AT THE PACE OF WHAT IS REAL

If courageous enough, we might
just slow to the pace of creation,
where the pulse by which the mind thinks
touches the pulse by which the heart feels,
and together they equal the rhythm of miracle:
where being plays in exact motion
with all being.

There is much talk of being present and entering the moment. It is highly valued in our time as an antidote to the tensions of the modern world. And rightly so. Some forty years ago, Ram Dass clearly rang the ancient bell when he shouted, “Be here now!” For all traditions sanctify the moment, not merely as a medicine to quell the symptoms of an agitated life, but more deeply as a perennial doorway to the company of the Whole.

Yet what does it mean to enter the moment? And what conditions of inwardness open the moment before us? We’ve looked at this from many vantage points. Still, there is one more to consider. It has to do with aligning the pace at which we think with the pace at which we feel. This seems to empower a deeper means of seeing and knowing the world. Like tumblers in a lock, when the pace of true thinking aligns with the pace of authentic feeling, and when these in turn align with a seeing and hearing that returns us to a freshness of first perception—the moment clicks open. The hidden wholeness is unlocked.

More often than not, we have to slow our thinking and feeling and seeing and hearing until they open into each other. Once there, a common rhythm of being appears, which we can call the pace of creation. And the effort to enter each moment in this way is living at the pace of what is real.

It is interesting that when a Navajo elder was asked to define healing, he spoke of Ahyo-oh’-oh-ni, which is Navajo for “to bring one into harmony with everything.” As well, the psychiatrist Gerald May has remarked that “realness is the ground of true confidence,” which is a Western way of saying the same thing. For true confidence at its fundamental core is the realness or authority of presence that comes from being brought into harmony with everything.

Entering the moment is the most direct way we have of doing this. How? By entering each particular before us. How? By slowing our thinking and feeling and seeing and hearing to the pace of creation. How? By preserving and following the breath that joins us to the things around us. Here we are brought into harmony with everything. Such realness opens us to the greater motion of all being that we are always a part of.

I just had a great teaching in this regard. But in order to share this, I need to trace some events of the last year. You see, next week will be a year since we moved to Michigan. Of the many things we boxed and packed, we took an old wooden bench which sat on the edge of our garden in upstate New York. It is a small, unpainted bench that was there when we moved in; crudely made with two wide boards for legs and a third board nailed in various ways as a seat. The seat is split and can pop up, if you’re not careful. We had it in front of a large forsythia bush. The bench feels more ancient than it seems, like a relic from some medieval monastery. Anyway, we now live on a hill, and last year, as soon as it was warm enough, we put the bench under a canopy of oak trees near the house. It was a magical spot that seemed to bridge our past and our present.

It wasn’t long till spring was in full bloom and we discovered quiet trails along the shores of nearby Lake Michigan, a magnificent lake that feels like a freshwater ocean. And so we spent hours walking the dunes there with our dog, Mira, she playing with the small surf, while we held rounded stones, wondering what they might say had they the chance. It was toward the end of summer, when no one was around, that we found this smooth, bleached bough with one equally smooth branch forking off one end. It seemed important, like a wooden flute that had lost its holes to the erosion of the sea. We took it home and, unsure what we were supposed to do with it, carefully leaned it in a corner of the garage.

Soon after this, my dear friend Robert sent us an unusual housewarming present—an oar! It was a meaningful surprise that traced back to the Jungian analyst Helen Luke. Both Robert and I regard Helen as a mentor, and it was her interpretation of Ulysses’ vision as an old man that taught us both about starting anew. It was long after the Trojan War, after the ten-year Odyssey home, after the freeing of his wife, Penelope, in Ithaka. Ulysses was getting restless, itching to go back to sea, where he was regarded as a master. He was ready to go—to refind his glory—when the soothsayer Tieresias came to him in a vision and said, “No—you shall keep walking inland until you meet someone who doesn’t even know what an oar is. There, you shall plant the oar and start a garden.”

And so Robert gave us an oar. That first winter we put the old bench in the basement, left the driftwood in the garage along with a glider needing to be assembled, and the oar was in the house, looking lonely without a boat. During the winter, we listened to the winds move about the hill.

