Being with you

Being With You

Samuel Bird

Do you remember how it felt when you turned to this page? What finger did you use to pry the page free and turn it? How do you feel the book in your hand now? Is it above your head as you lie below, in front of your face as you sit across, or some contorted shape that feels most comfortable to you? Did you just pick up the book for this chapter, or did you just read the last chapter with it being fresh in your memory? If that is the case, what insights and lingering quiet thoughts are parading across your mind? How do these thoughts pertain to you and your engagement with existence? Outside of the explicitness of thought, what do your feelings imply? What emotions carry their own story and beg you to listen? What were you doing before picking up this book, and for the rest of the day prior? Is that something you don’t wish to think about as you read this? Were there redemptive qualities to your day that brought a glimmer of wonder to monotony? What of the rest of the context you bring to the table? When the hearer hears, they already have a sense of what the speaker means. What contextual meaning does your life bring to your reading of this? What does it allow and accentuate for you to extract from the text? What will be the consequence for your life? Of all things that bring us to now, let us be present in it. Let us instead go back to feeling the book in our hands. While you read, what synthesis do the ears pull from the world around us to the one within? Perhaps the crackling of the fire, the bustling of human activity, or the whirling of the wind. How do you feel about these sounds? Is there a wish in your heart for the rushing of waterfalls or chirping of birds? Still, the sounds go on with their frequent disruption. Is there a sound in the orchestra that you forgot was there or barely noticed? What does it imply that you forgot about? How do these sounds accent the rest of the sounds that you heard today? Perhaps a song moved you, or voices carried meaning to you. Did that music’s shaking of the soul stick with you, and did that elucidating language leave resounding ideas? What of your sight? Clearly you can see these words as you read them, but you also have things in the periphery or even your primary vision as you turn away to give your eyes a break. Where are you reading this? Your bedroom, on the bed, on the couch in the living room, or in the office of your work or school? How does this place make you feel? You spend enough time here, it can be easy to forget, but how does the lighting in the room affect your emotions? What beautiful view out of the window, painting on the wall, or paraphernalia from your life can you see? Take a moment to allow a deep breath to well up in your gut, gently pulling in the atmosphere from around you. Those things you see, what do they speak of the life you are stepping back to reflect on now? What type of person will you be when you set this book back down, and your actions are the spilling of your soul into the world? How do you feel about your relationship to the world? Don’t worry about knowing it, but how does it seem to you? What does your life mean to you? Your thoughts may wander, but let them and follow them when they do. Read to have a conversation and not to be talked at. What are you thinking as you write this? What do you think about me, yourself at this moment, and our relationship? Take a moment to look back over the thoughts you have had over the course of reading this chapter. What primary thoughts stuck out most? What narrative structure do these thoughts fall in, in such a way that you grasp the flow of thought? As you think about the thinking of your thoughts, what thoughts do you think? What peripheral thoughts come bombarding in, reminding you of something? Is your body itchy in a place you would have to readjust to scratch? Are you realizing that the comfortable position you read this in was temporary, and you would now like to switch how you sit when you read this? If so, go ahead. What other needs, desires, and wants come to mind? Are you hungrier than you thought? What was the last thing that you drank? How does life rest in your chest? Go back to the chest. Once again, pull a smooth and slow deep breath right to your belly as if you were inhaling the world. Close your eyes and rest them for a second. You will have had to open them back up to read this sentence. What other sense became enlivened when your loudest sense was stilled? Do you realize a droning sound in the distance, find an odor in the breeze, and find you once again have to readjust how you sit? If so, feel free to do so now. We are now going to have to practice the next portion with grace as there are things to pay attention to off the page, and the page needs attention to identify so. How is your body feeling? What a funny thing we say, our body. Perhaps we are more than our body, but we are at least partially our body. For that reason, perhaps “how are you feeling?” is more in order. However, I want to identify that portion of you that is your body. How does it feel? Once again, close your eyes and be present with it. I welcome your glance back to the page. Does it surprise you? Was the world of your body filled with more information and life than you supposed? Feel free to breathe with closed eyes to identify so. How much is there to experience? What kind of day are your toes having? Perhaps you have been active, and your blood flow is keeping them warm and free. Perhaps you have been still, and the cool weather makes you realize how much more you wish to cover them under a blanket or place them under your body. Have you ever taken time to be with your toes? What are they experiencing as you go on with your life? As someone who gets stuck in my head, my toes allow a vacation for my attention. You know, if you didn’t have them, you would struggle to walk as well as you do. Even banished to your footwear, they still activate muscles constantly to keep your balance. Outside of gratitude, do you spend time with them? What about your feet? They are what connects you and moves you in the world. Do you ever switch your attention from the world you move around in to the thing that allows you to do so? What about your legs? So much territory for sensation and motion. Are they situated well now? How lucky you are to have these great oaks hoist you. Your belly, what does it feel like? Aside from the heart and mind, I think it takes the next place for thinking and feeling. The food you access for it, what does it make it feel like? What deep, grounding emotion are you carrying in your gut? What more might it have to say? Your back and chest, now we really see if you need to reposition. Here we get to the frame that makes up you. Feel your clavicle and shoulders. How much do they do to make your thought turn into labor? Coming down to your arms, how do they feel, and what weight do they have? I have some guesses about what your hands feel like. Likely, some fingers feel the smooth backing of the book as the thumbs and the rest of the fingers feel the slightly more coarse pages. Let us go back to your breath. For as long as you can stand before the curiosity and thoughts pull you back to this page, see how long you can stay with closed eyes and breathe. What are you feeling now? Perhaps you feel like you have had a chance to catch up with yourself. You run this way and that, doing this and thinking the other. When could your mind, body, and soul, along with their unique parts, synchronize? What senses did your body need to come to terms with? What silent thoughts are happening in the background that need to be worked out? What of your soul is moving from doing in the world to being in it? You will note that “being” is still a verb. However, it is not an energy of movement across time, but the persistence of an entity across time. Take this moment to be that entity. Let a moment pass you by. Did you feel it? You are blasting off through the fourth dimension. Each moment passes at one seeming speed and never in any other direction. You are now in a very tender state. Perhaps an emotion comes up. Your heart may have been trying to tell you something for a while now, but you have mastered keeping noise around you. What is it telling you now? No doubt, the emotion will have an imperative as an action to resolve or complete the thought attached to the emotion. That is fine, but tell it you can worry about addressing it later. Right now, you are going to be with it. Tell your heart that you are going to be curious. From time to time, we put words in the mouths of our hearts and minds. Don’t worry about making sense of it, just be present with it. Are you surprised? Perhaps it didn’t seem as large of a concern as you thought or as important of an end until now. Once the heart’s messages lower from a shout, let us come to the mind. Thoughts rip passed us. Some are words, some are visuals, some are their own form that exists only in the mind. The only thing they all have in common is that there is something that it is like to experience them as you, or as I would say, they have a seemingness. That last thought that went passed you, what was it? More essentially, what did it seem like? What secret wisdom could your psyche have in sharing this thought with you, even if you evaluated it as not being worth the execution? How lucky we are to have minds that give us so many things, allowing us to judge what we will. Sit in your mind between the thoughts as the soul that sees. Just see. Be a soul. Finally, be what you are. In its entirety, be all the things that your different parts combine to be. Let your past as it made you and your future as you work for it, meet in the now, where you are exactly what you are. Whether yourself, fate, or God, marvel at what it is like to be. 

