Indigenous Mind

No matter how much I long for an imagined future for myself and the planet or drag myself back to a perceived idyllic past I am still breathing into the “right now”.  Longing, worry, agitation and frustration can’t change the fact that this moment is the one before me.  It is the one I can experience and transform. This moment I can choose to be right where I am in the fullest possible sense.  I can choose to be aware of the wonder, grace, problems, emotion, connections, conflicts, joys, and pain of it.  And I can breathe to open my senses so that I can feel myself as a small part of the moment in preparation for the depth of possibility it holds.  I can choose to feel my breath linked to a breathing planet through trees and plants.  I can expand my listening to hear the sounds of the other beings who are sharing the moment with me so that my mind does not fill all the space.

 

This awareness is not a state of achievement.  It is like walking.  I take a step and as one leg lifts off the ground I am close to falling. As I set my foot down again in the movement forward I find stability.   My stability is measured by my orientation. With each breath I am on my way to falling into the whirlwind of human created stimuli- messages, information, emotions, obligations.  I can miss out on the moment with an amnesia that highlights my emotional response and obscures the wonder of the moment.   I can also choose to breathe and create space to look beyond myself to my North Star and reorient myself to my aspiration- relationship and connection.  Or I can choose to tentatively open my senses and my body.  I can expand my moment to the landscape of which I am a detail and find inspiration in the trees, plants, and minerals, bodies of water and creatures of land, air, and water around me.  I can be reminded by nature and become aware of my breath in the moment with my indigenous mind.

 

My nature binds me to the earth as tightly as I am bound to tree and plant producing oxygen, not only for physical survival but for the awareness of myself as part of the planet and her changes- not as cause or solution, but as an intimate and dynamic detail of her process. I can fall prey to the rhetoric and drama of issues, events and emotions or I can breathe into the tiny moments of choice that allow me to collaborate and participate in my own unique way as a partner with the earth throughout the web of relationships with all other species.

 

I can continue to ask “how do I live my life right now” or I can take a breath and remember – to listen as well as talk to nature, to receive the breath of the Earth through plants and trees, to feel the smallest vibration of relationship in our actions – to redeem my indigenous mind and move from human centered thinking to earth centered perception.  We have the power to live our lives right now with a new orientation - to listen to the layers of species on the planet for their deeper messages; to be inspired by familiarity and intimacy with our neighboring species; and to open our powers of perception for the possibility for revealing a common future. 

Excerpt from “Indigenous Mind” from the Living Now Anthology to be published  September 2010 by North Atlantic Books