“Are my boots old?  Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect?  Let me
Keep my mind on what matters,
Which is my work,
Which is mostly—standing still and
Learning to be astonished.”

Oh.
You guys.
I read these words
Over and over.

Tears brim.

Bless Mary Oliver.
How does she know me so deeply?

How is it that my wild perfectionism continues to drive me away from the moment?

How is it that we think we should be more together?  More healed? More whole? More sober?

Yes—I admit—I am nowhere near any part of perfect.  Not even.
Not a sliver.
Not this week.
Not this moment.
Not—ever.

I am perfectly imperfect.

Do you identify?

Why would we even think we should be somewhere beside where we are?

And Mary, you got me on this one—
I’m here to say, yep, I am no longer young.
Not even close.

Remarkably to me, I am now (and how did this happen?) seventy years old.  Although I feel both 12 and 192 at the same moment.

How do I know myself as seventy?

I don’t know.

How do you know yourself at your age?

Let’s look to Mary—she gives us a few powerful messages about how to be who we really are.

I know myself by living into Mary’s reminders,
To stand still,
To remember what’s important,
To learn to be astonished.

Standing still, she says.

Stop figuring it out, stop working so hard at all if it.
Stop working so hard when not working at all.
Slowing down.
Breathing and relaxing.
Savoring, 
Tasting fully the moment
With full-bellied
Breath.

I know myself by standing still.

Keep my mind on what matters, she says.
What matters is clearly not me, not my mind’s tumbling narrative of the moment, the Great Drama of Me building steam in my mind.

What matters is
being there with another,
feeling the sun on my face,
hearing the crunching leaves
beneath my feet,
smelling the fall
as she opens her arms
To us.

I know myself by keeping my mind of what matters.

Learning to be astonished, she says.
Seeing the beauty
In the sunrise,
Moving my body
To the rhythms of the wind,
Allowing myself
To submerge fully
Into bath
Bubbles 
A’flying.
Feeling my guitar
Singing comfort
Into
The depths
Of me.

I know myself by learning to be astonished.

And here is Mary Oliver, reading a poem and being interviewed by NPR’s Rachel Martin in 2013.  It’s a six-minute gift to spend time, to talk of prayer, poetry, and our glorious earth.

To stand still,
To remember what’s important,
To learn to be astonished.

Dear Friends,

So—how about you?  Following Mary’s three-fold suggestions, how do you keep your mind of what matters?  What does that look like? And secondly, how do you stand still? What’s your practice of standing still?  And so importantly, what astonishes you? What takes away your breath? What reminds you that everything is exactly and perfectly right, in this moment, no matter what is happening?

Consider.  Contemplate.  And dear friends, practice.  Let us practice with wildly perfect imperfection.

Please do send on all messages.  I am aruni@rnetworx.com

Autumn blessings,
Aruni

What a wacky and wild ride, this being human.  

To attend to our humanness, at Kripalu we’ve initiated an eighteen-month training for staff, to drill down into the six core values of the community.

The first value—Presence.

It was an easy winner for number one.  You gotta be here before you are anywhere else…….

The practice of being present?  

What does that even mean?

Aren’t we already right here, right now?  

Yes, we totally are.

But we forget. 

We keep forgetting, you guys!

This is truly the human dilemma—we forget that we are already home.

Again and again, we forget.

Our practice is to remember, to notice, to return, to come home.

Without judging the forgetting,

Without making ourselves wrong.

Over and over again, 

We practice returning to presence.

Here is a twelve-minute reminder, a video of my teaching about Presence.  Walk with me around the Kripalu grounds—excuse my huffing, which I find slightly embarrassing.  Yet, despite the huff and puff, let the grounds, the trees, the emerald-ness of everything remind you—

Of the beauty of the return.

Dear Friends,

How can you practice presence with a bit more intentionality?  For one week, between the reading of this blog and next week’s, what riverbanks can you bring to your practice?

