Tag: pain

Over-thinking – threshold of insanity

Overthink not

Overthinking – threshold of insanity

When I started my EveryNow blog in 2018, I began to reread and redraft every blog before publication to make as certain as I could they make sense to others and the ideas are offered naked and free of concealed meanings, obscure convoluted expressions, or other examples of my own muddled undisciplined thinking.

The application of this methodical analysis is pleasurable and stimulating, because results come thick and fast.

I tease out into the open the logical progression of my ideas, I replace fuzzy areas of meaning with highly precise alternative words or phrases. I turn passive verbs into the active voice. I use nouns in place of -ing suffixed gerunds. I simplify concatenated sentences by trying to reduce them to simpler shorter ones each with subject, verb, object. Shake-down like this lubricates meaning and clears understanding.

The main criteria I apply is to put myself in the ears and shoes of my readers. I test every phrase, sentence and sometimes every word against its possible receipt by me as if equipped with the ears and eyes of others.

I have good reason to take unusually potent delight in this role play.

Imagine me in my late teens and for most of my twenties. I was too self-conscious of the sound of my own voice, and even of my inner voice, to be able to comfortably remain in company or in companionship. As they left my mouth, the words I spoke returned not as an echo, but with an instant direct feedback. Words from me sounded disturbing, because I could only filter my understanding through my own understanding. I could not hear myself speak as others might hear me. If I imagined my words as they sounded to others, I would imagine a room full of heads swivel in my direction, effectively shutting me down.

I guess it might end up like this for a person in long-term solitary confinement. We are all of us first and foremost gregarious. The environments with the most damaging effects on our emotional and mental health are loneliness and physical pain. When there is only one voice to pay attention to, the inner voice compensates by taking precedence, because it substitutes itself for the lack of the company and conversation of other humans.

In my late twenties, various factors combined to reset to normality the harmonious and effective functioning balance of my attention between the significant and the trivial.

(I detail one such event in this blog: https://everynow.blog/2021/02/18/a-story-of-50-years-of-redemption-and-salvation/)

From the time around these healing, self-reconciling events, I can date the beginning of my reintegration with the world of life, love and productive work. I could say I rejoined society from which I had felt isolated, distanced, unable to comprehend. This marked the beginning of a sense of a gradually rising tide of joy and gratitude for life lived.

Before this it was living to love – amusing, mildly decorative, but shallow, ephemeral, lacking in lasting significance.

After this I was, and am, loving to live – broadly capable of sensing and reaching out into the search common to all human minds and hearts for spiritual, philosophical and essential meaning to the experience of being alive.

Knowing without being told

Screenshot_20180918-164114_Chrome

I experienced the joyful vibe in Colourfest 2017, and my other few participations very intensely. But I didn’t try to hold on to them.

I can now “do” non-attachment. I would spend decades yearning after the event, preserving memories, keeping keepsakes.

Today I am the conduit. I can deeply swim in and submerge into these fine, fiery, feathery, frolicsome experiences. But I don’t want them to last so much that all I become is a sad curator of memories. That has gone. I’m over all that. It’s a sort of inside of head declutter.

It’s good. It feels “grown up”.

I had a perfectly surprisingly amazing experience on Sunday morning, June 4, 2017.

Nashir Karmali gave a 2 hour lecture on Ayurveda healing practices. Much of it was in the form of delightful anecdotes from his own long years in his own Wimborne practice.

He impressed us all. He comes over as he is, a deeply human and compassionate person, wise, learned, and with a gentle humour.

There must have been at least forty in the elegantly preserved Gaunts House Library. All remained quiet and respectfully attentive in the room throughout.

I knew Nashir’s talk would “use up” all the calm sunny weather on that day. I knew the weather would deteriorate from midday on.

But I dismissed as selfish idle ego chit-chat the idea of “bunking” it! And Nashir himself had, after all, personally invited me.

So I stayed to the end.

At the end, we were asked to partner off into healing/listening pairs. We were told, “Sit face to face, eye in eye, holding hands, look deep into the honourable soul we see in the eyes before us. For the first part, one touches the wrists of the other at the pulse.”

I remained sat down while the others got up, walked and mixed to find their partners.

I know from Biodanza I am way down the list of pairing choices owing to my minority age group, as I was here.

Only one unpaired person remained.

Before me is a woman with a forceful confident manner. She is a young woman. Certainly of good family. Someone well-educated and sure of her place in her society.

Her face is pleasingly round and open. Her symmetrical features lend her a certain classical nobility older than her years.

