the simple feeling of being
“we are not only living at arm’s length from each other, we are living at arm’s length from ourselves”
-Christina Crook The Joy of Missing Out
It’s Sunday morning. I’m sitting with a book in my lap looking out at the garden. It’s raining; it’s the first of December 2018 and it’s been raining now for nearly two weeks solid. Rain is natures’ white noise, here and now and yet Jurassic in feeling. Actually, looking out at the rain it’s…percussive, soft and soothing, the lawn is wet right through; russet coloured autumn leaves are turned and gathered, clustered around the trees at the far edge of the garden. Everything seems more, well, intense and statured with colour and though it’s a dismal day the textures and colours seem to radiate with life, even though at this time of year life is tending to slow down.
Perhaps that’s it; everything slows down at this time of year (except us!)
The spiritual teacher Aydashanti in his book Emptiness Dancing invites us, at this time of year, to explore “what you are without your leaves,” for we have the habit to pick up our past, our anxieties about the future and our often-errant stories about ourselves as if they were fallen leaves that we refuse to let go of and hurriedly try to stick back onto our lives.
What if we just let things fall away? What would we find? What can we do without?
Aydashanti suggests that we might find ourselves “naturally cracked open… [into] the compassionate heart”.
For me, a lot of this is about time. I’m very timebound and usually see this a good thing-probably because my days as a therapist are carved up into 50-minute hours, the 10-minute spaces in between are then toilet break-check email-phone-make new appointments so my days are structed and regimented.
But this Sunday the time is different. It’s akin to my experience of spending time (whoa! When did time turn to currency?) at Samye Ling. Kagyu Samye Ling is a Tibetan Buddhist Centre in Eskdalemuir in Scotland[1]. You drive past Langholm and into the rolling hills, and there it is, a huge white stupa and a red and gold temple. For me this is a mark of difference, a demarcation that signals I’m stepping onto another domain, it’s as much about the inside as the outside; I’m now turning inwards, moving into the right hemisphere of my brain, out of the data driven left.
Time is different at Samye Ling, slower, paced, it’s breathable and open, time is heartfelt at Samye Ling, and you miss out on everything, and nothing at all.
I’m watching a robin on the lawn, picking and pecking, undisturbed by the sprinkling rainfall.
There’s really nothing else here at this time and there’s no need to be.
In her book The Joy of Missing Out Christina Crook reverses the insatiable need that FOMO (the fear of missing out) produces in us with its hyper anxious drive for the next this-and-that and suggests we put down our phones and devices, disconnect from all that and connect with us instead. Albert Borgmann writes “technology is a systemic effort to get everything under control” [2] but often we are better suited to letting go of control, and practice falling back into our root nature than swinging like a distracted monkey (ala monkey mind[3]) from one stimulated event to another.
I hear a sound; looking out the French doors, high in the sky, cutting through the murmuration of rainfall like a hundred grey darts, wild geese in formation are flying southward. It’s beautiful.
It’s time like this, here, now when it feels that whereas somebody or something in the hurly burly digital world tinkered with my brain, in moments like this I reset; immersed and embodied in a sense of natural awareness.
This winter could be a chance, an experiment, to stop and experience what it’s like to stay with what is, to simply be in our wintertime without leaves, alive in our own radiant core and open.
[2] In Christina Crook The Joy of Missing Out also see https://monkeytraps.wordpress.com/page/8/?pages-list
[3] https://www.pocketmindfulness.com/understanding-monkey-mind-live-harmony-mental-companion/
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