Examples:

• At every red light, I’m going to take three breaths.
• At noon every day, my phone will remind me to stop, look around, and see what is there.
• On my daily walk, I’m going to listen to and focus on the sounds around me.
• When I wash dishes at dinner, I’m doing to consider the temperature and feel of the water and the soapsuds.

Any other ideas?  Keep me posted. I am aruni@rnetworx.com

Thanks for joining my Presence with Intentionality Practice.

Oh, the beauty of the return—
All blessings,
Aruni

I woke up on the floor of my 5th Street apartment.
Humidity had glued my face to its wooden floor.

I didn’t know what time it was.

Wait,
I didn’t know what part of the day it was.
Then I realized, I didn’t know what day it was.

Everything hurt.

I knew I could never get up.

I got up.

It wasn’t me who got me up.
Left to my own devices, my own desires, I would have kept lying there
In that pool of sweat,
My sweat.

Something else moved me.
The power of that empty pain?
The force of that hideous despair?

Something moved me
Up
Toward the telephone,
To the hotline.

Something moved me
Up,
To find keys, 
Birkenstocks,
To open heavy, heavy New York door,
To walk into street.

Humidity oppressive like a wet-heavy-hot-blanket
Surrounded me.

New York summer grit biting my face.

Something moved me
Up,
To walk across the noisy churning trafficked street,
To the church that was always there
Waiting,

To the people
That were always there 
Waiting.

One block away,
Starting in a few minutes,
I walked past the church.

No.

I am different.
Not going in.
Not going in.

I went in.

Everything they said about themselves 
That day
Were things about me,
I hardly knew.

Things I had yet
To meet
In
Myself.

Everything changed.

They called themselves “grateful alcoholics.”
I snickered.
Grateful?
For that despair?
For that pain?

They said, as the day begins, 
Be grateful for everything in that upcoming day,
For
It was all
A gift.

I thought,
A gift?
What if shit happens?
Shit will happen.

They were right.
Shit happened.

They were right.
The shit did compost.

They were right.

Eventually
Grace
Unfolded.

Eventually
The
Miracles
Revealed.

Now
Everything continues to change.

As I continue to go
To those churches,

I continue to say
In the mornings
Yes, I’m grateful,
No matter what happens,
I’m in,
As best I can.

I am grateful.

I wake today 
In my bedroom
Most resembling
A comfortable treehouse.
Branches all around
Supporting me
Holding me
In their arms.

A morning storm lights the sky.
Thunder rumbles in the throat
Of the morning’s darkness.

For every single part of this day
That has not yet happened,

For every single moment of my life
Especially the heartbreaks

For whatever I am given,

I am grateful.

Eventually.

Eventually.

As I outlive the pain,
As I breathe into and through
The despair,
The gifts await me.

I am grateful for August 27, 1986.

I am grateful for August 27, 2019.

For the pain and the joy,
For the fear and the pleasure,
For the despair and for the hope.

It is all grace.
It is all inevitable.
It is all sacred.

Dear Friends,

It’s a hard one, this “gratitude for the difficulties, the unknowns, the heartbreaks.”  I am here to remind us: gratitude changes the chemistry of the brain. As we outlive the feelings, so much becomes possible, all eventually relaxes into perfection and ease.

Do you have something in your life you did not choose?  Something that, as it approached, you railed against, fist to the sky.  You tried to halt its arrival. Let me guess—it happened, anyway. With hindsight, can you look to that situation, can you see the gifts that emerged?

I do not write this to take away the pain.  I do not write this to eject ourselves from the human experience, the inevitability of the pain of living.

Pain is mandatory.

I write this to remind us, to give our hearts courage, to give us the strength—to keep going.

Suffering is optional.

Please send on your leap of faith, your situations that eventually opened into the next gift, the next iteration, the next unfold-mend of your life.

All voices welcomed!  And experiences, beyond sacred.  I am aruni@rnetworx.com.

All blessings

*Thanks to Ed P. for his extraordinary pix of his first Kelvin Floodlight dinnerplate dahlia of the season.