April, Fourth WeeK

“Traitor,” I admonish my computer when it has the audacity to inform me that today is the first day of Daylight Saving Time. Further, it has automatically set my clock forward. I hate Daylight Saving Time. I always have; I always will. I couldn’t care less whether the people in the cities want to drive to work in the dark or want to drive home in the dark. And I even hated it before I lived in the country. My body just does not readjust easily. Of course, living in Arizona for four years, where they don’t buy that city-time stuff either, has definitely influenced me not to want to be knocked about by time changes. Here in the country, I’ll keep my own time.

One thing for sure, I’ll get up when I wake up, and I’ll wake up when I’ve finished sleeping. “Time is of the essence” is simply not true; time is non-essential. That is, unless you are committed to a routine of slavery. Even all the critters keep quiet on cold wet gloomy mornings. No alarm clocks for them either. They are content to work only when weather conditions are good. However, not one inclined to being a dictator, I check with all the bees, birds and butterflies. Neither do they have any interest in “getting going” an hour earlier this morning. We all agree that we are going to get up the same time as we always do. The things we have to do can be done at any time. We can live and love life at any hour of the day or night.

My clocks here are unreliable anyway. Because of the regular thunderstorms, the power continually blinks off and on, so my clocks cycle back to 12:00. I usually manage to reset one of them, leaving the rest to destroy my time reality with erroneous data. I mean at 5:00 in the afternoon when I look at a clock that reads 10:00, it destroys my orientation. It helps me break down the fixed timeclock reality that I have been conditioned with since birth.

I’ve always tended to wake up at sunrise, which means early in the summer, late in the winter. Have you ever noticed that the sun does not know to get up at the same time every day? Out here in the country, I don’t need to know what time it is, or what day it is. That’s the first question they ask when testing for Alzheimer’s: “What day is today?” I would fail at least fifty percent of the time.

My days are equal. I certainly don’t want to wait until Sundays to worship the sacred. This realization hits me every time I step out the door to the wonderful green cathedral that surrounds and embraces me. The natural glory that blesses me is nothing I’ve ever experienced in a church. There was a reason that the ancient temples in both Europe and Asia were in the open air, often under a huge spreading Banyan tree or in a grove of oaks. Was there a reason that we started worshipping inside buildings?

Some days are created with a vibration that enables us to experience easily our essential loveliness. I like to say that they are days that the gods decide to come down to earth to play—so they make a heavenly day. These days are gifts, to miss out on this gift is the same as being offered a platter piled with gold and saying, “No, thank you, I have to go sit in the office to earn $200 to pay the bills.” We have forgotten what a true treasure Life is. Or did we ever know?

Today is one of those superlative days, which put me in the mood for playing with the gods. I never know when these special moments are approaching. It’s definitely not that I do anything particular. I can’t even say that they come out of a certain frame of mind. The silence just seems to appear spontaneously out of thin air. I look up and there it is. Although this is the way it always seems to happen, I am continually surprised that it comes when I am not doing anything particular, but just being me, doing the ordinary things of my life.

For instance, the silence rolls in today while I am walking from the garden plot to the shed to get some straw to shade the earth around the beans. I just look up as a cloak of vibrant alive silence encompasses and encloses me. I know this is more likely to happen to me when I am out of doors, but I also experienced it many times inside the building of the Aurobindo Library in Pondicherry, India. Thoreau admitted he was totally dependent on being in nature for his epiphanies.

Once Judith, a wonderful friend and editor, asked me if I had been meditating regularly. “No, I have not,” I forthrightly confessed. “I just am not a person to sit down and meditate for long hours. Another path has to be discovered by me.”

I have struggled with this dilemma off and on for years. Occasionally, I have admonished myself, If I had only meditated one hour each day for the past five years, how would I be different now? It sounded like such an intriguing challenge. Why didn’t I take it on? But years would roll by and I didn’t.

The truth is I am inclined to be an active person. My very nature demands a certain level of activity, or I can get dulled out. Continually, I feel the challenge of finding a way to experience the peace of meditation in my life of action. After all, that is the first goal of meditation: to find the calm peaceful balance inherent in ourselves. The final goal is to experience our divine nature. However, to reach the pinnacle without going through the steps is rare. It can happen, but I can’t count on being lucky and getting struck down by light like St. Paul.

So my own spiritual practice is simply conscious action. “Skill in action” is the term Krsna uses in the Bhagavad Gita, the well-known text that contains the essence of Hindu thought. To me conscious action is my performing of tasks with a clear-minded awareness of what I am doing: body, emotions and intelligence all on the same team. Actually, Lord Krsna also said, “Skill in action is yoga.” Yoga is not standing on your head, or breathing a certain way. Yoga is being conscious of the connection to one’s higher Self.

It seems that in these moments of profound silence, I accept myself. The Me whom I accept has nothing to do with the me who does things in the world. I think spiritual practices are meant to unpeel the false layers that society has imposed upon me, or I have imposed upon myself. In so doing, I gradually get back to the essence of who I am. In this silence, I don’t feel there is anything to strip away. There’s nothing to peel change accept modify. There’s nothing to do.

In these terms, a poet and a nuclear scientist have the same opportunity to discover their inner core. This is the true equal-opportunity system where every man is created equal—not the system we have in today’s world. We may tout that all humans are created equal, they are not. And they are not treated equally. One can easily note the difference in the way a poet, a farmer, a doctor and a nuclear physicist are treated in our society.

In terms of self-awareness, it is impossible to judge that any action is better than another. A scientist designing power plants that can destroy the earth. A farmer planting seeds in the earth to feed his fellow countrymen. A poet extolling us to hear the melody of Life wrapped in a bird song.