What does “Not business as usual” look like?
by Antonio Dias
Movements.
I’m pretty sure it doesn’t look like movements.
Or advertisements for money making ventures.
I don’t think it means continuing to complain about how bad everything is and then remaining within assumptions just because, well, “Why should I have to change? It’s them that are wrong!”
So, what do I think it looks like?
It looks like finding one’s center. It looks like using strength gained in this way to face the unknown and not be in a rush to make it look familiar.
It looks like confronting the incoherence of thought and our general lack of proprioception.
It doesn’t look like anything familiar, but at the same time it doesn’t look that much different. It’s not a pose.
It doesn’t have an image.
It resides in each of us as we find it and it is recognizable when we meet.
Or so is the hope….
At this point one of the few hopes that isn’t a delusional fantasy.
Tony,
I am aware of the space I occupy.
The space is mine, as long as I live.
From my occupancy of that space I own my vision of my surroundings.
To own such vision is awareness.
I am aware of those surroundings, and of all that changes within the extent of my perception of those surroundings.
I delight in the varieties of form,
the water
the stone
the air
I delight in the wind
the rain
the snow
I delight in the seasons
winter, spring summer and fall
birth, life, death
I share this space, with attention and delight, with all life,
the worm,the bird,the beetle, the grass,weeds and trees
My place in my space, and all that shares that space, deserves my attention.
I can not separate myself from from my space, any more than I can abandon my own shadow. I cannot abandon my attention.
I am in it and it is within me, inextricable.
I break my attention, to pursue trivial things,
Like work. Like anger.Like disappointment, and sacrafice,expectation anddesire.
But the leash snaps me back, I am held rapt by my attention to my space.
The more aware I am the greater and grander is my space.
What will occupy my space when I die?
As I falter, as I am less living and more dying will my space shrink away?
As I breath my last, will my space be reduced to a pinprick, and lastly diminish to nothing at all?
Or will my space and my attention open freely to a vastness never knew.
Without the constraints of my biological packaging does my attention continue? Would my attention go beyond what I felt,saw,heard in life within the limits of an organism?
Would this be my essence? ………………………My soul?,
John,
Thank you for this!
We shy away from poetry at our own loss!
Wonderful.