NOTICE, FINALLY

• Today’s questions: Are you ready to see what is all around you?
• Today's suggested practice: It begins with this: take a deep breath; now, holding this breath, notice. First what it feels like to hold the breath. Then, what is around you as you exhale. Repeat three times, slowly deepening your breath and lengthening your hold, and especially your exhale. Repeat three times during this day.

Rev. Hans Peter Meyer 
(Click on my name and join me in the fairly quiet space that is the Apprenticeship to Love Signal chat group. I’d love to hear about your experiences with this short desire practice.)

TODAY'S MEDITATION

The longer I take with this, the less effort it takes. The less effort I make, the more I notice.

What she tells me is this: You see me.

And also: You are not like that anymore.

I am not too busy to notice her. The subtle ways she becomes who she is. Becoming radiant. Or, less so. I'm noticing more. Better. But the noticing, it doesn't come easy. For me

...

I am learning this: to sit with heartbreak, however this heartbreak comes to me. It may be as subtle as the silence of a loved one, when I am wanting words of affirmation. It may be as strong as the death of someone who has helped me give shape and meaning to my life. However it comes, heartbreak is something precious: it breaks my momentum, stops me, and makes me acutely, painfully aware of this moment. Finally. 

…

What I’ve noticed, as I put more emphasis on noticing: I experience wonder and awe. The moment, is beautiful. Terrible, yet so full and rich. 

…

I wonder, Is this where this apprenticeship leads, to less effort, more noticing, more receiving?

For all of my adult life I've heard this: love hurts; marriage is hard. But maybe what hurts is the resistance to love? Maybe marriage is hard because I make it so, because I will not allow myself to receive all that she brings to me?

...

I’m not young anymore. Still, I have the youthful habit of rushing, of being impulsive. 

I don't have time for that anymore.

At this time of my life, I don't have time for only noticing beauty in my life when death, loss, an ending come calling. Now I am impatient for one thing only: to become slow, voluntarily. I want to notice —to see, and to love— all the moments. All the beauty. 

…

I am jealous of the demands of the world. Lazy, in fact. I want to do nothing but sit. Do nothing but notice the unfolding of beauty all around me, this flow of the feminine. To feel Her. To allow myself to be nourished and loved by Her. 

And, in my turn, to ravish Her, with all of my slow attention. 

Today it is enough, just to love the one I love.

TODAY’S INSPIRATIONS

🌀“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time,” Georgia O’Keeffe wrote a century earlier… 

It does not come easily to us, true noticing — that transmutation of looking into seeing. We must apprentice ourselves to it daily. It is our life’s work. (Maria Popova)

🌀The Conscious Warrior practices the cultivation of wonder and awe. (John Wineland, Precept 7)

🌀Thy right is to work only, but never to its fruits; let not the fruit-of-action be thy motive, nor let thy attachment be to inaction. (Bhagavad Gita, 2:47) 

🌀There are so many others. But you see me, you hear me, you know me. (My beloved)

SIGNAL CHAT

If you have thoughts about this meditation on the crooked path of sacred marriage, please join me on the Signal Apprenticeship to Love chat group.