Here is where I am

Here is where I am standing right now. Let me describe the scene. the water is slapping against the shore and my new favorite musical artist Fink is on the speaker in the cottage window (ummm his music is fodder for contemplation and meditation). The sun just came out and burned off this fog and the deck in the front is so hot it forced me here by the ocean, the breeze is not quite cool but just enough, just enough. My hair is blowing in the wind. the sweat on my neck is drying and cooling from the earlier yard work. I hear the wind in my ears along with the mourning birds cooing and crying, and diving seagulls are fishing in the ocean near my feet. A loon just skipped by slapping the water; there is a sailboat against the distance shore floating by (swear I am not making this up). I can smell the new mowed lawn blowing on the breeze down to me, rewards reaped from my effort. Pax, my faithful border collie is on the shore with me, he is panting from a day of frisbee and ball catching, he is smiling. There are no demands. No one is here that I have to please, conform to, wait on or consider, no one. My parents are in their cottage 100 feet away minding their own business, my belly is full from a delicious healthy salad made by my mom. The sun is getting ready to set in a hour or two, the clouds mixed with fog are starting to roll in quick. My bike is a few feet away waiting if I want to take a ride, my new camera gear all set up and waiting for me to practice with.  I have choices, I have options, I am blessed.

Just at my feet a few yards away is the place where I and my loved ones let go some of Terry's ashes three and a half years ago. I feel him close, he'd love what I am doing. He knew how to be in the moment here at the cottage and I am in the moment.  Here is where I am. This is not a easy concept for me, rather it is one I aspire to but have a difficult time getting there. Living fully with all of your senses everything right here this second in front of you. This is life as I wish it could always be. How life might have been way back in the day before we had so much to complicate us, before all the technological advances and lost connection with each other and with nature. Before the bats, bees and finches started dying off, and global warming wasn't at the point of no return and before clowns got to be presidents. Where have we come and where are we going to I wonder?

My parents were talking last night to me, reminiscing as elders do, about the time the ammunition depot in Dartmouth on magazine hill exploded in the 1940's. My dad spoke about having a neighbor drive him and all his siblings down to Chezzetcook in the back of a pick up truck and put them up for a night. Would a neighbor do that now? Would it be all for one, would anxiety overtake our common sense or would we gather to help our fellow citizen in a crisis? I hope so, I still have hope for humanity. Can this beautiful earth still invoke feelings of the rightness of humanity in us? For me it can. As I gaze at the ocean or sit in nature I feel closer to the "divine" whatever you perceive that to be, for me it's nature and the beauty in it. I can't be sad or moody or gloomy or mad when I view or sit in nature. I know I am all over the place with this post. But it is connected someway somehow.

Maybe it is in the fact that when I am in the moment (and I hope for you too - whatever being in the moment is for you and however you get there) it would be natural or happen automatically that I'd pick up my neighbors and deliver them to safety, that I understand their pain, commiserate with their plight and their anguish,  hear them and see them for who they are. If I am not distracted with past and future I can notice when someone is in distress, I can reach out - connect. I feel nature precipitates this happening, I feel when I am not caught up with world turmoil- rather being in the moment- it is then I am allowed to taste this blessing. I say "feel" here not "think" because this is a feeling I have when I am where I am. The busyness of life falls away, the work, the bills, the wants, needs, jealousy and desires, the worries, stresses and disappointments are no where to be found. Only the calm ocean, the birds, the seaweed and the sky fill my view and my heart.

Here is where I am, I am in the moment. I am blessed.