as we near the end of Coming to our Senses by Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Today like every other day
we wake up empty and scared.
Don't open the door of your study
and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel
and kiss the earth.
- Rumi
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Across the span of nine hundred years, Rumi is evoking reverence and how easily it can be missed if, in the face of our endemic discomfort, we persist out of habit in opening the door of our study and begin reading when we might, alternatively, "take down a musical instrument," the closest at hand being our own living body, and let the beauty we love, if we can be in touch with it, reveal itself in the many different ways we might carry ourselves in this moment, here and now. This is nothing less than an exhortation to practice being truly in touch with what is most fundamental, most important, and a nod to there being no singular one right way to go about it.
When we do not limit ourselves to one way of knowing, or one vocabulary, or one set of lenses through which to look, when we purposefully expand our horizon of inquiry and curiosity, we can take delight in all the various ways we have of knowing something. We also have a chance to recognize the mystery of what is not known conceptually but sensed, felt, intuited, attended to by the confluence of all our senses in direct unfragmented experience, not excluding anything, even our concepts and what they reveal in any moment, all summing to an ongoing exchange with what is larger than we are and that is nothing other than us as well. Every one of our mysterious and miraculous senses, including mind, is a way of knowing the world and a way of knowing ourselves.
We are larger than any one way of knowing, and can enjoy all of them as different incomplete and complementary modes for appreciating what is, and for participating in what is with gusto and delight for the moments, timeless and yet fleeting, that we are here for. We can rest in not knowing, as well as in knowing, in the beauty of form and function and in their mystery, on any and every level that the senses and the mind, our instruments and our instincts, and our efforts to understand, deliver to us in any moment.
- Jon Kabat-Zinn
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Sounds of laughter, shades of earth
are ringing through my opened views
inciting and inviting me
- The Beatles
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