come on people now

like most humans, i'm burdened with a "monkey mind" -- the thoughts that swing from limb to limb, stopping only to scratch themselves, spit, and howl. from the distant past to the unknowable future, my mind swings wildly through time, touching on dozens of ideas a minute, unharnessed and undisciplined. this in itself is not necessarily a problem; the problem is the emotional attachment that goes along with the thinking. happy thoughts make me happy, but how quickly i swing again into obsessive worry, ruining the mood. and then it's the rememberance of an angry moment and i start to get hot and pissed off all over again. and then my mind decides it might be a good time to start feeling sorry for itself, and loneliness follows promptly. you are, after all, what you think (unless you raise yourself to a level of consciousness and awareness and presence that allows you to see the falicy of this statement). your emotions are slaves to your thoughts, and you are slave to your emotions.

the other problem with all this swinging through the vines of thought is that i'm never where i am. i'm always digging in the past or poking at the future, but rarely do i rest in the moment. when amber and i were in central america a couple summers ago, i found myself in a landscape that was beyond breathtaking. i remember one thought that constantly flowed through my mind during that trip: it's so beautiful here. i have to come back here someday. but wasn't i, at that moment, there? what was the point of wishing to come back, when, at that very moment, i had the divine gift of presence? in fact, if you're looking for a union with the divine, this kind of forward/backward whirling is a problem. there's a reason they call God a presence -- God is right here, right now. in the present is the only place to find Him, and now is the only time.

an old, old, friend and i had dinner last night; tara and i used to be neighbours, perhaps 20 or more years ago and, while we'd seen each other briefly from time to time over the years, i hadn't had the opportunity to actually visit with her since we'd been kids. twenty years is a lot to catch up on in the span of three hours or so -- an impossible task, in fact -- but what struck me most about sitting down and speaking with her, a person i really hadn't known for the better part of my life, is not that so much time had passed, but that, sitting across a table in a restaurant on broadway, eating yummy chicken satay, veggie spring rolls, and na'an with our fingers, we were both there, present, as if no time had passed, at all. that is, we'd both made it to the that moment, and there we were. and perhaps, that is all that matters. whatever had happened to me or to her in the last two decades of our lives did not impact the importance of seeing her again at that moment, and having the opportunity to chat and laugh and, of course, reminisce (jem, the misfits, the shoe rock, the umbrella tree, walla walla washington, and paul simon) was the real gift i was receiving. good food, a new old friend, the miracle of making it to now.

i spend so much time lingering in memories of the past, fearing the great unknown that is the future. i should spend more time just enjoying what is.