Respect, King Canute! Reflecting on time and tide

We all suffer from a nagging sense of fear, or anxiety, or dissatisfaction, or loneliness, at some point. To recognise that this is in some sense an illusion brought about by the patterns that contain and occupy us like fractals which then bloom into other possibilities related to the last is not to relegate everything to the realm of myth. If I’m real, so is my experience, and so is yours, so are the fires and floods, pandemics and plastic pollution, corruption and courage that occupy the airwaves and our conversations when we are not thinking about sex, or food, or how to win an argument.

We are certainly the creators of our experience in the sense that we experience what we pay attention to, and that’s a creative act. But of course there is an ‘out there’ to contend with too. To pretend otherwise is to risk the kind of arrogance that drowned King Canute. There must be something that links these two, a line between what is happening, and how we bring it into awareness. It is this ‘how’ that matters.

With just enough effort, and just enough surrender, we can align with the liminal edge that is awareness of existence as it is happening, a respect which is reflective watching, but which is also an opening, like a portal, to love. This kind of awareness can become as habitual as the worries and nagging fears, as the addictions and desires, that have previously consumed me. I can  see just what is here, and see too how such disparate events as previous experiences and the weather have brought it all to this, and thus both compassionately but also dispassionately disengage until there is no more accumulation of previous experiences and activities based on reacting with rage, jealousy, resentment and greed, but only the kindness of respect, watching. I cannot do much about the rain, or sun, but I can engage in the ecological emergency as an emergence, an opening into the possibility of altering direction, of mitigating suffering. Almost all that happens to us does so as a matter of contextual idiosyncrasy. Reflecting on that I can see I, too, emerge in context. Awareness takes me to the edge of this, where there’s a shift, the universe aware of itself here, now, through me. what else can I allow to come through this being me if I respect what is happening now?