Just a moment

So there is this moment and like most moments and experience words only capture shadows of what was.  But I have been reflecting on this space where I am moved, and transported somewhere else and out of time.  It is that spot where you don’t feel in control, but not out of control.  It is a sense of being so fully present that the purpose of the activity is lost and meaningless.

This is fleeting and rarely felt and never captured.  The only other place I find it outside of him is on the wheel. The rhythm and spinning of the heavy concrete flywheel… the sound as it goes around and around and around. The feel of the wet clay under my hands. Normally bending to my pressure to my movements. The clay, at my best, is an extension of my vision for it. Yet in these moments that is not the case.  Rather I become an extension of the clay. Me, the clay, the water, the wheel are one.  One in the moment and it doesn’t matter when this happens, what the final product is.  Those moments are not about the pot produced but the moment that was experienced. Those pots are the ugliest to me because they in no way reflect the experience.

It is when I am holding him perhaps, and can smell his body pressed closed to me, feel the warmth and firmness of his body in my arms and hear his heart beating.  Nothing else is happening, taken out of time nothing else exists just that moment.  This is fleeting, but when It occurs there is this sense of deep connection.  It can occur sitting face to face and looking into one another’s eyes for an extended period of time and become lost.  I become not myself, but not someone else.  This zen is hard fought for, and in fact fighting is not the way  to achieve it.  It is experience at its purest.