Seeing the ocean as I rarely do, it has become an opportunity to question my daily habit of defining reality before experiencing it. Wonderfully, almost teasingly, the Universe urges me to try to see at the waves with scrutiny or critique because it simply cannot be done!
It resists my tendency to “script” my experience there—to create a personal drama of what’s happening around me. The sea is far too vast for my ego to get to penetrate these moments with its memories of beachdays past. There is just THIS ocean and THIS moment, just NOW and then gone!
The generous Universe makes small enlightenments a repeatable gift. So go see the ocean occasionally. Look at the clouds. Sit in the sun or on your meditation cushion and Just Wake Up to this moment whatever it brings.
The mindfulness that vast water provokes is able to draw me out of the buzz of my incessant, internal conversation with myself. It urges my seeing reality as it truly is. Doing that requires being present to the moment, apart from the expectations and interpretations I bring to it. Once I stop shaping reality into a theatrical performance with myself at its center, mindfulness allows the world to surprise me. The Universe becomes delightfully open-ended.
My Practice, as I see it, is to stay in that moment any/time I get the chance to be even momentarily astounded by beauty/pain/reality/oneness/? Wether its vast like the ocean, or small like the fading wine-colored leaves upon my stoop as I begin another walk, another chance at seeing reality without dualism, without independent-arising mind, showing me the true connection of Inter-independent Origination.
And then perhaps I sneeze at the diesel fumes of a truck that passes and then I idly look with very little sincere curiosity at the landscaping choices of my neighbors and I think about my bodies newest complaints. And so back into Samsara I go. This is Life!
And so then I mindfully, as a Practice create GongFu Cha Tea starting before meditation, do the dishes just to do the dishes, and I walk with intention, or I sit on my meditation cushion and voila! I begin again to be open to opportunities, to find my various paths of return to Inter-dependent Origination, that place of Oneness, of both Form And Emptiness that arises in the rare moments of small enlightenments.