Anadi and I spent Christmas Day running and jogging and walking around the Royal Parks of London… With no plan, no path mapped out… The day unfolding in joyous fun.
We had begun it chanting the Gayatri Mantra 108 times, which felt timeless – as if there wasn’t a beginning or end and so the day continued… We packed our skipping ropes and credit cards! Just in case a coffee opportunity arose – and off we went
Making our path as we walked it….
Antonio Machado is a very famous Spanish poet… His poem ‘Caminante no hay Camino’ – Walker there is no path – inspired me as I ran barefoot across Spain in 2018….’ The poem continues… ‘Se haces el camino al andar’
You make the path by walking it…’
And so this is my life – making my path by walking it – and Christmas Day our metaphor.
Running about and seeing what happened, where we went, who we talked to, where we found a coffee oasis…
Machado goes on to liken our past to standing on a boat – looking behind and watching the wake disappearing back into the sea… Like it never happened…
This resonated very deeply with me – the past is gone – there is only now – and there is no future… There is only the step we’re in.
It reminded me of my life, wandering about is my favourite thing, or running about!
All exists is this moment. All exists is this step. There is nothing else at all…
And so we stopped near the Albert memorial and fed the squirrels and practised our skipping – Anadi is a lot better than me! 🙂 And people came by and we greeted one another ‘Merry Christmas’
Some stopped, two women perhaps nearing 80 years – ‘Well done’ they said ‘We played tennis this morning and now we’re out for our stroll’… A man in a bright Christmas jumper – with almost more holes than jumper ‘I always like to sit here and read, every day’ he said ‘This jumper is very old’, he continued ‘but it has sentimental value…’
The parks were full of others wandering, making their path by walking it on this Christmas day, 2020 – each moment sacred – never to be experienced again
To be fully here now however, there is often much inner work to be done because all the time we are ‘reacting’ out of the hurts from our past, then we cannot be in the present moment…
And so we must feel these hurts whenever they arise in the experience of now, in order to freely and fully connect to the absolute present…
And from this place of letting go new impulses, which are not connected to our past patterns and scripts, can emerge from the silence within us.
To connect to our silence, we have much clearing to do and this often entails many paths that seem lead us in a circle!
And so life an endless paradox, often seems a riddle and an unsolvable puzzle…
But we can keep making our path by walking it – and sometimes happen upon an unexpected coffee shop – open on Christmas Day!
And so this is how we came to be sitting in Marble Arch with the pigeons and other people drinking coffee…
Now.
No riddle to solve, or seemingly unsolvable puzzle, because it’s so is simple, now, while sitting with Anadi on a cold Christmas Day, sipping a coffee…
‘Walker there is no path…’