I’m re-reading Toni Packer’s wonderful book The Wonder of Presence: And The Way of Meditative Inquiry.

She writes of when she and her husband saw Krishnamurti speak. Her husband “grew up in a puritanical family and was raised to be modest and honest, imbued with a strong drive for bettering himself. The idea of improving himself, of becoming a better person, was a strong motive in his family.”  When her husband heard Krishnamurti speak about “human beings’ everlasting endeavors to become something or somebody in the future”, he was struck.  He ran to her laughing and light. “Here I’ve been attempting to become a better person all my life – ha ha ha ha ha.”

I’m reminded of when I heard Marion Rosen, my teacher of Rosen Method, say “Perfection is static.”  I nearly fell off my chair.  What?  I’d been trying to be “perfect” all my life and now I was hearing that it wasn’t something I should want or desire.  First, what is “perfect” and second where is movement there. 

Toni Parker describes this as direct insight which is indescribable, but then she goes on. “It is that wondrous state of being in which the conditioned personality reveals itself for what it is – conditioning giving way to wholeness without lack, all things, people, mountains and oak trees being wondrously the way they are, nothing to be faulted, nothing to be improved.”

I don’t always remember this about striving and perfection but I do think walls have fallen around my perception of who, or what I, the crazy-making I, might be.

Since my walk at Muir Woods, I feel myself curving in delight, immersing in a place where time is just a concept imposed on a beautiful living, changing world we share.

Last night I watched the documentary Muscle Shoals.  It’s about perseverance, hard work and the connective and collective power of music guided by the sounds of the Tennessee river in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.  The native people call it the Singing River.

I lived on the Mississippi River for fifth grade and part of sixth so I returned to the rhythm of living by the movement of a river, the momentum and ease in watching life flow by.  My mother said it was hard to get anything done when the river called like a friend to be listened to, and to listen and soothe.

It’s raining today.  I made a fire and sat by the fireplace, finding my own rhythm reflected in the elements of which I’m made and with which I flow – earth, water, fire, wind, and air giving space.