Nate Hagens

The way the wind moves a particular tree branch.

The face of someone you love when they don't know you're looking.

Frank looking at me like I'm his entire universe.

When you let yourself be stopped, when you stop, when the world offers you something like those things, that actually is the practice of presence.

Beauty, defined by you, is the present moment announcing itself.

And the metacrisis aware mind has often trained itself to push beyond these announcements because there is so much heavier, real work to do.

I now think this is a mistake.

The announcements are the work, or at least an essential part of it, to get us into the psychological, physical space to do the work.

The fifth path or suggestion is the hardest.

And I don't know whether to call it the gift of finitude or prescience or perhaps even awe.

The reason that presence is so difficult and so important for many people, but especially those of us who have learned what we're learning on this platform, is that we've been given a strange and terrible gift.

We've been given a sharper than usual awareness of the contingency and connectedness of everything.

the species on earth that go extinct, the forests that burn, the institutions that will likely fail, the carbon pulse that is depleting.

We carry these things as a daily companion, the knowledge that what is here today will not always be here.

Um, and that the ordinary world is not ordinary and that this particular Baltimore Oriole and this particular cup of coffee and the morning light, uh, on that morning, a couple of weeks ago that I missed, these have never happened before and they will not happen again.

And all these things are not guaranteed to anyone.

And such awareness held wrongly is the driving engine of our dread.

I talked about that last time.

But if we held these things differently, and I can envision this, but not quite actualize it fully myself, it's the engine of presence.

Because if everything is contingent, and if the present is the only place where contingent things can be experienced and received, then attention to the present moment becomes the most appropriate possible response to the situation we find ourselves in.