CONTINGENCY

[Continue]

Although he had no more food, he decided to push himself, to test his skills. The campsite was still comfy enough. All he had to do was catch something and he could buy himself another forty-eight hours out in his paradise.

He found himself and lost himself throughout the hours of the morning.

It's the way of gratitude… in the extreme. Reminding; I don't have to be here. Take away but a few essentials and I am in good company with the animals of the wood to provide what is needed to live, or else… It's where I discover my true contingency as a being.

What it sees becomes real, each thought an invitation to manifestation.

Back when he camped that first full night alone so many years ago he'd hiked the woods and found an opening to a beach where a large oak tree had fallen near the shoreline. Now he sat on what remained of it on a beach that had grown more sandy and spacious. His teeth were trying to pierce through a sturdy fishing line, attempting to snip off the old set up with a bobber and try some casting with a sluggo instead, see if a bass would take it.

He was there but his thoughts, still juiced up with morning coffee, were elsewhere.

It can be a trained action of love and devotion. Keeping one's whole heart open toward the other; a pure vessel of love, restorative wholeness.… What might blossom from it?

Laura would rush ahead and forget too much and turn it into something quick and cheesy for church folk. No thanks.

He enjoyed most, in his imagination, the interview format where he sat with headphones on his head in a cramped studio in New York or Los Angeles or Chicago with a well-known host on spirituality and it all poured out of him like warm syrup, no… like a balm, a soothing ointment on an angry contusion.

"I guess I'd invite people to think more about a life posture, if that makes any sense. There's never a bad time to remember, to reconnect more fully to life and to come to a certain enjoyment of the ebb and flow of forgetting and remembering, …  as I think also there's not much use in adding thinking or worry to our forgetfulness, the seemingly necessary interruptions of any day-to-day human encounters, God knows."

"We stay awake. We find trust, we are granted trust, strong trust. We open our eyes or reopen them. We replace ourselves into the present, breathing in, breathing out [for most of us]… Fully alive to the moment which always means aware of our choices, our true freedom to take responsibility for and manage our thoughts, feelings and longings.  Love illumines, by grace, a kind of truth-sight; the eyes of the soul, the entire body-spirit illumined and awake."

He stood up and walked down the shoreline, one foot in the water and the other not. He went barefoot as it was really starting to get hot and he walked down into more shaded space and started to cast. He'd reel in evenly then give a few firm snaps on the line with a flick of his wrist to make the neon yellow and green lure dance beneath the cold water.

We fall asleep and are driven by our minds down pathways and around a million different byways where we, from that place, can be said to have become unconscious.

It pays no attention and can become a place of reactivity only, a place of responding only to what's in front of us, of nonstop strategizing with full possession of the imagination enlisted, attaching to outcomes we want, on the lookout for danger and pleasure, taking the nearest fruit, the more instant and satisfying googo available, the "thing" that we believe will satiate in the moment. Call it: Comfort Coma… wherein "I want-I want-I want" replaces one's awareness of life, "I breathe in, I breathe out."

Flies buzzed about and some would bite in search of his blood to live.

We can wake up and in the light of loving compassion more accurately See the more reactive thoughts and entanglements, we can awaken to tenderly guide our awareness toward what's alive in us. Here possibilities emerge as we listen to our longings, the powers of imagination are reenlisted to a much more beautiful cause… And the flow continues.

He reeled and tugged at the fishing rod. A large crow gave Caw! out beyond the hillside to his east.

What's most noticeable in the awake place? We live and move and have our being, gift by gift… One breath at a time, one meal at a time…

SNAP!! FISH ON!