All went quiet. I am touching her pulse on both her wrists. I cannot detect much if any beat. But it is contact. We both ignore what Nashir was saying about what to do and say, because we have become absorbed in each others gaze.

I find she had a tranquillity bordering on nobility.I say quietly,

“You are far more beautiful than even you will admit.”

She smiles. It is a compliment.

Then I begin to see and to feel inside of me something completely contrary to and at odds with the composed expression on her nice symmetrical face.

Here’s the thing. I became more and more restless. My stomach twisted. I see her calm face cloud slightly with a sadness. But what I feel is her fear!

I say,

“You are not as composed as you are projecting. You have had a shock, you have had a frightening experience. It is recent. You came to this festival in spite of carrying this with you.”

Her eyes filled, although the facade I had looked through was still strong and was not about to fail her.

I asked if she would share.

She said I was right. She said the day before the festival, her boyfriend, who lives across the road, had dumped her.

I asked her how she had felt this in her heart. She was torn up inside, she said.

Neither of us expressed an objective opinion about how or why I had “seen” this from only her eyes. Since then (only 36 hours ago) I have not foolishly distracted myself by marvelling at the phenomenon of this vision.

I accept it and am surprised is all. I find it suggests that I may have the ability to help others more than I had realised.

In the last moments together, I said,

“The pain and turmoil inside you does not ‘belong’ to you. You don’t own it, and it doesn’t own you. It is a hard to live with emotion, which will pass, like all emotions.

We are not mechanisms. We have no off-switches.

What is permanently yours is the light of love in your own heart from which you came, to which you will return.

That is your strength and that is what will support and sustain you through this time. Keep your heart in view, do not try to examine your heart’s pain.

Your closeness to your living heart will be what helps shorten this period of pain.”

It was her turn. She looked at me and she said I was very very calm. Hearing, or rather seeing her see this, I suddenly felt like collapsing.

I had to close my eyes, look down, bite my lip to avoid breaking down. I composed myself. I said,

“Under this I am in turmoil.” Quickly I added,

“But this is only what is on me now. I am at peace in my heart.”

She asked to hug. We hugged. Moments later we were both gone.

What do you think, dear Friend?

🔸Adhere to EveryNow 🔶

None of us are ever alone in the path we take, nor in the circumstances of the path, however dire or distressing.

Love’s presence EveryNow

In the vast ocean of life, though we are billions, the number of common threads of humanity in which we all have a share is surprisingly small.

“Today is a long time ago”

My friend Bryan Alkins said on Friday 2nd October 2015 – “The past is the past! How far in the past doesn’t matter. Live in the moment. 🙏”

If I occasionally believe I am dangerously far divorced from “normality”, because all that matters is what’s going on now, I will beg my pardon and I will still defer to the moment.

I have long held the view (for near on forty years) that those who disavow the mystical and say there is no thing beyond the material and the provable, are trapped in a bubble of mystic magic divinity which knows and loves them, but which is sadly not visible to them.

These days I am believing it is simpler even than all of that.

Those who have not begun to bathe totally in the now cannot conceive of doing so. They believe it has no value to them, because what does not relate to their own lived experience appears to them as unsubstantiated evidence without the necessary confirmation of cause and effect.

EveryNow is that lived bliss of unconditional immediacy of experience without reference to past, future, or to labels of name or pertainment.

People who relate every present moment to its antecedent and who take care to measure it by its potential future effect make the mistake of regarding EveryNow as a state of instability from which no practical outcomes through reason and judgement are to be initiated.

After all, whoever thought it wise to choose to be a passenger in a vehicle driven by a person in a state of bliss?

Fear is sometimes taken to be the inevitable next step after identification with uncertainty. To see new ways of being as strange is to associate those who operate from this state as strange and then perhaps as people to be feared.

Nothing is more precise, more glaringly pinpointed with a sense of the absolute than EveryNow!

Long Live Love’s presence EveryNow

Here are reasons to be glad, to be grateful, because every giant effort of will we make to take just one step, every step we stumble at, every time we call out in agony, we unite with every human who ever endured, screamed and moved  on.

Far too many of those I know have had to un-shipwreck themselves after being all but capsized by cruel storms of other people’s making.

I try not to make sweeping generalisations, or say things that cannot be proven by some investigation. In all truth, I cannot think of any person I have ever met who does not live with some heavy burden of pain. Can you look through the front doors of your own family, friends, acquaintances and say, “There lives a human with a heart free of all hurt?”

