Do you ever pause in the middle of your unfolding day with a feeling of having awoken from some profoundly convincing dream?

     I ask this because in recent years, every so often I’ve had what you might call a mini-awakening. A little realization. A small epiphany, say.

     I’ll be going along, involved in whatever tasks I’m busy with, or maybe walking somewhere aimlessly, or with purpose, and the next thing I know I’m standing there senseless. I come to as if waking in the middle of some compelling drama. I don’t know how else to describe it. Perhaps some ghost of an impulse flits through my mind to trigger it, but suddenly I’m acutely aware of this particular Now in the long line of Nows that is my life. What I’m doing at this minute: expand it to the distant past and the far future, and it makes up the entirety of moments that comprise my lifetime. It’s an essential and inevitable part, inseparable from any other, without which I am incomplete.

     “This is it!” I’ll think to myself. This is the moment I awoke to the insight, emerged into awareness.

     Now as if floating above myself, wholly aware of everything here and now and everywhere and everywhere all at once, I hover over my body. I can see me there, paused, having this waking dream. Then after a delicious, delirious pause, as if the two of us decide together, we slowly wander onward in the direction and pace we were maintaining before this occurred, deliberately walking with each step into the rest of our life.

     The first time this happened, I wrote a poem about the experience. Not at the time, of course, because evidently when these epiphanies occur there is no bandwidth for anything else!

     Like any poem, mine makes a failed stab at describing what words can never quite touch. So it’s appropriate that I wrote it in Haiku form, that uniquely Zen vessel of poesy that fits the concept perfectly.

Enlightenment

In the wood, sudden
Happiness kisses my face
Dances outside words!

~ from my book
“Haiku, Shmaiku and Headin’ Out to Sea”

     Since that encounter, I’ve had this happen numerous times. Of course, I welcome every one. Walking in the woods is often the impetus for suddenly drifting off the forest floor to rise slowly to the level of the highest trees. But it can hit anywhere: sitting in a café, standing in line at the DMV, walking down a busy city street, standing up to go into another room.

     It’s easy to miss the sensation when it arrives and to go back to the relentless pull of Do! Do! Do! But sometimes I’ll pause long enough for the fact of me being me, standing here thinking of this in the midst of a life on the ground under the sky in a world in a universe filled with everything, to sink in. There will occur a sort of enlargement, a subtle but unmistakable shift in roles between observer and observed, a stepping as if for the first time into something in which I am already so deeply embedded. The waking dream.

      I try to make it happen more often nowadays, but I can’t always seem to recreate that serendipitous moment on purpose. It seems the best ones descend when I am in between tasks, finishing up one thing and stepping back to see what’s next, not aware of myself. Then suddenly, I am!

      Another word for it is ‘living in the moment’.  As anyone will tell you, it ain’t easy. You have that little “aha!” moment, then hours later realize that you’ve somehow drifted back into your everyday quotidian world. But it’s not too hard to then step back in and say, This, too, is the moment. Aha! Here I am once more. Déjà vu all over again. It’s just me, little ole me, at yet another point in the cycle. And accomplish a little reset.

     This is it!

__________________________

     Have you ever had this memorable experience? What was yours like? I’d love to hear your adventures with mini-awakenings–or even those big once-or-twice a lifetime ones.

     Meanwhile, keep your third eye open. You might just get a visitation!