Hmmm

Living life is much harder than mediation. When you are meditating you are in the practice of full acceptance. You are saying yes to every feeling thought and emotion that you experience, all the while sitting comfortably. When you live life you are judging situations and people, making decisions, and moving towards goals--all of this with the same internal internal yes we practice in meditation. These two directives seem contradictory at first, but they are not. On the inside we do not try to achieve anything. There is an effortlessness to our being. On the outside we strive, we toil, we fail and we grow.

Hummingbird

      The day Maria and I decided to embark on this blog, she went for a jog (did not mean to rhyme, just came out this time). She joged out up her street into the little pathway behind the beautiful rolling foothills of Palo Alto. On her way there, she saw a woman in a long yellow raincoat singing a song out loud as she rode leisurely on her bicycle through the park. Deja vu. Last time Maria went for a run, the same woman passed her by in the same way at the same exact intersection - meandering on her bicycle, slowly peddling past. This moment of intense awareness and complete saturation of the senses, prompted Maria to write this poem (borrowing a slight variation of T.S Elliot’s verse):

Out on my run

a hummingbird hovers close

to the web of a spider. A woman riding a

bike sings a note to every stroke of her foot.

Children watch nearby; it’s the same

lady in the same yellow raincoat singing that tune.

Another day by the park.

Another still point in a turning world.

Two friends blog about spirituality and modern life in silicon valley

      Straight out of Silicon Valley’s Stanford, this is a blog about spirituality in a life saturated with fast paced, high-tech dependent, social media’d out modern life.

      Nate and Maria’s lives and passions are eerily similar. They share a love for personal growth, technology, and entrepreneurship. Both are dedicated to a daily spiritual practice and both are hard at work managing and building their own companies. They will discuss philosophy, sciences (natural and behavioral), the arts, technology, whatever else their hearts desire, and how they bring about spiritual insights into our lives, that are both abstract (may stay there) and practical (we hope).

      When brainstorming a title for this blog Nate said he once read a ‘terrible long’ poem (which ended up being a T.S Elliot poem) but that had a beautiful verse in it that really stuck out to him: “At the still point of the turning world.” The poem is quite long. Here is the quartet that matters.

Time and the bell have buried the day,

The black cloud carries the sun away.

Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis

Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray

Clutch and cling?

Chill

Fingers of yew be curled

Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing

Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still

At the still point of the turning world.

     Maria and Nate agreed it was perfect.

     What is this still point? It is the stillness one brings into the dynamic and hectic modern life, through breathwork and meditation. It is about the little moments in our day that become the only and ultimate reality. It is the interplay between the non-changing Self and the changing reality “maya” the world of illusion, in which we live. It relates to our innate need to create order in chaos.