I used to mistake the wind for the workings of my mind.
The whirlwind I first felt as a child. Gusts kicking up bits of leaves, paper, feathers, dust, and debris. That is what my thoughts seemed composed of.
It is hard to settle a mind like that, always caught in a vortex of movement.
Which suited me back then. It suited the speed I was being urged to accommodate, rather than the reverse. Rather than imagining, in my wildest dreams, that I could affect the speed of the world.
But I have learned that I can.
And that I do.
Every time my mind becomes an anchor rather than another element in the storm.
To take the time to ponder the smallest nuances in a landscape, the tiniest movements in an ocean of movement. This has become, not my work exactly, but my practice.
I don’t need mantras or teachers. I don’t crave sitting in groups of others to quell my jumping nerves.
I need only give myself permission to pay attention to nothing.
Nothing becomes my default. Nothing becomes my set point.
And like the cosmos outside me, planets orbiting in a space too vast to contemplate – and why try? – I allow myself to create from the blackness, from the void, from this place the world is fond of calling nothing.
Where nothing is.
Where nothing arises.
Yet is the genesis of everything.
It is the place potential resides, including my own, including yours.
It is the anchor, the still point from which galaxies are born.
I love to linger there.