Recently I spent five minutes just sitting on our backyard patio table and seeing what I could be present for, what I could notice. What I realized is that the world beneath my crazy life is infinite. In that five minutes, I heard wind chimes chiming, listened to the honking and roaring of traffic on a nearby street, saw the roses blowing in the breeze, watched the orange tree standing still and proud in the flowerbed across the yard, witnessed the sun moving just an inch across the sky, just enough to make the clouds take a different shape. I heard birds and saw bugs and felt the breeze on my arms. There was just so much going on, but I had to stop and look and make it a conscious effort to notice. And it only took five minutes. And I wasn’t sorry. It was beautiful. And it was all right there, in my own backyard.
This can happen in your classroom as well. When the kids are working, just stop. Focus your attention on the present moment. Look around. What do you see? The kid in the third row scratching his nose? What do you smell? The teacher in the next room making microwave popcorn again? What do you hear? Kids laughing and squealing in the halls outside your door. What else do you notice? What other world is going on just beneath your world? What other life is constantly happening just beneath your life?
Trust me: It’s there.
***
I was so moved and inspired by my experience on my back porch, I wrote this poem:
There is a world
beneath our world
where the wind chimes dance
and ring
where silver sparrows whisper
the eulogies of dying leaves
where the nearby traffic
grumbles its way into its
smoggy oblivion
where the orange tree
stands at mute attention,
but casts a daring look
at the nearby swarm
of hovering bees.
There is a world
beneath our world
where roses hum like a choir,
their outstretched petals raised
in reverence, their
harmonies pure and tight.
It is a world where the wind,
like a genie’s carpet,
flies in and sails by us,
fluttering the hairs on our flesh,
where the sun
when it moves but an inch, alters
the multitudinous shadows.
It is a world beneath
our world that is always
alive, but is only truly
witnessed in the silence
of our profound stillness. TZT