The Gift Of The Present Moment

I mean, really, Gentle Reader, that's all we have.  The moment.  The present.  The present moment.  During my long walks and my interminable monologues in Spanish on my cell phone (they all think I'm talking to someone in Spanish  Well, maybe I am!) I keep returning to the subject of the gift of the present moment.  I often have to return there when I find myself getting spun out on tangents about matters that I am not able to solve or that are really none of my business.  Now I am not going to call this "Mindfulness," which to me is simplistic Buddha babble, a useless catchphrase for the unimaginative.  It is an interior state of awareness, a place where we can really begin to give thanks to the beauty of what God has given us and made us.  Perhaps living in the present, but something more.  It is living in a state of gratitude and enjoyment of the present.  This is where God, lives, where hope, faith and inspiration live.  This is the place where we are strengthened with love, to love.  It is easily lost and forgotten as I get caught up again in worries about the future or regrets over the past.  And then I have to remember again to focus on the present.  The sunlight filtering through the trees.  That flower over there.  Moss on a tree trunk.  The sound of a bird calling nearby.

This is God's gift to us, this gift of the present moment.  It is a refuge, a sanctuary.  The stillness is still too easily broken by distractions or sudden inconveniences or accidents.  And then we lose altogether this foretaste of Paradise and have to struggle again to regain this gift of the present.  It is a place of solitude, but authentic solitude where there is no loneliness for in this state of solitude we are joined to others and to the world.  This is where true prayer begins when in the gift of the present moment where we live and move in the presence of God that we come into true fellowship with
God, with Angels and Saints, with all of those who have lived before us and all those whom we live among now and those who will come after us.  We have only to open our heart and let the trickle of love begin.

This is where we gather the strength to forgive and to live lives of reconciliation and healing.