We are strong beyond any adequate means of describing our strengths. I believe no trauma, no setback, no block on our way can finally dim, disfigure or extinguish our inner light.

Yet there are two things we are definitely not suited to suffer. These are physical violence or isolation.  These sorrows figure in the storylines of so very many people. I include illness or disabilities in such unwanted, unwelcome and insufferable tempests.

I am extremely fortunate to have avoided the worst of such crippling external influences.

It is not true to say I do not live with God in my life. It’s just that I am aware that by publicly aligning myself with a Western religious orthodoxy, I automatically draw down iron curtains from those I most care about and most wish not to be distanced from.

It’s a sad fact of life that such labels are capable of thwarting the transmission of exactly those truths that are universally recognised.

In my EveryNow blogs, I avoid direct reference to religious nomenclature in order to keep the channels of positivity flowing without distraction, and without the additional identifiable baggage that I see as secondary and non-essential.

This is my own Motto, the final words I most often use to place my seal on my writings…

“Love is present EveryNow”

You, or any reader, can readily replace the word Love with their own named deity.

My impulse to avoid any form of evangelical message comes from my distrust of organised religion, particularly the Western dualistic orthodoxies.

My adherence is to the present moment. This is where infinity and all the goodness therein lies waiting to be found, simultaneously to be consumed by us and to consume us with no diminishment!

Infinity – the permanent invitation

“Feel the peace and beauty of connecting to your heart…”

I am always of the belief that it is possible to walk “through” the Stargate portal and to have an insight so immediate and all pervasive that your pain and hurt, every trace, drops away, and at last you can “let it be”.

This is an insight into love absolute, a place, a real place, where fear evaporates before it can take shape.

You must know I have had the good fortune to pass through some form of Stargate. To reach there, I had to have lived more than a handful of decades, be retired and released from over 40 years of nine-to-five grind, and I had to undergo several epiphany experiences closely accompanied by some shining new rare and true soulfriends.

Before you arrive in the presence of such a magic portal, it’s likely you’ll still need to arrive again and again at more of your old journey destinations on your way. You’ll probably be faced with the choice to tear down clinging overgrown undergrowth covering the face of your mind.

You will see yourself in the forgotten places with a brand new clarity. You will be forced to allow the sacred significance of your present-in-the-past to carve deep grooves in your heart. 
You will suffer ancient tears to overflow into your present you for the first time.

Only by touching naked feet fearless onto such stepping stones as I describe will you understand your leaden ankle weights and unseen shackles represent illusions.

Released from these delusional encumbrances which you had chosen as your territorial possessions, you start to walk tall. This is the walk of your life.

These are structures that have become so vital to the security and safety of your self. You have devoted so much energy, time and concern in their construction. These are systems you have become accustomed to handle in a fiercely protective, conscious, deliberate and deliberative way. You can remember words to describe them, such as weights and shackles, tears of lead, deflection of hurt, avoidance of pain.

Your protection has come more to depend on the unblinking maintenance of your defences, and less on identifying what caused you to construct your defences.

Who you are is occulted by the insistent persistence of your protection of you. 

Like you, I know you can always stand in the light of your own being at a moment’s notice.

You may be moved to seek help and find it with an intermediary.

You may find the light of your being quite unexpectedly homes in on you of its own accord, with a beam like a searchlight.

The shock can startle and even perplex you, till you are are obliged to accept the fact that your soul is staggeringly beautiful, or you opt to refute the experience, telling yourself platitudes handed down to you from the bland, limp phrasebook of socially acceptable conformity.

This encounter with the happening magnificence of your being has not any words to enscribe, describe or circumscribe it.

This close encounter with the heart of your shining soul is yours. It is yours before question or answer.

You have already entered many times into a wordless wonder of living. You know what it is, of course. It is something that sometimes happens in your body or mind. Or you have felt it “outside” of you.

You are far nearer than you can begin to imagine to the shimmering entrance portal into the place where the wonder of living is too intense for words. And the space, the extremely real place, perhaps the only space which is real, and which lies ever glowing at a constant brightness (the ‘bright’ of peace and love), is the directly lived experience, the Now.

Now is not a mere moment. Now is every moment, suffused to saturation point with beginninglessness and endlessness – EveryNow.

EveryNow exists complete, without reference to a frame of words. 

EveryNow exists in completeness, independent of whether it is thought of, or sought after.

EveryNow exists completely and it is unaffected by being ignored, or overlooked, either by negligence or on purpose.

