This day in Daydreaming on the Porch

Look to this day!
For it is life, the very life of life.
For yesterday is already a dream,
and tomorrow is only a vision;
But today, well-lived,
makes every yesterday a dream of happiness,
and every tomorrow a vision of hope.

From The Sanskrit

…The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live;
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears;
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears…

William Wordsworth
From Ode: Intimations of Immortality

To live each day well — it seems so insurmountable a task on those weary mornings when we rise for work and all the worlds we’ve discovered in the past are the past, and a sameness has settled over our lives and routines, that comforting sameness and lack of surprise that dwells in the very heart of each of us. And for all the comforts which this balm of sameness provide, and for their cushion against shock, still it seems as if the rude awakenings of life, the haunting sorrows, the failures, and by the same token, the knowledge of love, the joy of springtime remembered, the cloudy, hot, swallow-filled skies at sunset above me on the porch, the restfulness in dreamy abandonment of cares — it seems as if all those memories, good and bad, are what mostly comprise the life of the present, as if the moment itself reveals nothing.

But we must be careful about relying upon the past too heavily for enlightenment and truth, the sages tell us. Confronting the exacting and precious moment, the here and now which is trying to reveal life’s subtle essences to me, I have sat here oblivious to the possiblity of grasping this knowldge, this great truth that the present moment is all I have, all that the memories rest upon. Oblivious until now, when I make the effort to understand.

On a quiet and still Sunday morning at 10:15, I look out my window and see the branches of the oak tree blowing in a gathering wind. This is my happiness. Not the thrill of some ecstatic and passing sensation of the senses or desires, or re-living old memories continuously, but the knowledge of being alive to the possibility of greater love, and beauty and hope. For it is true that in the present moment are born the seeds of future happiness, which reside in the vision of my soul at rest, as it is now trying to be.

(Written Sept. 17, 2000)