Present
Connie Earl, UNECOM

"What is the present?" I ask
as I tell myself to live within it. For years
I've looked ahead
planned
sought insight to take me further down this path, and now
this path is open before me, cavernous, compelling and so little explored.
Where do you find the present when sometimes everything around you has
gone dark?

"What is the present?" I ask
as I look to confine myself to it. Is it today,
with its commitments leading to the next and the next? Is it this meeting
which makes me yearn for the person I long to be?

And yet, I've spent
these last years learning the present moment in the most primal, visceral way;
in fact teaching others how to live in its elusive cradle, to let go, to give over,
to breathe…

"Don't push the river," I'd say.

And I find myself now, late at night, trying to stop its flow
Here,
to speed its flow There, and I wonder how it is that I can't reconcile these two people;
how could I lose that insight?

How can this part of me live only in the past while I seek the present? Isn't it this woman who brought me to this very moment? How could I have left her behind, I think, when she has taught me so much?

As I am dragged under, searching wildly for her above the surface,
seeing nothing,
I am forced to surrender.

And then suddenly she is there, waiting patiently all along for me to re-member, to open my eyes and invite her in, waiting patiently for me to let go, to give over,

to breathe.

The Healer's Voice Home

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