Walking meditation

James has begun on a new path, he  walks outdoors now.  To walk with him is to rediscover the freshness of the world.  Everything is new and interesting.  What I ignore, he finds infinitely fascinating.  What I don't see, he notices.  For him, it is a walking meditation, where complete attention is focused on exactly what he is doing in that moment.

It may take him 20 minutes to walk I distance I cover in 5 minutes, but his journey is much richer.  He notices every cigarette butt and piece of discarded gum, brick walls are a constant source of fascination, as are tufts of grass growing in the mud, overgrown hedges tumbling out over broken walls, even the very holes in the walls are fascinating, as he sticks his fingers into cracks and crevices I  had never noticed.

How blind I have become to what is around me.  I follow my own channel of seeing and being, but I realise that I have locked out so much of my surrounding world.  Not that this is, in and of itself, a bad thing.  The mind has to dismiss billions of pieces of data every minute in order to focus on what does matter to it.  But what if I have dismissed the significant along with the insignificant?  Therein lies the opportunity.

My world is relatively ordered and predictable, yet it is only on the fringes that transformation takes place.  It is in the seemingly random events and acts that we have the opportunity to transcend our present moment awareness, and to transcend our present selves. How else can the divine connect with us, if not through the random, seeming erratic episodes in life?

In the most unexpected ways and moments, our higher consciousness opens up, connecting us directly to our infinite source, allowing us to touch the whisper of our soul, the minute fluttering of the divine breath.  Whether or not we are willing to accept the insight of those moments is a different question, but the fact remains, on the fringes of our lives, we are in communication with our divine source.

One could compare life to a walking meditation.  It's easy to forget we are wearing blinkers, ignoring the fringes of our own lives, the unexpected, random moments and events that open us up to our spirit, to an expanded, enhanced version of who we are.