Unexpected Birds: Finding Peace in This Moment

Photo: Unexpected birds (2013). Copyright SJPhotography

Unexpected Birds: Finding Peace in This Moment (includes guide meditation)

Unexpected Birds

And sometimes you are walking down a familiar path on a spring morning, and there are questions raging, questions that seem to demand immediate answers. What to do with this precious gift of a life? Where to go? What to say next? Which choice to make or not make? Which voice to listen to? How to make everything okay again? How to hold it all together? How to avoid falling apart?

And suddenly the questions cannot hold, they shatter into a million silences, because a tiny bird has perched itself on the path in front of you, perched in the here and now, not in the there and then in which you are seeking your answers. Your eyes meet hers, and you know that everything is okay with the universe. Questions will get answered, or not, and solutions will appear or not appear at the perfect time, because you will make yourself available to them, as you are available now to this tiny and unexpected bird.

Perhaps today is not a day for answers and unshakeable certainties, it is a day for birdsong and staying close to questions as they walk with you down familiar paths on spring mornings.

_Jeff Foster, “The Deepest Acceptance: Radical Awakening in Ordinary Life”

Sometimes, the present moment will arrive automatically, and stand out in your awareness as a moment where you feel your chaotic thoughts suddenly stop and the moment is revealed. Or maybe it is felt as a sense of losing space and time – ushered in by a single bird, or a beautiful landscape, an “ah-ha” moment of understanding, or a profound moment of feeling loved or extending deep gratitude that is received intensely by another. You may find yourself, as author, poet, and non-dual teacher, Rupert Spira describes “having a vertical intervention on the horizontal line of time.” He notes that love, beauty, and understanding are the three things that will bring on this kind of vertical intervention. The moment when time seems to stop moving in a linear or horizontal way, and you find yourself standing in the vertical or infinite moment. Maybe you have experienced these times, if only briefly, or maybe they have been felt longer and repeatedly. This is one way to feel the spaciousness, deep peace, and love of the present moment – this automatically experienced “ah-ha” that breaks through our normal day of feeling fixed on a clock hand ticking slowly along in time.

Another way to experience the present moment is by opening the aperture of our awareness to focus entirely on the HERE AND NOW – dropping the illusory ties that hold us to the past and the future. No matter who you are, much of life is lived out feeling anxious about a past that is long gone and worrying about a future that we cannot get to. Our past and future lives are lived out by our actions, in our thoughts, through our beliefs, in the words and stories we carry, create, and continue to speak, and in how we hold ourselves and step into our everyday world. We think the past has power over our present circumstances so we continue to mull, analyze, and think about our horizontal life to make sure our future is better than our past. All of this keeps us from the reality of the present moment – the only moment that exists. We ignore its brilliance – the simple noticing of NOW that offers us a world of tranquility, oneness, and calm – free of anxiety and stress.