Accepting what is

I'm sure I've written about this before: I seem to belong to that class of people who are unduly sensitive to or influenced by what they see. Which means I was taking a risk yesterday by volunteering to go with a friend to see the new movie Avatar in 3D.

It was hard, I won't deny it: there was way more violence than I'm comfortable with, and the underlying assumptions -- or should I say, reminders? -- about the lengths to which our society will go to assuage greed were equally horrifying.

But I loved the color -- of course -- and the idea of a world where people understand the essential oneness of life and can physically connect to it was enchanting. I'm just not sure it's enough to postulate that such a world exists, or that there might be some of us who are capable of crossing over into it.

Because there was still a sense of insiders and outsiders, of good guys and bad guys, and it bugged me that the bad guys had no redeeming features, and that the only way to overcome their evil was with more killing. On the other hand, if the two civilizations had managed to somehow strike a balance or achieve a truce without all that firepower the lines outside the theater might not be so long (even in mid afternoon!)

When I left the theater to drive home through the dark and the pouring rain (never my favorite thing to do) I was still under the influence of the movie -- much of which depicts the heroes flying around on giant pterodactyl-like creatures -- and as a result my car felt almost alive under me. So when I was reading Eckhart Tolle this morning, and being encouraged to stop and get a sense of some nearby inanimate object, I could better understand what he might be getting at.

Reading Tolle's observations about the connection we can come to feel in the wildness of the forest, it brought me back to images of the movie, and so this shot -- of a remarkably anthropomorphic tree -- seemed to speak to me this morning.

We are so surrounded with life, and yet our minds keep lunging forward into worry and anticipation, or back into regrets and nostalgia. I encourage you to take some time today, not necessarily meditation time, just a few minutes, and try to be in tune with where you are, with now, with the hum of your computer or the purring of your cat; with the power of the car you're driving or the feel of your seat, or the floor beneath your feet, the warmth of your coffee cup.

There is something amazingly precious about this moment, right here, right now: something valuable in the pain or the challenge that you face; a rightness to things. But we have to stop projecting past and future onto what's around us to feel that sense of connection, that deep openness that comes from accepting what IS.