, your dignity, and believe correctly that all things that meet your solemn gaze are possessed of the same.

Stage props which once were street furniture and minor familiar landmarks have become your companions. In their immutable presence, their gaze turns on you as you pass. This is the Gentleness of Being. Your spirit, as you go left, right, left, right, is recognised by Things and by you as infused with the Gentleness of Being.

Begin to expand your list of greetings and polite questions in your daily chatversations. Discover replies come back to your heart from inanimate and from living things. This is not surprising. It is what occurs in the discourse of life with life.

See no limits to the interplay of joy between you and Things.

Hard edge boundaries to your perception are illusions of your mind. If you say they protect you, from what are they protecting you? Your mind wants to label this as this, that as that. In doing so, Gentleness is set at one remove. When you continue to let your mind explain things, all traces of Gentleness slough off.

Love and joy reside in and depend on a delicate matrix of compassionate tenderness. In this way, the reality of a kiss depends on remaining unexpected, unallocated, unlabelled. A kiss which is knowable, instantly ceases to be a kiss.

A soap bubble can exemplify the way the magic mysticism of a kiss disappears, and both parties cease to be involved, the moment the thought rises, “I am kissing”.

I stop my script here. I fear it may veer off and become stuck in that rut of exposition, and exhaustive explanation, far removed from the sunlight in which you shine, dear Friend, and in which dust specks do dance

~ Love is present EveryNow