Running

I am sitting outside, in the evening, enjoying a smoke after a long day.

My closed-up eye is bugging me (allergic reaction to comfrey – long story).

As the tobacco comes on, I look up at the sky and find a single star, and I hear myself ask this star for a message.

“Do you have anything for me, star?”

Silence.

Nothing.

And I realize. Somewhere, along the way, I adopted a kind of disempowered stance with regards the cosmos. I seem to embody this stance in my weaker moments. This stance can best be summarized in one word: MORE. As in: “Please, universe, give me something more. I don’t have enough right now – enough vision, enough understanding, enough awareness of what is going on – please give me something more.

“Something more, to contextualize /my/ life. About me. For me.”

“Give me something more.”

Then I remember, a magazine, maybe 5 or 7 years ago. It was called “More.” I recall thinking when I saw that magazine, “Really? Is that really what people need? More? What a materialistic message!” And yet, like a drop in a river, this momentary thought of dissent and subtle despair quietly surrendered to the deluge of modern culture humming all around and through me, and in the steady din of the message to get “more” repeating itself in myriad ways, big and small, I subtly allowed the river of “not enoughness” to seep into my own skin.

I let the idea that I need more creep in, as if it were my own. As if it were natural.

Then – still on the porch – another memory follows, as if stacked upon the previous one like a perfectly fitting stone in a wall: A few years ago, maybe before seeing the magazine, maybe after (in what might be called an actual vision) I received the knowledge that this – /just this/ – this natural world, this world! is all that I want or truly need. It is all so completely, stunningly simple, plain and perfect. And I felt myself, then, in blissful, bodily, natural devotion to this natural world.

Sitting on the porch, taking another drag, I feel my body relax. I realize I have already received the only vision I will ever need, the only understanding, the only awareness, the only context required to help me make sense of my life.

And I say thank you.

Silence.

And then, crickets.

Crickets!

The crickets are singing! It is sooooo amazing! Like this other-worldly network of song and vibration, sending their thin, buzzing intelligence into our awareness sideways, like a layer of reality so out of sight, blended in all around us, you could ignore it and not realize you are living in a world knitted together by cricket song!

Crickets singing back and forth across the canyon behind my house like tiny microscopic whales, speaking of night, and stars, and life, and enoughness.

Speaking of life!

Maybe the crickets just woke up, for the spring, I think. But I don’t think so.

I think I just woke up!

Thank you, a thousand times thank you, for my one, precious life. May I spend the rest of my life reminding – and being reminded – that I am already – always – swimming in a river of blessed, beautiful enoughness.