Challenges

The Hope Wall, Concord, California
10:30am, January 6, 2007

I had many challenges today. Challenges to serenity, challenges to understanding, challenges to compassion. Challenges to patience. I am resisting my tendency to judge the actions I took and consequent outcomes. At one point today, I glimpsed my recollections of the day with pride and shame removed, and the continuum seemed a kind of oscillating wave of up and down energy, alternately pulling and pushing Gs on the various objects strung through like lights for a Christmas tree. That was a very different, electric view to my day.

In the midst of an intense, face-to-face shouting match with a good (perhaps ex-) acquaintance today, there was a hummingbird flying between us and hovering at the feeder just above us. I saw the bird and the acquaintance, I heard the voice and wings.

New reading, "Researching Your Own Practice: The Discipline of Noticing" by John Mason. A past student of J.G. Bennett, and a mathematics teacher at the Open University in Britain.

From the preface: "To develop your professional practice means to increase the range and to decrease the grain size of the relevant things you notice, all in order to make informed choices as to how to act in the moment, how to respond to situations as they emerge.... The Discipline of Noticing provides a way of working against the tendency to forget, to not notice, to be so caught up in your own world that you fail to be sufficiently sensitive to possibilities."

It is always exciting when the post brings your book order. Kind of an arrow you shoot into the future and then, when the future comes, you find it landing at your feet -- thhhhup!

There are tremendous forces in nature that we wittingly and unwittingly submit to. Ultimately everything will pass away. When we can only find despair in the present, we desparately invest hope in the future. But the past and the future exist in now. We touch the past and the future in the present moment.