Saturday, April 17, 2021

The Presentation of Your Mind

 

Java Sparrows or "Birds?", Kailua, HI, January 2019, Nikon D600, FX 28-300mm
 VR lens, 300mm,1/60 sec @ f5.6, ISO 400, -1.67 EV, no flash © Steven Crisp


The Presentation of Your Mind


Your mind is a tricky thing

Making you believe things to be true

Even when they make no sense at all

Perhaps you’ve realized that by now


Like that mysterious work presentation

You are due to give later this week

Yet you haven’t even studied the topic

While you reassure your boss you’re ready


But there are glimpses of the awakening truth

You even say to yourself, “It’s not really due”

And so you relax, smile, and return to your slumber

Only to find an audience waiting in your dreamworld


Ha-ha, as if dreams were your only trickster

Truth be told, your waking world is too clever by half

For when we glance at that yellow oleander in the garden

Shimmering in the setting sun after a light rainfall


All that our mind tells us we see is a “tree”

But it is most certainly not that; if anything,

It’s a dance of light, a mesmerizing joy,

A singing bowl of birds, and aptly named “Be-Still”


We’re fortunate though, since we stand on shoulders that tell us

About left and right cerebral hemispheres, and the corpus callosum,

Connecting nerve fibers, that permit and inhibit transmissions

It is evolution that has brought about this draw-bridge in our mind


To keep us alive, at least long enough to continue our

Ancestral lineage, indeed, because we are so quick to judge

But if we are really lucky, we feel some strange pull ... an intuition

To look deeper, beyond features and categories and groups


We recognize the tug to understand something more

Beyond the reductionist, so-called, material world

We can catch glimpses of aliveness itself, that effervescence

Always bubbling up, in, through, and all around


Things are not the labels we ascribe to them, nor are people

Indeed nothing exists that can be studied in isolation

Everything is truly interdependent and arising …

Fresh and new, in this very moment, if we will only truly see


How can it be we see the multiplicity and yet

Somehow we can also glimpse the wholeness of life?

See the totality unfolding in this precious moment

As morning dawns and its singing bowl reverberates


What a gift to see each moment with fresh eyes

With that child-like wonder and utter astonishment

Every sense can come alive in this very moment

An open heart, welcoming Life, that’s living you

 

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