BE HERE NOW

The TV antenna guy is here, having just scaled the roof as casually as he would take an elevator, he is now in the lounge room playing with dials and testing the TV. For the last couple of months our TV has looked like there was a metallic grey blizzard in every location. Although I don't watch a lot of TV, getting it fixed is part of a general cleaning up of my life, a symbolic preparation, of tossing out the old to let in the new and sharpening the reception to listen to the signs that I need to hear.

This has been an incredibly healing time in my life, like the seeds that sprouts from the remains of a searing fire, I feel like I am ready to grow out into the sunshine again after the raging chaos of the last couple of years. What I am coming to realise by reading The Power of Now by Eckhardt Tolle is that most of the this chaos has been staged and played out in my mind.

The journey started for me 3 years ago when I first went travelling, a journey not so much to see the world but an attempt to find this missing piece of myself which I was convinced would be in India. I was certain that going to India would give me the sense of completeness and belonging that I had longed for all my life. For those that followed my Bollywood Dreaming blog you would know that this was not what happened, if anything I left feeling more confused than ever.

When I came back to Australia I was convinced that my completeness lay in finding a job in the arts and pursuing my calling. When that didn't work out as I planned I fell into a tail spin of depression. Wanting and needing anything to anchor myself to, I took the first job I could find and that recently ended like a bad horror movie. Then the miscarriage brought all of this longing and sadness to a head, as I again tried to anchor my lost soul onto something else. It was at this point that I realised that nothing was going to fill this gaping hole. That no matter what I did, what success I achieved, fame or fortune that it would still be there.

From my reading of late, largely spiritual books, I am coming to understand that this sense of incompleteness is part of the human condition. An aching need in all of us drives us to be better and to create, but also to consume and destroy. Our appetite gets bigger and bigger from the furstration of not be satiated. The sad part it seems is that we already have what it is that we so desperately seek, we have only to truly look within ourselves to see our own magnificent sense of perfection and wholeness.

Sounds easy right? Tolle claims that to see the perfection of ourselves and life we need to be here now. My first thought is; I am bloody well here now. But as I listened to myself I discovered that I have been checked out of the present for as long as I can remember, either digging through the past and trying to force it to make sense or reliving it's drama. Or by living far out into the future full of promising better-ness, shimmering like a desert mirage, or blazing red in an inferno of impending disaster.

So I am off to meditate and to BE HERE NOW.