Look up.  Set aside the empty box and the packing tape.  The sky is a a rich gleaming yellow with a hint of orange, an alien landscape, the sunset through a passing storm.  Walk out onto the asphalt driveway.  The air is warm and breezy but the lingering raindrops are like ice.  Turn around, look at your house, the one you are about to leave.  Just above it, cradling it, is a full rainbow.

This is supposed to be a moment of change, a moment of sweeping transition, an “in between.”  After six years in this city, I am moving to another state in one week.  But, there is no feeling of transition in the air, no sense of that crevice between one time period and another.  I am at home in this moment.  Right now, I am not going anywhere.  I am just putting objects into boxes.  Just watching the sun shine through the storm.

The front door is still swung open.  A big juicy fly wanders in for shelter, buzzing around as if in a drunken stupor.  Picnic ants investigate the entry way.

“Are you moving in already,” I ask.  “I am not all the way out yet.”

My feet are gritty from the wet driveway.  I wander into the grass, tall and soft like shag carpet, and visit the big tree in the frontyard.  The bark is spongy with moisture.  I place my hand on its skin, and a faint little spider scurries from my finger.  For the spider, the skin of the tree is the landscape.  I scurry on the skin of the earth, the beautiful throbbing earth breathing and turning beneath my feet like a sleeping giant.

The lowest part of the field across from my house was soaked after the rain.  I walked across it then stopped, and suddenly a sound like trickling water coursed through the ground about ten feet in all directions.  I stomped.  The trickling repeated.  It sounded like a rain stick.  (To play the sound, click here.)  I had never observed anything like it.  I stomped again, this time hunched over examining the soil, looking for signs of little tributaries of rainwater.  The sound repeated, but I saw no water moving.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about the skin of Mother Earth.

Yesterday, I returned to the river, swam naked, and lifted a butterfly from my shoe.  She crawled around on my hand for a long while.  She dashed away and returned a few minutes later.  She remained on my hand during most of my walk along the shore, nearly a quarter of a mile, at least twenty minutes.  I brought my hand near my face and gazed at her.  She licked my skin, dabbing away, not worried about where I was going.  It was not long ago that I longed to hold a butterfly, and here she was, appeasing me.

This moment is the beloved.

Even moments that seem difficult.  Days ago, I put something in my long hair that permanently damaged it.  I wear it up now.  I realize that I’ve stopped worrying about making my hair look perfect before I leave my house.  Years ago, I would have been tossing and turning at night, my stomach in knots, wondering how long it would take to grow out.  Instead, I just… I feel happy.  The problem is just another mystery to be solved.  Investigating chemical solutions has been… enjoyable.  Learning how to braid my hair has been exquisitely pleasing.  I look like a true Native American with my hair in a braid.  How did something so horrible become a delight?

It is this universe… making love to me with every breath.

I think I get what is happening.  It is not so much that my delusions have become quiet and dim.  Rather, the real has become louder and brighter.  This moment, the real, continuously outshines whatever my mind hashes up.  This moment is the sun shining through my storm.  The storms come but soon pass and evaporate.  My mind still mutters and rambles, and it still triggers cascades of pain, but the pain has nowhere to rest, nothing to stick to.  A bubble of pain will rise up and quickly pop, just simply gone.  Just gone.  Nothing to cling to.  I look at it.  I could get pulled in, but not really.  I can remember what it feels like to be pulled in.  Then, this gleaming sun of the real shines across my lap, and my attention is quickly diverted, and the bubble of pain just disappears, and the thoughts that gave birth to it are left baffled and empty handed, sulking away with nothing more to say.  They are confused because they never get the last word, they never quite fully resolve things, and yet all is well.  The more I experience this, the harder it is to get caught up in thought, so there is a snowball effect, a process that takes on a life of its own.  One need only want it.  I spent more than fifteen years in a meditation practice to quiet my mind, still my senses, and erode my illusions.  Perhaps this layed a foundation, but the real transformation seemed to begin the moment I looked at this sun and simply said, “This is all I want.”  Now, I giggle, because it is all there is.  How could I logically want anything else?  Nothing else is.  This sun encompasses everything, contains everything.  Everything you think you want is there within it, so you lose nothing.

The real seems difficult to want, because we think of the moment, and it seems at times boring or dreary or empty.  But dreariness is not an intrinsic feature of what is.  Dreariness and emptiness are thick layers of thought and interpretation blanketing the moment.  To use a slightly risque metaphor, attending to this moment and finding only dreariness is like making love to the universe with a condom on.  You’re not really tasting it.

Open.  Let go.  Let go of everything.  Absolutely everything.  Even the threat of failing at all of this, or the threat of dying, emotionally or physically.  Let it all go.  Open and let this moment be everything to you.  You already know how.  If you have ever been in love, you know how.  This everything will never leave you.