Just lying on the couch and being happy.
Only humming a little, the quiet sound in the head.
Trouble is busy elsewhere at the moment, it has
so much to do in the world.
People who might judge are mostly asleep; they can’t
monitor you all the time, and sometimes they forget.
When dawn flows over the hedge you can
get up and act busy.
Little corners like this, pieces of Heaven
left lying around, can be picked up and saved.
People won’t even see that you have them,
they are so light and easy to hide.
Later in the day you can act like the others.
You can shake your head. You can frown.
by William Stafford
Many of the poems that we feature here in this blog, that feel mindful, take us from the busy distracted mind towards moments of space, peace and presence. We need to be taken through this door, and poems are little doorways. This poem however, by Twentieth Century American poet William Stafford, begins in the luxuriation of a moment fully embraced – a ‘piece of heaven’, and then seems to concede to the inevitability of going back through the doorway into the melee of a busy mind and life.
Yet even though that necessity to return exists, because the fulsome early morning moment was deeply absorbed, might the day ahead feel just slightly different? The piece of heaven that was not ‘left lying around’ and was instead taken to heart may well live on clandestinely in the body as the poet gets up off the couch.
There’s something so particularly enticing about the way Stafford makes these moments feel contraband. Quiet little rebellions of mindfulness that are intimately secret. He encourages us to swim against the pervasive tide of doing, monitoring progress and conforming. He seems to be saying ‘Claim this moment as yours to enjoy, don’t give a care to what ‘they’ think. Let taking joy in the moment matter.’
Throughout the day I’m aware of many forks in the road. I can continue full pelt through the to do list and end the day frowning and rung out, or I can claim moments of appreciation for just being in between tasks and stay loyal to a human timescale, rather than a mechanical one. Might time be elastic? If I rebel against the urgency of getting on with it all, will I really end up regretting it and failing to keep up? I’ve been entering into the stealthy experiment of claiming these ‘little corners’ as gifts to myself for a couple of days now, and I feel enriched! There’s a gentle mirthful joy about it, like a serene smile with a wink. And my world hasn’t fallen apart yet.
Will you join in the experiment?
PS if you’d like to practice pausing and claiming ‘little corners’ of time and space alongside others, there’s a new Mindfulness level 1 course starting soon…
Photo by Laurence BL on Unsplash