It has been six weeks since I got off the trail.
There was a process, that began several weeks before I ended my hike, in the desert after Wells. It has quietly been the most important spiritual shift that I have had, since I left the Evangelical church in 2007-2008.
We were crossing the low desert, and I began to listen to “The Power of Now”, by Eckhart Tolle. Eckhart had a point-in-time spiritual enlightenment experience about twenty-five years ago and has spend the rest of his life trying to help the rest of us get there. His writing is a quite basic map into experiencing Da’yana, the Hindu principle of conscious presence, which is ancient.
I walked through the low desert, listening to Eckhart Tolle’s words, and I felt myself moving through space, and I saw a blurry line of where I need to go. A veil lifted. I blinked, looking at my reactionary choices and the drama it has brought myself and the people around me, especially the lovers I have had, in recent years. Something shifted. I started to observe myself, and a very atrophied muscle deep inside flexed. Maybe for the first time ever.
When I was a child, maybe 6 years old, I remember lying on a chair in our front room in our house on Willow Street in New Bedford, upside down, with my head hanging off the chair, the way kids do, staring at the ceiling. I remember thinking, I am awake and alive right now, in this instant. Now. Now. Now. I’m here. I’m aware that I’m here.
That’s it. That’s all it is. You just stay there. You stay there for as many seconds as you can. Then your mind quiets and you feel joy and gratitude. It really is available to all of us, immediately, always. It is God’s gift, the breath into humans.
It is radical, and I don’t know where I am going. I’m moving through life, dream-like. I hiked around seven hundred miles of Dirtmonger’s beautiful route, and I have arrived here.
To be continued.
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