Summer sails by...

And sometimes you just have to enjoy the in between.

Are we ever really “there” in our lives? It is rare and precious indeed when we feel the moment is all there is and all we need. These peak moments are blessings and between them we just have to enjoy the steady stream of life. I've hankered for explosive experiences and am having to accept that sometimes life is just life, it is a coat of many colors and the florescents wouldn't look so bold if there weren't grey days for them to stand out against.

Yesterday I ate lunch with a gentleman visiting from the city. We sat at a wood picnic table shade provided by a mature pine tree. Doesn't this in itself sound like enough? But of course in that moment it seemed very ordinary, very fleeting, just another moment in my long, busy day. He was talking about Walden Pond, which is near the Ashram. The book, he thought, was actually pretty boring. It is essentially Thoreau's journals and they are often mundane and tiresome: lists describing provisions he brought or wildlife he saw that day, and simple descriptions of daily routines. It's no Sex and the City-- but shouldn't that be enough? Chop wood, carry water the Zen saying goes, just 'being here now'.

I heard about the singer Vashti Bunyan in a magazine interview with Devenda Banhart-- she is his favorite singer. It was one of the greatest music tips I ever got, thank you Mr. Banhart. For the next 6 months I listened to “Just Another Diamond Day” every morning when I woke up. It was like a prayer at the beginning of my day, an invocation. It describes the elemental beauty of the cotidian: “Just another Diamond Day, Just a blade of grass. Just another diamond day, and the horses pass”.

“Diamond Day” is suggesting the same way of seeing as Blake's famous line's:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour.

Blake celebrates the human talent to transform the banal into beauty. This is the great action of art-- a transfiguration by the fire of imagination. Our mind's aren't trained like this, though. It is a potent soul who is able to keep their power to see the beauty of the world in the rush and hub hub of our disposable modern age.

Being in nature reminds us how we are organic, too and we're part of this organism called Earth; we are connected. It's so easy to lose this connection and just vacuum up the grain of sand in the weight of our daily chores. We have to keep remembering and revering the sand, Tipping our hour glasses of conciousness towards eternity.