The Practice of Staying Awake

I took this slightly blurry photo of sticky monkey flowers on a morning dog walk. I wasn't after clarity when I shot this, but I had fallen in love with the yellow/orange shade of the blossoms and I wanted to capture their color. Spring is behind us now, and there didn't seem to be much color in the California hills, until, with sticky monkey flowers as an entry point, I started noticing.

This extraordinary color transformed the morning's obligatory dog walk into something else, something quite beautiful. My brief pause to appreciate a color sparked an idea. One aspect of my professional work is to offer live, digital graphic recording of meetings. Using an I-Pad, I capture conversations, in words and images, as they happen, and the results are displayed on the screen as participants talk. The application I use for this work is called Procreate, and Procreate offers the option of creating customized color palettes. I decided, with sticky monkey flowers as an inspiration and entry point, that I'd create a custom palette of all the colors of Huckleberry Hill!

To do this, I needed to capture colors in photographs, then upload them to my I-Pad, where I could use the application's color picker to create my palette. So today I took a new lens on my walk up Huckleberry Hill. It wasn't about exercise. It wasn't about the dogs. It wasn't about enjoying the view. I started to discover colors.

First I grabbed photos of the huckleberries in all their shades of ripening. After that I fell in love with the gentle gray/green of lichen. I was intrigued by the hundred shades of gray in stones on the path. I fell in love with the new green of a Monterey Pine sapling.

And so, I adventured on, oblivious to time and space, lost in a world I'd walked through dozens of times, but never quite seen in this way. The foggy, gray coastal morning blossomed into color. My eyes were opened.

This little re-telling of my morning walk brings me back to a question a friend asked me yesterday, a question about my spiritual practice. What I replied at the time amounted to this: life is my spiritual practice. I can do a 30-minute meditation practice, or daily journaling, or art therapy, or reiki . . . there are probably thousands of spiritual technologies to choose from . . . but as good as they feel, they don't seem to stick for me, or not long anyway. I want to let each moment of my life be a teacher, a spiritual practice.

What do I mean by a spiritual practice? Now that I have written those words, I realize I am not so sure of the answer. It feels like I am on a quest to live a fully human life, which by my definition is a spiritual life, a life where I am connected to everything. This means staying awake rather than losing myself in the trance of thinking, and identifying who I am with those thoughts. I was at a loss to explain to my friend just "how" I approach life as spiritual practice, but my morning's encounter with color provides the example I lacked.

Being fully human means, to me, not falling asleep at the wheel. It means falling in love with what the moment offers. Offering it reverence and deep attention. It means changing it and being changed by it at the same time. I was gifted with that experience this morning. It was a walking meditation and journey into the mystery.

The good news is, you and I don't need sticky monkey flowers and huckleberries to practice staying awake. The iridescent colors of a bubble in the dishwater will do. The purr of the dryer can be a symphony. The strange tingling, aches and cravings of our bodies offer an entry point. Everything speaks. Everything is connected. And I have to stop here, because the sound of my fingers tapping on the keys of my laptop is inviting me to remember my wings and fall into the warm embrace of a smile.

Don't wait. Start right now. No spiritual teachers are required. There are no books to be read. Life will teach you, if you let it. Start right now!