Yesterday, we finished preparing the beehives. The night began to fall with a nearly-full moon, and Venus bright in the sky. In that pregnant twilight—it wanted to give birth to stillness—there was a fox on the hill that barked in shrill, peculiar arguments about the nature of his existence.
There is a new beginning at hand on this day.
In a certain sense, there is no other day. This is the day I have awoken to and will be in. There's the opportunity for me to be free of past days and future days, and to just be in this day. If I invest in it, the solid sense of my body and Being will help me in this task.
Life is not a single work for a single aim; it’s a whole work for a whole aim, which includes all of what life has in it. If I see my effort in life as being on behalf of a single individual thing, or even a group of them, I miss the point. My effort is on behalf of all experience; and so my effort ought to be focused on being here, not on the individual results of being here. I can enjoy each result in its own nature if I am first in Being.
Surely I don't know what will happen today. Can't I see this now? One lives forever on the edge of the unknown. In this sense, each moment is a new discovery.
Somehow there is something just past where I am now that I intuited and meant to write about; yet it hides and refuses to make itself obvious.
There's always something just past what is now, concealed from creation, that gives birth to creation and its eternal journey forward into this great unknown. The knowing is born in the movement. And in this movement love is also born. Thus Meister Eckhart remarks ( Sermon 87) that knowing and loving is, to even the great masters, apparently all there is—
yet they come from a place before knowing and loving, in which knowing and loving are born before they become what they are.
This is certainly one of the mysteries of creation and my own existence: creation and existence are already there, even before I can identify them. Eckhart’s sermon (I should warn you, it's a complex one) touches on this.
The surface of what I see and what I am today spring from depths this great; it's worthy of appreciation.
In the face of all this, my ignorance becomes more evident. The better I rest within stillness inside today, the more deeply I can receive this life. All of that takes place now, not later; so I had better attend to it now.
It's where all the opportunity lies.
Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.
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