Today, I wanted to be with you. If I could do it in any other way, we wouldn’t talk. I talk too much. Instead, we would sit in silence as we looked at what we could see, or break that silence with the most interesting of thoughts that passed us by. Perhaps you spend too much time taking in information and need information to be brought into the world, and to allow another person to witness. If so, go ahead. If you are in a position to do so now, feel free to talk to me out loud. What thoughts are rupturing from you with a violence that makes them need to burst? Tell me of your mind and soul. Let me hear you. Let me see you. Let me be with you. God places His ironies in the lives that strut across the stage. For myself and you as we relate, it is how much I love you and how little I will ever be able to access you. Today, I wanted to be with you. Thank you for allowing me. It was an honor, a memory we share, and one I look forward to recalling in a life after this I don’t now know of. It is presence that is the most divine of gifts between souls. Through time and space, I got to do so with you. I could truly see you. I looked into your soul as I beheld it with you for that brief moment, seared in my mind as an ever-present always. It was one I cherished. I looked, and I did not, will not, and will never look away. I saw it. That thing you try so diligently not to let anyone see. Perhaps you are wise to do so, but you carry the burden of witnessing next to someone. If you think my love for you is because of your qualities available for valuing, you miss what I mean when I say I love you. I love you. As the intrinsic sort of thing you are, and as all that entails. This love can make sense in no other terms than what it is. Perhaps it is a love that seeks to pull you from where you find yourself, but it is certainly a love that meets you there. I am so grateful that you put up with me. I am cursed to not be mentally present and to be aware of it. Your loyalty is just another excuse I have for showing why I love you. What are you feeling now? What are you thinking now? For myself, I am crying. I am so grateful that I got to be with you.