Blink, and you can find yourself in it… it in you.

All you need is to be ready and prepared. Be ready for the invitation. If you give any of what I describe a modicum of credence, then your best tribute to it and to your innate beauty, and to your instincts of self-preservation, and even to your secret inner conviction that you truly think of what I am talking about as a schmaltzy, rose-scented, kitsch pink cloud, is to be ready.

The way to get close enough to the magic of EveryNow, so that it can guzzle you all up into its roseate field, is to be prepared and ready to accept its invitation card: Infinity.

Sleep is as precious as wakefulness. Sleep is close to infinity. Sleep is a hallowed gift. Wrap it with respect, give all of yourself into it. Sleep well

~ Love’s presence EveryNow

Peas in a pod

Peas in a pod

We are all as alike as peas in a pod. Grass and flowers die. Houses and mountains crumble.

We have in common – every one of us – our innate sense of self-preservation, our basic humanity, our need in common for love, air, food, drink, warmth, security, safety.

I recoil from trying to assimilate enough knowledge of politics or religion to become capable of qualifying my modes of thought or action according to their principles or precepts.

All my observations of the continuum in which I exist point to one thing – transience. The further back in my time I retreat, I still see the same quality of impermanence.

This predictable unpredictability, which in isolation would resemble a pit of empty despair, always presents laced with scents, colours and shapes of love.

EveryNow is my shorthand for the unending orgasm of loving to live, EveryNow is my X and Y and Z axes of celebration of the joyful flow of existence. 

My reference of my sentient consciousness to that flow of change, to that intimate turbulence in my microcosm, is mirrored in the  indiscernible motion of the violent unfurling of energetic matter in the Universal macrocosm.

All these things are fractals of flux. 

I say, let them take high precedence among the attributes worth taking the trouble and time identifying with, regardless of our physical shape, financial stability, health, grounding or lack of grounding, 

Dive in! Submerge, let the savage unknowability of fractal flux close over my head while it is under this influence. Be attached to it, take inspiration for decisions to action, give official recognition to it as the truth and validity suffused through and through the heart of the being of the next bystander in the bus queue. Or in me!

The fact of suffering is much less useful to understand.

Time spent on focus on pain is time not spent in the pursuit and sharing of the celebration of bliss in all its forms and infinite fluctuations.

Think about it… We come complete with pain at birth, and viewed from within, pain advances our understanding almost not at all of the peace and love that animates us, from which we all arise and back to which we are all dancing each other home

~ Love is present EveryNow 

We are children

The elixir

My inner child, playmate, best friend

May I remember all of my growth. Growth physical and growth in heart’s love.

I want to remain alive to my heart’s ability to grow in heart love.

May I find the courage to draw on the power with which loving with loving kindness regenerates my heart’s expansion into love’s swaying flower fields and forests of kindness.

Every day let my fearful forward-fixed gaze give me a rest, so I pause and take stock.

Every day I will remember when I open my eyes awake, to let my heart take me by the hand, its own little child, wide-eyed in wonder, and lead me to learn new expanding abilities of loving to live.

At night, let me review this amazing journey of breath and blood, tears and sweat, so I remember why my heart is so rightly full of gratitude.

My heart and I have accepted challenges, made discoveries, assimilated life lessons, received and been blessed by growth.

The ebb and flow of heart’s luminosity assists and stands guard over growth and healing in my body.

In this inevitable plurality of beings, my heart drives me to connect. 

My own growth towards recognition, understanding and peaceful acceptance of who I am comes from unconditional, non-judgemental relationships.

Deep maternal love, which is one form of non-attached friendship, released my tiny child into the grassy flower-meadows of my very first summers.

Later on, my heart, strengthened and emboldened by the unmistakable benevolence of the Big Green, began to receive and to give non-judgemental friendship.

Stagnation dissolves and energetic growth returns when my inner child makes itself known to me again. It may be from hints, signs, clues to my senses, to my awareness, that my inner child’s presence peers past the curtains of my darkness, always dancing, always smiling, always beckoning me out to play and to laugh!

It may be my indirect sensation of its presence through my perception of its absence and the terrible pain of that lonely emptiness.
Mercifully, this pain is pure illusion.

My inner child wants to be found, it never hides! And so, with a little concentration, I can come to my inner child, playmate, best friend.

Then my inner child holds my hand once more, I am filled up, my heart is filled and my being is refreshed with the giggles of childhood.

