Take Me To Your River
In the last few months I've discovered a deep love for Pt Reyes and its surrounding areas. It's close enough for a day trip, and far enough to feel the weight and pressures and anxiety of my day-to-day life lift. This old white barn is at Pt Reyes Station. It conjures up thoughts of a blank slate, of starting over. I feel like I'm in constant start-up mode...the natural way of things for a substitute teacher I suppose. It's both uncomfortable and reassuring at the same time.
It's uncomfortable because I haven't quite felt like I've had a secure footing for a long time. But it's reassuring in the sense that it's impermanent...This assignment will end. This frustration with a specific student or circumstance will end. This feeling of aimless floating will end.
And one day I'll find my more permanent job. One day I'll look back on this time and be able to appreciate all that it has taught me. In his book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts writes,
But tomorrow and plans for tomorrow can have no significance at all unless you are in full contact with the reality of the present, since it is in the present and only in the present that you live. There is no other reality than present reality, so that, even if one were to live for endless ages, to live for the future would be to miss the point everlastingly.
Something that both Alan Watts and Eckhart Tolle address is the idea of resisting the flow of life being akin to resisting the flow of a river. I'm working on letting go of swimming against, fighting against, planning for and always looking forward or backward. I want to live with ease and flow with the river of life.
xxo