word house

What You Speak

Becomes The House

You Live In.

-Hafiz

Having been gifted a mondo huge-o box (i mean HUGE) of Chartpak rub-on lettering in every size and font ever invented, I realized it was a fantastic opportunity to put my favorite quotes on my walls.  so this morning, i continued to look through my book of Hafiz, rather than watch the next episode of Unbreakable on Netflix, as has become my habit.

I found the quote above, and it struck a chord.  it shall go on my wall by the front door.

I've been reading "Silence" by Thich Nhat Hanh, and this morning, he was talking about how our mind wanders and that leads to fears and unkind thoughts.  and i realized how true that was in my monkey mind.  so Henry & I headed out for a walk…without the cell phone *gasp* and without anything other than each other.as i got to my favorite part of the woods, i took in a deep breath of cool pine air, and let my mind wander as usual.  An owl suddenly flew across the path ahead of us, startling me back to the present moment.  and i realized i was not able to enjoy the Present Moment, because my mind was wandering away from it.  Hanh says to let you breath bring your mind back to the present, so i took another breath and stood for a moment looking at all the different textures of tree bark and hearing the cicadas and birds.  and then started walking again, but this time i was walking in that moment…how much more peaceful.  

years ago, before cameras in phones, and digital anything, i saw a cartoon that brings it all home.  a man and his wife are at a cocktail party, talking to another couple.  He has a white streak across his face, but is otherwise tanned.  The other man asks how their vacation was, and the tanned man replies "I'm not sure - I have to wait for my pictures to come back from the lab."  The white streak is obviously where he had held his camera up so much that it blocked the sun.  i realized how much we self-document…it's startling, really.  we send so much time with our heads bent over a phone, texting, or taking selfies or pictures of where we are, what we are eating, etc., and never spend time in the moment…experiencing all that the moment has.  Those moments smoosh together to form our path, our journey…are we missing out?  When i travel, i like to eat the local food, and see what the locals treasure, not necessarily the tourist view.  I take very few pictures, because there never seems to be a way to capture the essence of the moment.  maybe it's the fault of the person behind the camera! either way, i find that i enjoy so much more if i'm not worried about getting enough pictures.  and when you think about it - how many times do you actually go back and look at them?  it's the memory of the time spent that you treasure.

as usual i took a winding path to get here.  my lesson lately has been to live fully in the moment.  and it sounds easy, but for someone who has spent the past 30 years being hyper-prepared, it is not as easy as it sounds - my mind constantly does a time check, and a what-if check, and a what's-the-worst-that-could-happen check, then starts running down a list of things to do …in case.  it has made me an excellent producer in the radio/tv world, and event planning, but in an everyday life it becomes burdensome.  so a deep breath in, and a smile, and a moment in the moment.

Wishing you a simple moment of peacefulness today.