My original child’s state of grace, let me remember it!

Let me know it again.
You and I are still filled up to the tip-top with the very same innocence and automatic acceptance of our natural and original condition, which is pure love, seen or not, felt or not, understood or misunderstood.

This acceptance is the elixir!

With this we can live in the perfumed fields of happiness exactly as it was, as it always was and will be, for us and for all sentient life to the end of all things

~ Love is present E v e r yN o w

🧱To my Friend who is in pain and perplexity🏖️

💠 To my Friend who is in pain and perplexity🔹

I truly wish my words may fill up your heart with love, dear Friend.

I remind you, you have set out courageous and have begun to confront dark barriers which old traumas and sorrows have solidified into blocks on your path.

Some of these horrid monoliths you have grown accustomed to carrying about with you wherever you go, wherever you are.

This is hard work, exhausting and lonely. There is no relief. The sad thing is, in the end, your beautiful lovable self can curl up and shrink out of sight.

And now I remind you that I still believe in Epiphany.

Being drenched by a spontaneous experience of this magnitude can take a person into a state of raised consciousness, regardless of unresolved internal obstacles.

Here is a place, a state of vibrant new awareness, where there is a continuous, powerful, conscious intuitive connection between oneself and the origin of all life.

This is a sudden inrush into the heart of life force – peace and love – from which all life springs and to which all life returns.

The heart floods with love. 
Very quickly the lovelight shows up the years, months and days lived in the shade.

Here is the source of a waterfall of Healing.

I liken this potential to enter into transformative awakening, this state of grace by an epiphany, to an arrival at a Portal, as depicted so graphically in ‘Stargate’, the sci-fi series.

However, there is a price to pay. No one steps through such a Portal casually. It takes courage and determination, sometimes born out of desperation and repeated suffering, to embark on such a rite of passage.

A person who has acknowledged and begun a journey of self-discovery, this person is unavoidably on course to rediscover the lovable, as well as the loving self.

The loving self I say, because you know you love and you have loved, and you can love. Giving such as this comes rather naturally.

Can you be loved so willingly in these familiar ways by your own self? In a nutshell, can you love yourself? 

Can you “be love” ?

Some call the opening of a significant life journey a falling in love again with the self.

“Again” because the original self “is” love. The early human baby, to whom the future has no meaning, is all about present immediacy.
This new being inhabits the space, the playground of love.

Here in this primal arena is also hunger, thirst, desire for security, in whatever order.

The reason (if such an abstraction has any meaning in the context of a newborn) why such primal needs excite us so much is simply that they sustain life.

This is life lived at no remove at all from the life instinct – the will to live, the will to continue to survive. This condition of mind is primitive, urgent, exciting.

And I say it is very beautiful. Indeed it is one of the openings into beauty.

Every sentient being on Earth – in the sea, on land, in the air – lives at this intense level.

Some time later, at the stage of independence, once the need is implanted as a result of whatever life circumstances, banal or dramatic, to discover some answers to Who, What, even Why I “am”, the path at your feet may become luminous and fertile with a rather mysterious sense of promise.

This feeling of being onto something exciting is present for the straightforward reason that there is a strong intuition that some kind of fulfilment is just round the corner.

The possibility of resolution becomes attainable, because you visualised it, called out to it, cried out for it.

All life is interconnected. All interconnections stem from one source. The source is terrific, powerful and overwhelmingly beautiful, and we hear this spoken by many from various directions from time imemorial. 

In unity, Humanity has raised its face to this millennial truth. This is how it is.

Little wonder that having stepped out on the pilgrimage to self realisation, the ground begins to tremble, and the urge to continue is irresistible. 

The stage is reached where only a hair trigger stimulus will be enough to slam the seeker into a brilliant way of seeing.

Or not! 

Epiphany experiences are in rather short supply!

It may happen little by little.
A person grows quietly into a new place of understanding and acceptance, with, “So that’s it.” With a few aha’s. 

It may happen quickly, like a dam burst. There is no avoiding, no postponing, no ignoring the approach of light, the flowering of the vision of life in grand abundance, and, with this release, laughter and the deep sense of joy-in-residence.

I so truly wish these blessings on you with all my soul’s strength, my dear Friend.

Love is present E v e r yN o w

At dawn I saw with speechless horror night had turned its back on me

At the lighting of dawn’s light I saw with speechless horror that night had turned its back on me and would not shield me from view.

And so I understood my time had arrived.

I completely gave up the impossible battle with myself.

