It had rained all night, and I started this November morning with a long walk in the park. The park was beautiful - damp, lush, cool, humid, green, muddy. The paved pathways curved around within the muddy grounds; the trees were shrouded by a light misty haze made of raindrops that looked like the finest gossamer veil covering the trees so lightly that it almost wasn’t there; I could hear the soft sound of water dripping as raindrops that had collected from the night rain slowly plunked from one leaf onto another leaf below it; the ground cover felt like a soft peaty packing of moist mud and fallen leaves under my feet; the whole forest was permeated with the faint fragrance of eucalyptus trees and alstonia blossoms; and in the background I could hear the myriad sounds of a thousand birds. Yes, the park itself was beautiful and I could breathe deeply and let my energy surrender to the call of consciousness.
But the challenge was to learn to see beauty in the busy-ness outside the park: in the narrow cluttered lanes of a congested residential neighborhood; in the sight of stray street dogs; amidst the loud snatches of conversations of people passing by and those sitting on their terraces; in the sound of film songs on a blaring radio instead of bird songs; in the sight of the sun rising over rooftops instead of the tree tops…We seem to always wait for the perfect time and the perfect space to make the shift from the physical to the spiritual. And in waiting for a future, more perfect moment, the opportunities in the “now” disappear and are lost. Sometimes there are second chances, but sometimes there aren't. So the moment I have now is the only moment that is real, and in being so it becomes perfect.
Words from a song by Leonard Cohen come to mind…The birds they sang at the break of day, Start again I heard them sayDon't dwell on what has passed away or what is yet to be…
Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering;
There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.