How to Make Sense of It All

Yesterday, as I was walking to work from the bus, I was in my head with my own personal troubles.  I was not feeling very peaceful and certainly not joyful.  Right behind Meany Hall there is a landscaped bank with tulip trees and small pines.  The tulip trees' blossoms are all but spent now, so they don't as easily call to my inwardly turned eyes.

I was given one of those awarenesses just as I came to the stand of pines.  I suddenly became aware that I was preoccupied, and that there was the possibility of a choice to me made about that.  At that moment I looked out and saw the pines . . . which were laughing.  I'm sure of it.

They were laughing flowers, and you know how contagious a laugh can be.

So, just as suddenly, I was out and laughing, laughing and amazing at the flowers just now coming out on the branch tips of these joyful pines.  And I was amazed that for so many years I never even noticed that pines flower.

. . . and I was home.  In that moment, I was home; and my personal troubles were not so troublesome anymore.

As the day went on, I became preoccupied again.  This time with the stuff of my job.  It was an exceptionally busy day, lots of  important stuff that needed my attention.

Then about two o'clock, I decided to take the lost & found over to the HUB.  It was just the next thing that needed doing.  I don't usually do it.  Someone else usually does it.  But it seemed the right thing for me to do.  And it was the time when we usually do it.

I walked out onto the broad brick path connecting Allen Library to the HUB, out from under the sheltering arcade between Allen's two wings . . . it had rained.  All was damp and puddled.  The smell of the rained on earth and grasses and trees, and maybe even the smell of wet birds and squirrels and insects and bacteria.  I don't know what.  It was that smell the rain brings even to the bricks and the people and umbrellas walking by.  It was the smell . . . and I was  home again.  And I was laughing.

How strange that we live these lives so preoccupied, so lost in our thoughts and jumbled feelings, so unaware most of the time that we are preoccupied.

Then just as suddenly the awareness comes.  We're home.  Where have we been the rest of the time --most of the time.

How very strange to live this way.

And even stranger to be convinced beyond any reasonable doubt (most of the time) that what we are preoccupied with is more important than being home.

Hear this as it's given, please.

Not a place--home.

Being home.

Being the home that life is in us when we join in our awareness with all else that life expresses around us and within us.