Without Issue

One minute mindfulness

Unfolding

Hello friends!

Here I am, pleased to be back after an interlude in posts due to what I will call ‘Random Universe Shenanigans’! I hope you find this Monday’s mindful moment a peaceful pause in your day. Have a great week, everyone!

My husband said something recently that really made me stop and think.  “Isn’t it amazing”, he mused, “that something as monumental as the leaves coming out in spring makes no sound.”  It was more a playful observation than a philosophical statement but beneath its playfulness lies a really rich way of thinking about our mindfulness practice.  So much of what happens around us – often really big stuff – unfolds under the radar of our senses.  Emerging fungi, spiders dancing across impossibly fragile webs, ants marching across forest floors, equinox and solstice, northern lights, the soil turning itself – all monumental stuff.  And – unlike in nature documentaries* where sounds are added to phenomena beyond the capacity of human hearing – no sound.

Mary Oliver, in her poem, ‘No Matter What’ says… 

No matter what the world preaches

spring unfolds in its appointed time… 

From Blue Horses

…and this made me think how some of the most monumental changes and realisations in my own life have arrived, unfolding, without the announcement of trumpets and cymbals.  Rather, there is a dawning, a turning, a slow pulling into a station.

For sure there are thunderbolt moments that come in with a crash or like a chorus from Carmina Burana.  And, of course, some things arrive with the devastating sound of the world imploding.  I’m not talking of those life events but of other slower human happenings like healing, forgiveness and understanding; they often arrive humbly and without any dramatic overtures.  In my experience, these life processes are signalled by a slow realisation that something has changed: a loss that hasn’t been consciously thought about for a few hours or days, an allowance for myself or someone else, a waking-up to a new way of thinking about a previously baffling situation, the soul letting go.

Unfolding can’t be forced or scheduled.  Unfolding isn’t an event; it’s a consequence of being – in the world and with oneself.  Unfolding happens…no matter what.

*In the course of research for this post I came across this fascinating video on how nature documentary sound effects – known as foley sound effects – are made: https://www.insider.com/how-foley-sound-effects-are-made-for-nature-documentaries-2020-12

Time-Lapse

Here 

we lie in un-mown grass

exhausted angels waiting for time 

to ripen below our feathers

stilling blood-buzz of impatience

tuned to lift, fall, lift of oak leaf and fern

till this 

or this or 

this moment

when we can unfurl our limbs

stand to watch

our presence rise again

in increments too silent

even for angels to fathom

D Sloan

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