Lately, my brain has been getting super-excited by simply watching the wave reflections on the wall, right above the swimming pool, here at the Y. Or else, here it is again, enraptured by the simple fluid movement of shadows playing on pavement, over there beneath the swaying dogwoods. It’s like I’m being thrown back into my childhood, when things didn’t have to signify anything… they didn’t have to teach me something, or take me somewhere. I don’t have to fit them into mental concepts, give them names, or even reasons. I can just enjoy them as a majestic play of patterns… without any meaning whatsoever.
I had forgotten this simple pleasure!
Concurrently, I seem to be listening to improvisational music and enjoying abstract act again, where patterns are allowed to emerge and submerge, willy-nilly, without being locked into any kind of framework. It’s like my mind is retraining itself to allow pure, unfiltered information to come in, data without direction, or premise, or hidden significance. It’s real proto-stuff… a place where feeling the world comes to the fore… while my mind (ahhh) can finally take a back seat.
And this is extremely gratifying, a kind of liberation… Our minds are always trying to figure out what things mean, how they connect, how they fit into some larger context. And in doing so, they are always robbing us of this simple childlike wonder… of patterns just dancing around, going nowhere… fantastically beautiful. Whoa! All the more so for their total lack of needing to mean something. There’s an innocence to them, a real purity. It’s like an invitation: May I have this dance with you?
“Live quietly in the moment and see the beauty of all before you. The future will take care of itself.” –P. Yogananda
So if we want to liberate ourselves from this rational, mundane, and predictable world, let’s allow ourselves be inebriated again… by pure, unadulterated sensation. Let’s enjoy the world dancing right here, in front of us, as the miracle of light, sound and color that it truly is!
Joy Biscuits 