Let's take a moment

(about stillness)

photo by Gabe Korinek

I'd like to take a moment to write about moments and why it is hard to catch and keep them.

I'm remembering the time when my exchange student daughter and I visited her high school for the last time before she flew back home. "Wait," she said as she ran around the school taking pictures of her old classrooms, the hallways, her old locker. She took as many pictures as her camera would hold.

Like my son, who told me to wait as we drove off to the airport to see him off for Germany. And so I slowed down and made stops along the way as he took in a long look at our house, the well traveled roads that he walked, ran and biked, the cinema, the restaurant where he worked, as he wouldn't be seeing these again for a whole year.

I can relate. Tons of times I have wanted to capture a moment that I could take out and swim in again and again. But life is rich. It is full of moments and they just keep coming.

So what is in a moment and what makes it memorable? More than a place or a thing – a memorable moment tells us all of what is spiritually rich about our lives.

One of my favorite poets is Godfrey John who has this spiritual take on ‘moments’ in his poem:

This Moment of Your Living

You’re alive – not merely existing. You are: you’re not trying to be. Discover the life of the moment- this moment of your living.

NOT YOU
Not you – as an amalgam of happenings, you-as-you-were a decade, a moment, ago: to ask What was I? is to be blind to the fact of presence. Man is not a chronology. Not you as a mosaic of hopes and fears: to ask What will I be? Is to stop discovering. Not you content with a status quo: a cup of years spilling satisfaction over the hour. Not even you-as-you-becoming --

BUT YOU BEING
You spiritually. You in the action of being you where being is the emanation of I AM. “I AM hath sent me unto you”: Being, God, impels man, breathes through him Love’s incentives. Soul’s expression now, you go as His fragrance in every place.
This is your felt unity with Him. Moment by moment.
Soul plants pure desires along your days. The innocence of what you are flares through the guilt of what you are not. Like cyclamen in the winter sun: not withholding, not seeking to hold- but giving out help simply by being what it is- moment by moment.

YOU TIMELESSLY
Not you in the moment. But this moment of you-- brilliantly, immaculately. Knowing is being. Infinitely. Mind’s allness, Mind’s oneness never stops being known. As man-idea, woman-idea--one idea-- in God’s thought, you are instantly
understood, always being known; you have Soul’s mobility within this hourless
knowing: the dance fulfilling the dancer without end, as in beauty in the unspoken, as rhythm in what is till.

DISCOVERING
To ask Who am I? is to be irrelevant. To ask What am I? is to be blind to substance, to the isness of Spirit where you are.
Ask, How am I being?
Man is what he’s being-- Love’s pure idea-- birthlessly real.
Love’s meaning is your meaning at each moment of new awakening- at the precision –timing of Principle. Here you are learning to be what you are.
Beautifully. Brilliantly. Preciously. Agelessly. Mightily. Deathlessly. Yes, as a psalm spills over you. Yes, in this fond discovering of you. You are what you are because I AM that I AM. NOW.
Moment by moment by moment by moment

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