Fly over Country

Life slows down out here in the boondocks.   One becomes earthier and the rhythms and times of the earth deepens this adventure, this journey we know as our experience of life.  It's hard though - at times.  When the stressors of work and the requirements of survival and all one's hopes and desires and one's fears and anxieties combine.  The mind tends to wonder, it tends to drift.   Thoughts spin new thoughts, fears begat fears, and the mind sinks back down into that mire of mud, into that web of illusion, getting lost in the past or the future and being mindless of the here and now.  Yep!  Life slows down but not necessarily the mind and that's essential.  I think.  To being present.  To being present to one's self being present to the bare awareness of nature.  It's elements, it's moods, it's beat, it's pulses and times.

We live in what I happily refer to as "fly-over" country.   Planes fly so far above us that while we see their trails and glints, we never hear them.  "Fly-over" country is quiet country.  Its wide expanses of land, mountains and clouds.   Out here, one can hear the "sound of silence."  Out here, one can follow the path of the sun from rise to set and mark the change of the seasons with notches on a western deck.   Out here, one can learn to slow down.  One can learn how to be nurished by the mud and one can practice unspinning the mind's many paths of illusion/delusion/confusion.  One can begin to experience clarity of mind as one learns to observe and note the proclivities and tendencies of a mind.

And it is hard.  To be present.  Fully present in the moment to self to other to surrounds and to the experience of a moment.  I still wonder how "moments" are defined.  Like an "hour" is measured in minutes.  60 Minutes.  An hour.  Seems to me those "moments" which have and will define our lives are timeless and more frequent than not if one remains awake and aware, in the moment, the here and the now and not in the sweet bye and bye.  I am experiencing (with the help of mind and mood altering substances) that when the mind is going, when it is off spinning its stories, its tales, its webbed narratives primarily to it's self because to everyone else its the "same old story" and everyone is tired of hearing it except the one still mindlessly repeating it.  Over and over.  As one grows older there is "no (more) time to wonder in the mire."  (Come'on baby light my fire....).