Walking the labyrinth this afternoon, this was the only rock that was lit by the sun. The rest of the labyrinth was in shadow, but this one stone, just as I walked up to it, was illuminated. By the time I’d walked around this spiral once and was next to this stone again, the light had shifted and was illuminating the duff between the stones.
This, of course, gets me thinking about timing. Timing is an important factor in humor and music and gardening and quilting and cooking and all of the other things I love to do. In fact, I can’t think of a single thing that doesn’t involve timing in some sense. And yet, we invented it. Or rather, we invented a way to delineate it. We denote time in music with time signatures and different values for different notes. We denote time in our lives through clocks and watches and the sun.
Being in the moment. It’s a “thing” now. A thing that we talk about. I feel like I talk about it, or hear about it all the time. Wanting to be “in the moment.” Do I know what that is? When I’m actually “in the moment” I’m not thinking about being in the moment, I just am. In fact, and I’m grinning now as I think about this, if I have a thought about “being in the moment” that actually takes me out of the moment.
It’s a funny thing – consciousness and how we view it.
I was in a moment, just then, writing about consciousness and then I got distracted by the em dash, and how beautiful it is, when the proper dash is used. But was I distracted? Or is that just where my attention went? Focusing my attention feels like it’s much more important to me right now than getting heady about what consciousness means. In fact, lately, trying to figure out what consciousness means feels much more drifty than getting excited about how to create beauty, even if it’s just in the form of an em dash.
Beauty. That reminds me of a moment in the labyrinth today. You all know I’m obsessed with the Pygmy Nuthatches, right? Usually they show up at the end of my walks and I was starting to wonder if that was simply a matter of the “bird plow” that I create when I show up in the labyrinth. (A bird plow, is the shape of sound that gets created when a threat comes into the birds’ world.) Today, as I walk in, I hear them, my little beauties, but they’re on the other side from the property and heading away. So I start to wonder if their proximity to me has more to do with their patterns of movement and less about me, since they don’t seem too bothered by me.
As I walk, I listen to all the different sounds, bird calls, insects buzzing, dog scratching, and I get quiet. As I walk out, I hear my bird friends, I break into a broad grin as I realize that there is one just above my head.
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