It takes time to 'tolerate' the present

I have had such a lovely day today!  Awoke to sunshine here in Seattle where the days have been gray and cold.  Meditated and did some morning movement practices. Although it was Father's Day, my husband was out of town and my daughter and I went out for a delicious brunch and friendly conversation.  Then I came home and spent the afternoon working in the garden.  I have felt relaxed and present and at ease all day. 

Working in the garden was filled with sensual delights - the smell of the soil, the birdsong around me, the breeze on my face, a kind of conscious connection to both the overgrown plants I removed and the impatiens, hosta and helleborus I was planting.  What was most significant was that I allowed myself this day.  I allowed myself to be fully present through each segment of the day, to take it in, to let it have all the time it needed - our lunch, the planting, taking time for a drink of water, cleaning up.  

Seven years ago last month, I left my internal medicine practice of 20 years.  I left because I was committed to creating a venue to teach people about conscious embodiment as a path to wholeness.  I was also committed to having my work be something that emerged from my life as whole cloth - not something that dominated my life so much that there was no time for anything else.  This was my intention at the time.  But what I didn't realize was how long it would take to really manifest my first intention and fully embody the second.  (In fact, the latter has had to come before the former!)

I gave myself that first summer - 2001 - to decompress from many years of training and the long hours of practice.  And yet, I didn't have a clue about how to be 'off duty'!  Mary Oliver's poem  The Summer Day was my guide post - I wanted to be 'idle and blessed' as she writes about in the poem.  And yet, for all of my life - nearly 50 years - 'idle' meant 'unproductive', 'indulgent', 'lazy', 'adrift'.  My mind went to guilt and doubt, comparison and judgement when I was idle. My body could not fully settle into 'being' after years of perpetual 'doing'.  My muscles were taut, coupled to purpose, poised for action and not just any action; but action that would be outwardly measured as valid.  Playful, carefree, joyful or spontaneous were not adjectives that could apply to me at that time! 

'Recovering Catholic', 'recovering physician' - however you look at it, I had been conditioned by years, decades of reinforcement that busy-ness, productivity was the only worthy pass time, the 'measure of my days'. The present - whatever it held - was not enough.  I - unless busy with some redemptive activity - was not enough.  

It has taken 7 full years for a transformation to happen within me.  Literally a trans-formation - a change in form or structure.  I had to shed layer after layer of requirement in the form of expectations, beliefs and what I call the 'have to' body (a bodily predisposition to acting 'as if' I must comply with something expected).  I endured months of depression on and off over these years as I left behind the former measures of my worth, my identity, my need to know.  My personal practices of meditation, somatic centering, aikido and then yoga have been critical, providing me with a new reference point for my experience of aliveness, of what it is to be alive and to be me.  The reference point now is first in the body, my connection to the ground under my feet, my breath in the center of my body, the verticality I experience as I lengthen my spine, a sense of my own 'weight and density'  as May Sarton refers to it in her poem 'Now I Become Myself'.    

Now, this weekend, today, I see how far I've come.  Now I can experience the present in its fullness, as a rich encounter, a savory delight.  Like there is nothing more.  I can be idle or active and blessed equally either way. I have grown capacity to experience the embodied present.  And it is all a gift, everything is a gift.... 

Well now, it's only appropriate to end this post with Mary Oliver's poem - The Summer Day. Let this be an invitation to you, dear reader - to take your time to learn to 'tolerate' the present:

The Summer Day

Who made the world?  

Who made the swan, and the black bear? 

Who made the grasshopper? 

This grasshopper I mean - 

the one who has flung herself out of the grass, 

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, 

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down - 

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. 

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. 

I don't know exactly what a prayer is. 

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass, 

How to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields, 

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't every thing die at last and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do 

with your one wild and precious life?

Mary Oliver

from New and Selected Poems, 1992