Mindful

by DRM

“You will per­ceive by the res­o­nance of the place whether the area is large or small, whether you are in the mid­dle or in a corner.”

Emile
Jean-Jacques Rousseau

What rel­e­vance does this quo­ta­tion have for the life of the soul, the long tra­verse of sen­sa­tion, expe­ri­ence and reflec­tion that makes up the total­ity of our consciousness?

The other night I went for a walk in the woods with the dogs in the dark. The pre­serve runs par­al­lel to a high­way. The road was busy and the white head­lights and red tail­lights of the rac­ing cars made bril­liant traces in the night black. A moon was up. It lit the path­way. The dusky effect traced a muted out­line of the ground, the stones scat­tered around and the inky trunks and limbs of the trees.

There was no true dark and no true silence. The envi­ron­ment was buzzing with action, even as the dogs and I trudged along.

I grew up on the edge of a swamp. It spread for count­less acres behind our house. The swamp was soaked in fetid water. Trees and wiry bushes grew out of solid tufts of swamp grass that cleared the swamp water. Some of these tufts were larger, ten paces across say, and occa­sion­ally a large enough clot of firm ground appeared, with enough den­sity in its dirt and enough mass in its vol­ume to sup­port the roots of a large hard­wood tree.

Walk­ing in the swamp at night was like mov­ing with no knowledge.

You would swing from one tuft to another, feel­ing your way in the inkjet black air. The smells were ripe and wet. Water grabbed at your shoe, soaked up to your knee when you stepped the wrong place.

When you reached a solid point, you would pause and look around. The black night had no answers, gave no clues to the time or the direc­tion or the route.

Cry out and the swamp would suck your voice away from you and offer noth­ing back.

Our expe­ri­ence of our soul is like walk­ing through a swamp at night. Any path we are on can be altered or dis­rupted. Solid ground can be replaced by grab­bing mud. We can lose pur­chase quickly and feel the grow­ing sen­sa­tion of panic that cries out to us that we are lost and have no way to get back.

What res­onates in our soul to offer a guide? What is the sound that we can use so that the echo can help us locate our place? What is the light that will off­set the unfil­tered black of night?

A mem­ory of mind­ful moments: this can be the thing that gives us certainty.