Then things began to thaw, and last week we had an unusually warm day. The daffodils were budding. So we assembled the glider in the driveway as our dog kept stealing the instructions. Finally, we put it together and it now seemed obvious that it belonged under the canopy of oak trees where the bench had been. So we started looking for a new place for the old bench.

I carried the bench up the hill to the highest corner, where I had traipsed in the snow to glimpse the moon. Sure enough, we found a spot that seemed almost magnetic. The bench wanted to be there. I thought just to leave it, but noticed that the ground, of course, wasn’t level. So I dug out a small landing. Then, as I started to walk away, the cut-out upper half of the circle and the mounded lower half were begging for stones. We had a pile we’d been stacking since moving in. I carried them over and on my knees began packing and petting the heavy stones in place.

By this time, Susan had bought a forsythia and we planted it near the bench. But the hill was calling for something else. So, after lunch, we bought four bags of pea gravel and some marble chips. And I began to cover the landing with a floor of pebbles, bordering the stone circle with marble.

As we backed off the hill, we looked at this perch that had somehow appeared through our unexpected efforts. It seemed holy and oracle-like. Then we both realized why we had picked up the driftwood. We pulled it from the garage and planted it behind the landing, hanging wooden chimes on the lone bleached branch. Now we knew where to put the oar. And so we carried it together and planted it, handle in the earth, on the uppermost crest of the hill.

I was struck by how all these simple and seemingly unrelated things—bench, driftwood, oar, pea gravel—drew us to them. And how each was a clue to discovering this holy spot that was there all along, waiting through that long first winter for us to make it visible.

The next night was mild, and along around midnight, I took Mira out, then climbed the hill to sit on the bench. The moon was full, the stars were clear. Tufts of clouds were drifting across the big, ancient sky. The breeze was quietly rattling the tops of the still-leafless trees. It felt like Eden. I don’t know how long I sat there, but my heart was stunned. Inadvertently, we had uncovered a timeless nook from which to watch the magnitude of the earth. I had the same stunned feeling when walking beyond the tree line in the Rockies, when listening to the Pacific early in the morning, and when looking back at Cape Town, at the very bottom of Africa, from the Indian Ocean.

Always, the things we hold, the things we water in place, the small moments we open—all are quiet steps that can lead us to some view of eternity. Now I think the magnitude of love, peace, wisdom, and truth can be known like this. For they are there all along, waiting to be discovered—all vast planes of being like sky, ocean, and mountains, waiting to be entered moment by moment. Clearly, by living at the pace of what is real, we can access the vitalities that matter. And though everything conspires to move us ahead of this pace—pain, fear, loss, doubt, anxiety, ambition—we can recover the pace of creation by slowing to where all things begin.

I first understood this in the tender months after chemo ended. I was drifting in a rowboat writing a letter to my father, who thought I sounded different. And I did. Here is part of that letter:

You ask if anything’s changed. I write this in an open boat in the middle of a lake which has been drawing me to its secret for months. I am becoming more like water by the day. The slightest brace of wind stirs me through. I am more alive than ever.

What does that mean? That in the beginning I was awakened as if a step behind, always catching up, as if waking in the middle of some race that started before I arrived, waking to all these frantic strangers hurrying me on, as if landing in the middle of some festival not knowing what to celebrate, as if someone genuine and beautiful had offered to love me just before I could hear and now I must find them.

You ask if anything’s changed. I am drifting in the lake and now it’s a matter of slowing so as not to pass it by.

That was almost fifteen years ago. Now, when I slow down, I am drawn to life’s clues. For entering into relationship with these small and simple things opens the bird’s call. By slowing down, the wind makes an old tree whisper, and the light makes a broken piece of glass glisten with truth, and a drop of rain somehow makes the eye of a fly as soft as someone tired of running.

I’m writing this on the moon bench toward the end of a quiet day, very slowly, a word at a time. The oar is over my shoulder, planted firmly in the ground. And I’m waiting for what speaks when the wind through the chimes, and the clouds, and my breath all exhale at the same time.