The Paler Leaves of This Moment
Sometimes, at this time of year in Maine, warm spring breezes lift the pale green underside of the leaves to the sky. Maple, poplar and birch branches sway to and fro, all as one, decoding the silent wind into that perceptible sound of briskly moving leaves. Witnessing this from my sunny garden perch I slip into a trance of now.
This moment is for me, one of life’s most precious gifts. Perhaps you agree? Or maybe this concept sounds completely whack-a-doo to you. Either way, you should consider living in the moment for as long as you can. In its most profound and simple form, that moment can be transcendent yet rooted in your place on Earth at that point in time. And that moment is now, at least for a while.
Just allowing those simple quiet moments to occur is a big challenge for me. Quieting the mind of a fifty-seven year-old is harder than calming my twenty-something mind of thirty-five years ago. I remember distinctly a moment in my early twenties, swimming at a rock quarry in early summer. The wind pushing up that pale green leafy underside, as the trees swayed just before a thunder storm; the hot sun on my wet shoulders; that moment, hanging in the balance. The question struck me then, and it strikes me now — what does one do with that moment?
How does one simply exist in the moment?
I sometimes want to lie down in our sunny garden’s straw pathway, offering myself as compost for the garden bed. To spend a full day lying there, hidden from human eyes, insulated from the world’s constant troubles, un-socialized and disconnected; just being in the garden like lettuce or basil. But then a thought redirects me to some recent and personal disaster; a business item, a money issue, a tremor from my hiatal hernia, a careless comment on Facebook. Redirected by habitual minutia that conceals the now and demands some sort of action on my part.
“Happiness, not in another place but this place…not for another hour, but this hour.” — Walt Whitman
For many, happiness is contentment, perhaps satisfaction with achieving a goal or milestone. I understand that feeling, but that’s not the happiness I’m experiencing when the leaves upturn. Perhaps true happiness is the absence of desire, urges, and seeking. Ironically, when considering our heritage, happiness may simply be freedom from what we Americans traditionally think of as the pursuit of happiness.
“The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
I don’t know. I enjoy politics, business, friendship, music and the learning of things human. According to science, man has been around for two to three million years, Earth’s been spinning for 4.5 billion years, the universe for perhaps 14 billion years.
That’s a lot of moments.
In fact, the enormous span of universal age, as we know it, makes time itself meaningless to our feeble minds. As we stand on the edge of the expanding balloon of our universal extent and peer into space, we see light from millions and billions of years ago in every direction. No matter where we look, we’re looking back in time as the universe expands at an ever accelerating rate.
No doubt, at some point in the last two million years some humans observed their night sky, marveling at its majesty, some accepting the mystery and beauty of those strange points of light, others trying to understand their movement and meaning.
As the winds settle and the tree branches return to their position, the garden becomes peaceful once again, the air fills with bird song. I sit and watch and wait for a moment to present itself. Perhaps this time I’ll be ready.
