My daily practice is very simple. I do what needs to be done.
I do some meditation as dawn breaks (no sweat, I’m an early morning person), I ground as I sit on a big blue cushion. I pay attention to the bare touch and slight movement of breath leaving my nostrils. As I sit, sending down roots and earthing into my own life, I pay attention to the ache in my lower back, the knot in my shoulder muscles, the fog in my just-awake mind. I listen to birds and bring attention back to that quiver of breath. I notice the rush of distractions: emails composing themselves, my mind puzzling over bills, dogs barking in the garden. But I stay seated. Staying grounded in one place is what needs to happen right there and then. Sometimes my energy is a fuzzy golden ball that glows and brightens as I sit. Sometimes there are images, insights, fragments and shards of the numinous. Sometimes it is all prayer and adoration and the bowl brimming over with life, the waves crashing onto sand, the wind in trees, the silence at the core of mystery. Sometime it is just me yawning and getting pins and needles in my left foot. Sometimes I am interceding for a friend sweating and vomiting in the grip of alcoholism, or a friend in her late 30s about to give birth, a sister far away in the Antipodes and homesick for Africa. But there I sit, whatever comes and goes. Where you are, there you find yourself.
I am grateful in this life as I age into croneliness. I have promises to keep. After a bath and cup of coffee or green tea, I make phone calls, answer the phone. I go out into the garden before the sun is too high and water herbs, pick flowers for the house, admire birds and tree frogs and geckos. A short interval of t’ai chi, sometimes followed by a brisk mountain walk. What matters is to connect, my bare feet on wet grass or sand or gravel, my point of balance low, my centre of gravity steady . I talk with my housemate, we eat blueberries and yoghurt for breakfast. I laugh and play with my small dogs. I get down to work.
The mundane is sacred, the secular is sacred. Embodiment, focus, attention, the heart overflowing. What nurtures intuition? I protest against human rights abuses and write to organizations, I lobby, I plot. I dream dreams. There are new books to revel in before I have to review them. Images from artists showing work in progress. Community involvement. Lunches with friends. Workshops. Writing alone in my study with house martins squabbling in the eaves, the shadowy green of trees falling across the windows.
Enchantment tiptoes into the midst of my very ordinary life.
Cooking for friends or a sick neighbour. Harvesting herbs. Doing small rituals that stir the blood and the imagination. Lovemaking. Facing conflict and letting go of resentments. Breathing deeply and enduring the pain. Trying to identify that blue and white butterfly hovering above a flowering cistus bush. It all matters, it is all equally worthy of attention. What happens on the periphery is often the most crucial.
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