This day, this hour, this moment

Look to this day!
For it is life, the very life of life.
For yesterday is already a dream,
and tomorrow is only a vision;
But today, well-lived,
makes every yesterday a dream of happiness,
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

From The Sanskrit

The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been and other palms are won.

Thanks to the human heart by which we live.

Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears;

To me the meanest flower that blows can giveThoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

William Wordsworth
From Ode: Intimations of Immortality

I love late nights so much, and I mean very late, such as 2- 3 am when I’m always up. Many nights I’m out on the porch in my faithful old rocker, deep-relaxing in peace and solitude during the one time of day when all the awful news, the noise, commotion, and worries disappear for awhile in the hush of night.

Las night was truly special I must say. I have a fan next to the chair and it blew cool night air that felt so good. Just the perfect temperature. Even though summer is approaching, nights are still relatively cool. We’ve had a good bit of rain lately so the frogs were quite audible nearby, rhythmically croaking in unison in that summer night-sound way that’s so pleasant to hear, just as the melodious cricket songs are as summer nights heat up and the humidity becomes heavy and moist, just like it is every summer here.

I am reminded of summer nights 40 years ago when I lived in a very quiet and wooded area at a time when the insect populations hadn’t been decimated. I read recently where we have lost 40 percent of all insect species due to human alteration of the climate.

I can see me now, sitting in my bedroom in a recliner chair by the window, or on the balcony overlooking a stand of hickory trees. I remember so clearly marveling at the sheer variety of sounds, not just from crickets or frogs but other night creature as well. I couldn’t even identify what they were. The cacophony of sounds was a symphony which was performed night after night for my enjoyment. I wasn’t up as late in those days because I had to get up and go to work the next morning. Then as now I was by myself. Me and the night sounds and nothing else. I could have been way out in the middle of the country instead of at the edge of a large city.

So last night was like those memorable summer evenings so long ago. The whir of the fan, the sound of the frogs singing in the otherwise still night. For the brief time I was out on the porch I was so relaxed and so free of unwanted thoughts and worries that I didn’t want to go in. I certainly didn’t want to go to bed. Later, of course, I would go in and pick up my phone and iPad and reconnect with others and the world. But for awhile, a timeless interlude in my busy life revealed to me again that the moment, the present only was what I lived in. Those moments of blissful contentment and solitude were all I needed then. I wasn’t meditating, I wasn’t doing yoga, and I wasn’t trying to be or do anything except let my thoughts roam wherever they wanted and my mind slow down enough to make me realize that the present was all there was and all I needed.

Twenty years ago I wrote this at Open Diary and it shows how the essential me is still the same. The years have added layers and layers of experience, but I’m lying here thinking that all my life I’ve been blessed to know what just “being” is all about. I just expressed it differently before.

I wrote:

… still it seems as if the rude awakenings of life, the haunting sorrows, the failures, and by the same token, the knowledge of love, the joy of springtime remembered, the cloudy, hot, swallow-filled skies at sunset above me on the porch, the restfulness in dreamy abandonment of cares – it seems as if all those memories, good and bad, are what mostly comprise the life of the present, as if the moment itself reveals nothing but those memories streaming by.

But we must be careful about relying upon the past too heavily for enlightenment and truth, the sages tell us. Confronting the exacting and precious moment, the here and now which is trying to reveal life’s subtle essences to me, I have sat here oblivious to the possibility of grasping this knowledge, this great truth that the present moment is all I have, all that the memories come from.

On a quiet and still Sunday morning, I look out my window and see the branches of the oak tree blowing in a gathering wind. This is my happiness. Not the thrill of some ecstatic and passing sensation of the senses or desires, or re-living old memories continuously, but the knowledge of being alive to the possibility of greater love, and beauty and hope, each moment. For it is true that in the present moment are born the seeds of future happiness….