Each age has its own task...Our hermitage is the act of living with attention in the
midst of things: amid the rhythms of work, and love, the bath with the child, the
endlessly growing paperwork, the ever-present likelihood of war, the necessity for
taking action to help the world. For us, a good spiritual life is permeable and robust. It
faces things squarely, knowing the smallest moments are all we have, and that even the
smallest moment is full of happiness.
I stood there dumbfounded by the vast silence. . . And, for one of the many times in my life, thinking, "Robert, what in the name of heaven have you gotten yourself into?" For the first few days, time weighed very heavy on my hands. I found myself constantly looking at my watch. I was suppose to look for fires fifteen minutes out of every hour and phone in a weather report each day at noon, but otherwise I could do as I wished. By the third day, however, something changed. Time was no longer an entity that pressured me. Time became like the flow of a river, and gradually I came into accord with the rest of nature. I was never again bored or lonely that summer. . . Living in the wilderness frees us from the tyranny of time and reveals how different existence was for our ancestors.
~ from BALANCING HEAVEN AND EARTH by Robert A. Johnson
I am done with great things And big things, great institutions And big success, and I am for those Tiny invisible molecular moral Forces that work from individual To individual, creeping through The crannies of the world like So many rootlets, or like the Capillary oozing of water, Yet which, if you give them Time Will rend the hardest monuments Of our pride.
~ from THE LETTERS OF WILLIAM JAMES by William James
Sitting here talking — that's happening NOW, so I'm totally absorbed in it. Right here, this is the most important conversation in the world because it's happening HERE and NOW! Was I getting a glimpse of an accessible philosophy here? Something I could actually use to hone the dulled edges of my own soul? To learn to celebrate the present moment, the NOWNESS and HERENESS of life? NOW, the most sacred, the most precious moment of all.
The field of space and time is invisible, but in that space and time is the conscious awareness of the mind of the universe. Within it are mystical experience an high loving. The cosmos is being created in its entirety every eco-second. We are working with God in a process of coevolution.
The spiritual life can only be lived in the present moment, in the now. All the great religious traditions insist upon this simple but difficult truth. When we go rushing ahead into the future or shrinking back into the past, we miss the hand of God, which can only touch us in the now.
To open to the sense, to become really conscious, you have to drop out of the future and the past and remain for a time in what T. S. Eliot called "the still point of the turning world" — the present. The only true reality is the present.