The pain stopped. It stopped like a drawn out shriek run out of breath.

Courage took hold and I dared to start over with no assumptions, no power of control.

The words and deeds I had been in such desperate need of found expression in my throat.

I found I could act on the deeds I had thought were utterly beyond my capacity.

I walked forward. It was a never before. It was an ever-after. It was unimportant if it was day or if it was night. I stepped into my power. A fish that moves by barely moving, and then is not seen!

Words don’t fail me now.

Words return from their pilgrimage beyond the distant horizon where I know my soul extends, and they break in salty surf on the beach – faithful, compliant, rhythmic.

ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL MANNER OF THING SHALL BE WELL [Julian of Norwich]

I never look back since that long fruitless night of prayer.

I do nothing to light the way.

The way is lit.

The way is inexpressibly beautiful always.

I choose thoughts, because I can.

I choose long and hard, enough that I dwell on thoughts of love.

I choose to look out for the vocabulary of love.

I choose the means to make the mouth of the mind clear for loving.

I give no home in my mouth to words of fear or hate.

So choose!

Be bold enough to speak out loud about love, always and everywhere.

One fine day, you will pause, and you will see a beautiful person steps to meet you.

A beautiful figure treads a path that lights up all by itself with neither conscious nor unconscious volition.

This person is you

~ Love is present EveryNow

🔥 The way is lit ⚡

⛲ The way is lit 🌄

More than many years ago, I was on the very precipice of total loss of everything I cherished and of all I had strived for and had created throughout my entire life.
In utter desperation, breathlessly through my pain, I prayed one whole night long to find some way to save everything from collapse and from reversion to living like a shadow among the shadows at the bottom of the mountain.
I prayed and prayed, and at the lighting of dawn’s light I saw with silent horror that night had turned its back on me and would not shield me from view.
And so I understood my time had arrived.
I completely gave up the impossible battle with myself.
The pain stopped. It stopped like a drawn out shriek run out of breath.
Courage took hold and I dared to start over with no assumptions, no power of control.
The words and deeds I had been in such desperate need of found expression in my throat.
I found I could act on the deeds I had thought were utterly beyond my capacity.
Words don’t fail me now.
Words return from their long journey beyond the distant horizon where I know my soul extends, and they break in salty surf on the beach – faithful, compliant, rhythmic.
ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL SHALL BE WELL; AND ALL MANNER OF THING SHALL BE WELL [Julian of Norwich]
I never look back since then.
I do nothing to light the way.
The way is lit.
The way is inexpressibly beautiful always.
I choose thoughts, because I can.
I choose long and hard, enough that I dwell on thoughts of love.
I choose to look out for the vocabulary of love.
I choose the means to make the mouth of the mind clear for loving.
I give no home in my mouth to words of fear or hate.
So choose!
Be bold enough to speak out loud about love, always and everywhere.
One fine day, you will pause, and you will see a beautiful person steps to meet you.
A beautiful figure treads a path that lights up all by itself with neither conscious nor unconscious volition.
This person is you
~ Love is present EveryNow ~

*The Quality of the Present*

*The Quality of the Present*

Deep awareness of the present moment feels both strange and free.

In me there is a kind of inner lake. The lake now contains waves and now has turbulence subsided. I am at once the lake and a person gazing on the lake. My identity is both, and both are essential to me.
There is calmness, but with no particular colour. The quality of the present is like this, I feel. It takes on the colour of the moment. It is like water which is not held in any container. It is like the next breath of air which is inhaled. There is no existence to the air as a “before inhalation”. The inhalation, as far as it can be framed as such, is its own life-giving self.
The present does not stain, nor will it be tainted, because the present continually returns to silence.
The present returns to its own nature, with the dignity and simplicity of a deer who, satisfied there is nothing untoward external to itself, gently lowers its head to graze again.
The present holds no sense of itself. It is in a curious way truly Entity Without Identity.
For me nowadays, there is no emotional attachment or colour to my experience of “now”. But oh, there used to be! Sometimes the chaos of competitors for attention had the garishness of a haunted house fairground ride.
I’m talking about jaw-clenched lurches towards shapeshifting colours of eagerly or anxiously anticipated futures, and the imagined burns and shivers from hot and cold cauldrons of endless swirling pasts.
All of that was attachment. It was attention misdirected or distracted away from the Moment. In a word, all that was “pain”. Pain, unnecessary, useless, worthless, senseless. And in the final reckoning, most remarkably, avoidable pain.

~ Love is present EveryNow