Today, I was about to give a brief talk on awareness to a local group. As this stuff is hard to talk about simply and clearly, I prepared my talk in advance. I chose each word carefully and organized the ideas.
As I sat waiting to talk, the leader on a last minute impulse picked one of my favorite poems to read: Wild Geese by Mary Oliver. It was read responsively, that is the leader read a line and the group responded with the next line. It’s a simple moving poem and sums up in a few words a great kernel of truth that my talk was laboring to describe. (more about this in the next post)
As I stood to speak, I put down my prepared talk and simply repeated the key lines of the poem. I could see heads nodding in acknowledgment. I repeated them again and added a few thoughts that linked
the words of the poem to the practice of awareness. I repeated the lines a half dozen time or so before I sat down. I never used my prepared remarks. Everyone smiled.
I am grateful that despite my anxiety about how the talk would go (the future),
I could be fully present to Mary Oliver’s words as they were read,
letting them to fully penetrate my awareness,
so that I could respond with my heart and my own words.
I think the authenticity of my response, not the felicity of my expression, led to the smiles.
Our worries about the past or the future can rob us of the present.
In practicing awareness, we practice returning to the present moment, the here and now, from wherever our overactive mind has taken us. Gradually, in everyday life, we notice more and more about what is actually happening to us as it happens.