Now Is All There Is

and my portal is sensation.

Photograph by my father, Ken Johnson

I’m about to get on a plane to New Zealand and I’m having memories of the last time I was there and some words I wrote on my last trip back in April. They came in a flurry of inspiration after I’d finished Alan Watt’s book ‘The Wisdom Of Insecurity’. It really moved me and challenged how I relate to the present moment. I love when those habitual dust clumps in your mind get all shook up and you begin to realize just how much you’ve been living in the fantasy spaces of past and future. I don’t want to keep escaping to the realms of abstraction over the gritty stuff of Life itself. I read it out loud into my phone when I was in a hotel in Kyoto last June and you can listen to that below. I hope it aids in your arrival to the place where you always are.

NOW IS ALL THERE IS 

By Kimbra Johnson

I ground into this vessel
With little thought for self
I touch the leather seat beneath me
And feel ‘cool’ ‘sticky’
Names for sensations
I am not separate
There is no ‘me’ apart from the experience
I root into my feet
They are resting on a hum of moving processes that appear to me static
I am not separate
My body knows this
But my mind divided itself lusting for escape from pain
But the attempt to escape pain
Only forced me into greater strife
For if I could touch this pain
Like the cool, sticky leather seat
I would come to experience
That the pain is part of pleasure
And everything is changing
If I could experience this houseguest 
without the need to name
If I could see it as my own breath
and seek not to hold it
Or run in violent pace away from it’s presence
I would quietly begin to make room
There would be no me and no you
For I do not exist without Sun and without Moon
I am one creative process 
Known only through experience
The moment I compare this experience
with memory or prediction
It is no longer ‘cool’ and ‘sticky’
It is not enough or simply existing relative to something else
Which is not to exist at all
Now it is abstraction
So, to the moment I return
Devoid of a longing for what I cannot see
Penetrating only the fresh, profound, self-less, essential, ever-changing moment
Of what is here right now
Pleasure and pain
Without need to change it
I dance simply to dance
Not to get anywhere
Life is not opposite to death
Death is the ultimate change and plunge into unknowing
It is where we come from
But it is part of us
I vow to be undivided
Not through thought 
But through sensation, and naturally, the love that follows
The creative action of this Universe
compels me to taste and see
To absorb and experience
There is no ‘I’ that needs to escape
Because now is all there is
One cannot escape from what is
We suffer in our attempts to be free from the raw intimacy of Reality
But to be free is to surrender
And watch ourselves act truthfully in response to the present moment
Not from stories of the past and fixations on the future 
That is to live without freedom
Never present to the pleasures in front of us
Thinking only of how to maintain them for longer
Hungering for security
Forgetting that change is our only certainty in life
Nothing is static
We make things static when we put them into the realm of thought and language
Memory and prediction
Past and future
I lay down Self with my will
I release the lie of separation
which keeps me running from what is
Convinced that I am looking at pain rather than experiencing pain and therefore one with it
There is no escaping what is
When I relax into this, I am freed of the need to escape
It will move through me and change
If I hold my breath I’ll lose it 

For those who would like to hear this read aloud….