A Doorway to Presence

https://jillmaccormack.substack.com/p/a-doorway-into-presence

Beauty and difficulty carry us all in life. Our power is where our attention rests and our attention is a form of bearing witness. A story of remembrance.

Staring at a screen I can forget

there is a sky with flapping winged creatures

swimming through it.

To be alive, I must remember.

This is the story of one remembrance.

This world, a doorway into presence.

“The doors to the world of the wild self, are few but precious.” Clarissa Pinkola Estes

Standing at the sink peeling potatoes from a 50 lb bag, again, somehow, I’ve forgotten there is a sky and it is almost dusk beyond my window.

Then a motion outside catches me and glancing upwards, my attention moves, heart leaping, away from the place where potato flesh and my flesh meet

to this: the waxing crescent moon hung high to the southwest just as the crows, hundreds of them,

flap their winged dance across the pale and blue between the moon and I, back home to their night roost.

And suddenly I am flapping, human, sky and crow, with them, pierced by the pulsing urgency aliveness brings. I stand and stare agog as though I’ve never seen the moon or crows or sky before,

my thumb and fingers of my right hand gripping a knife, fixed in peeling motion, my left holding the wet cold flesh of a half- peeled potato.

What kind of an epiphany is this?

Then just as my heart begins to settle,

a skiff of charcoal cloud drifts into view, obscuring, faintly, the sharp- edged borders of the white sky- scythe which only moments before had sliced me into pieces.

A staggering of beauty.

And just as fast as life itself moves, they’ve vanished; they are gone.

So I continue peeling potatoes, which, placed in water, boil, are eaten and a November darkness claims the world. The sky!

Later on the evening carries hushed tones of heartache in whispers, one soul to another. It hurts. It hurts to be alive.

And then the sad news of a death brings with it a fitful sleep of tossing in and out of the awareness of my own mortality and that of all I love.

The earth! The sky! The waters! This body, mine and yours. It hurts sometimes. It hurts to be alive.

Then somehow, as it has always done, the morning rose again and with it came a welcome gentle brightness.

And so I did what living asks of me in morning time.

Got up and dressed, stood barefoot at the sink to fill the kettle

and as I did I saw them,

the crows,

those mighty, mournful, curious beasts of such intelligence,

and these particular ones

returning with all of their black flapping wildness there before me.

Returning to cut the morning light into hundreds, thousands, perhaps millions of little pieces of bright that my heart knows as true.

Swift like insects they moved with great and beautiful wings, darting across the canvas of diaphanous pink, and muted blue and white and grey.

What is this world? Who are they? Am I?

I turned to put the kettle on, feeling a keenness I couldn’t name:

poignancy? gratefulness?

It felt as though a symphonic crescendo of all that’s good and beautiful and possible, still possible, rushed into me. Oh such beauty! Oh such wonder!

I wanted it. Wanted it with all the want of life. Wanted it to stay with me for a while or even ever.

But as the kettle boiled the water in its belly, thoughts of the day arose and swirled in me: what was scheduled, might happen- and they tried to convince me, to fill me with their myriad concerns and with my caring.

Instead, I stood there quietly, alone, as sentinel to my own heart and watched the clear clean water as it roiled, bubbled and settled back to still.

Presence. I fell into presence.

Like tea leaves awaiting water, I was.

And then!

And then-

the sky within became so vast, so spacious

the waters within me, still.

The dawning of all I might become

and everything I’ll never be but this.

All nothing, nothing, everything but this.

This!

How long it claimed me, I do not know for this was not the territory of knowing but being. And following was brightness.

Bright like morning light that swallows up the dark and for this (and for potatoes and so much else) I am grateful.

Beauty and difficulty carry us all in life. Our power is where our attention rests. Our attention is a form of bearing witness.

Thanks for your time in reading! (My apologies if you have received this twice.)

”If you yearn for a deeper life, a full life, a sane, life, that is a door.”

Clara Pinkola Estes

Jill M. MacCormack (she/her)

 neurodivergent writer and mindfulness meditation practitioner on a small Canadian island in a great big sea

a kinder world begins with self-kindness :)