John Tarrant
Editor’s Note: Meditation practice can help us to see our world freshly, to appreciate the simple beauty and perfection of ordinary things.
It is natural to look for the things you want outside of where you are now. Yet this moment is all anyone has. So if freedom, love, beauty, grace, and whatever else is desirable are to appear, they must appear in a now. It would be nice if they appeared in the now you have now. And if they are to appear and endure, they will have to be found in ordinary circumstances, since ordinary circumstances fill most of life. The marvelous, the lovely, will have to be right here in the room where someone is reading, someone is sick, someone is coughing, two people are making love, or a man is yelling at a dog. It will have to appear in the sound of rain splashing off trees, of a truck laboring up a grade, of TV from another room. It will have to appear in the sight of a child running, in the feeling of a headache, in the anxiety of preparing for exams, in worrying over a sick child, it will have to appear in what is ordinary, usual, commonplace, and right under your nose.
When you observe common things closely they have an emphatic quality, a thusness that is like a charge around them and which is both beautiful and satisfying. To see the way the corners of the room meet or the light bounces off the floorboards is enough of a reason for life. Painters understand that the interesting object is the round glass, the box, the rusty downspout and that there is no need to reach for a meaning beyond what is visible. By their beauty, objects bring the eye of the beholder into contact with infinity.
There is another quality of ordinary mind, which is the interior of consciousness, our thoughts, the shift of feeling and sensation. Ordinary means that there is no need to add or take away from what is going on in the mind. Each portion of life has the whole of life. There is nothing wrong with what is in the mind except the sense that something is wrong. In this way, simplicity turns to a form of compassion. When there is no objection to the states of mind that arise–ordinary or painful or thick–then they have their moment and move along, like clouds in the trade winds. And there is no flaw in the thinker or in the moment that is taking place.
