How much of life do we miss because
we're looking for what we expect to see?
Last Wednesday felt significant. A solar eclipse was coinciding with the Perseid meteor shower.
I didn’t have eclipse glasses. Nor did I want to faff with a colander or making a viewer.
I knew I couldn’t look at the sun.
But what about everything else?
What about the light? What would happen to the oaks?
And to the fields? I wanted to be there.
What might I see if I couldn’t look where everyone else was looking?
The eclipse hype was huge here in the UK. Still, I was surprised by how many people gathered. I'd never seen so many people waiting in the Great Park.
Families lined the flood defence banks. Children held cereal boxes converted into homemade eclipse viewers. People sat alone and together with picnics, blankets, drinks and, yes, colanders.
In the way the smell of bread baking can fill a home, expectation drifted over the fields as the sun moved into position for its date with the moon.
I headed towards the west-facing back field to see what would unfold.
As I walked, I looked up into the wide, clear sky.
Above me was a single, large and unusually distinct cloud.
It was unmistakably shaped like a dove.
In that moment, my father was with me.
I hadn’t been thinking of him particularly, thought I know he would have loved the eclipse.
As I followed that dove cloud, I felt my father’s presence around me.
I walked into that golden light with my shadow stretching away to the east.
My grief danced with the beauty of the moment.
It’s been more than two years since my dad passed. I miss him.
Yet, I no longer experience grief only as something painful that arrives to remind me of what I've lost. Moments like this bring him close to me again.
Grief belongs to life because love belongs to life.
On Wednesday evening, I didn’t need grief or beauty to disappear.
They belonged there in the field, together with the cloud, the oaks and the light of the sun.
In that moment, even before the peak of the eclipse, I felt complete.
The evening, the light, the landscape had given me back to myself and connected me with my father.
I wrapped all of that around my heart. I didn’t mind what was to come.
As eclipse time approached, I considered sitting down with everyone else.
But something in me wanted to keep walking. So I did.
The light grew thick as golden syrup and played in the branches of the oaks.
Shadows stretched themselves to contribute to the very slight darkening of light.
Around me, people sat with cardboard glasses pressed to their faces.
Everyone was facing west.
I watched everything around it.
A flock of starlings appeared in murmuration over the next field.
They flowed together before flying up overhead to somewhere only they knew.
No one looked up.
I looked East and north and south.
I looked up and I felt my feet connect with the earth.
I noticed the light.
I felt my breath.
I felt my father.
I felt joy.
And a wealth that can’t be counted.
In the richness of this moment, I knew this would be one of the ones that last.
A pinned memory that outshines all of the other evening walks I have taken across these fields.
Not because of the eclipse.
But because of everything that wasn’t the eclipse.
Everything that was around the eclipse that I opened myself to receive.
By 7.30 the full evening brightness was back after dimming only slightly.
Around me, I could hear people saying how disappointed they were.
We'd been promised 93%.
I understood. If I had gone expecting darkness, I would have been disappointed too.
Instead, I came home filled with awe.
I hadn’t really seen the eclipse.
I had seen everything around it.
How much of life do we miss because we're looking so intently for what we expected to see?
I don’t know if I would have experienced that evening in quite the same way eight months ago.
My relationship with the ancient oaks has changed the way I pay attention.
They have taught me to notice relationship.
Between light and shadow.
Between tree and soil.
Between what is living and what is dying.
Between myself and what is happening around me.
Life expresses itself through relationship.
This month, I’ve been exploring what happens when those relationships come into greater harmony.
Coherence.
Not the absence of difficulty, but our capacity to remain connected to ourselves and to life when a moment contains more than one thing.
Beauty and grief.
Presence and absence.
Certainty and mystery.
Pressure and possibility.
Coherence isn't something we find beneath an oak and leave there.
It's something we learn to carry into the whole of life.
Perhaps there's somewhere in your own life where you're looking intently for what you expected to see?
An outcome you're waiting for. Something you're trying hard to change, achieve, resolve or understand.
Just for a moment, I look somewhere else.
Look around.
Feel your feet.
Notice your breath.
Notice what's alive.
Notice what's already in relationship with you.
What becomes available that you couldn't see before?
This is part of what happens in an Oak Presencing Experience.
The oak isn't there to give you an answer.
It offers another place from which to see—yourself, your life and what might be possible from there.