Relaxation

Have you ever noticed someone going about, whistling as they’re going about their business?

Perhaps at the grocery store, the mall, the gas station, or even at your work?

They go about whistling and seem to be in the state of mind of contentness, or perhaps as if they are floating on a cloud.

If you catch their eye for a glimpse, just a moment, they seem to be in a very pleasant state. They never seem to be angry or upset or in a sullen mood.


You also notice this with children. The children just open up and start to sing, beautiful songs.

Do you recognize that sound?
Can you hear it?
Listen
The sounds of nature
There all around us
Can you figure it out?
It’s like life
Can you figure it out at times?
When you don’t understand
Can you trust?
Do you have faith?
Do you have the faith enough to know all is well?
To embrace each day, the gift of your life
To find the joy, happiness and the peace in solitude
Or out there amongst others
I hope you can hear the sound and recognize it
It’s all around us all the time
Do you sense?

One of the things I like to do for fun is to go on walking tours of cities around the world. Sometimes I revisit places I have been to in the past. In recent days, I have been to London, Pisa, Venice, Cologne, Madrid, and Nice.

How can I do this?

Often I walk around cities that I would like to visit in the future! For instance, I recently saw Buenos Aires, Argentina.

How is this possible? Especially, in the age of Covid-19?

I love to hear the sound of trickling water.

I go to garden shops and stand in front of trickling fountains.

At the Beardsley Zoo, the greenhouse has Koi fish in a pond with trickling water.

We’d go to Saint Margaret’s Shrine. I was always drawn to the statues, and in particular to a large three tiered fountain with trickling water.

At our nearby park there is a small stream that cascades sparkling water over a small waterfall to a pond.

Out of the blue came the hoot of an owl.

Sometimes this happens in my back yard. Sometimes in my neighborhood. Sometimes I think it follows me.

It was a very pleasant surprise - three long, slow, low hoots. A pause, then it repeated. A pause again, then it repeated again.

It calls up in me the feeling of the deep woods. Where there are wise animals, knowing old, huge oaks, and the feel of soft, moist dirt underfoot.

The woods are alive with mystery and quiet surprise. At any moment there could appear a deer, a chipmunk, or a giant, black crow.

I love to read Haiku. The idea is to capture the essence, actually the feeling, of something in just a few words.

Some of them are timeless, as is this one by the Japanese poet Gomei:

One chestnut, only one,
Is all his tiny hands can hold,
My little baby son. (Gomei)

There’s a brook by the side of the road. Sometimes, on the way home, I stop here.

It only takes a minute to get out of the car, you walk out, you tip toe across the little stones that extend and rise above the brook. It’s shallow here, maybe eight inches deep.

So I picked it, and select the large rocks, and I’m standing now in the middle.

The sound is beautiful.

As I look to my right, upstream, I see a driftwood. It’s floating down right now.

I wonder what’s going through that driftwood’s mind. Aimlessly, without a care in the world, just floating.

Introduction

John:

Matt, what do you see what you are doing. Let’s say, if you could go into the future about 5 years from now. What would you like to have happen, with all the effort you are putting into traveling to all these cities, meeting all these people, and putting yourself out so everyone gets a chance to personally, see, feel, sense, who you are and what you are about?

I love sunflowers. I mean, here is a flower that grows bigger than me. It is gigantic. And the seeds are so visible, so wildly bountiful, and so orderly arranged.

I see them growing in the community garden, and I admire their towering, poetic, lilting stance.

There are two local farms that plant thousands of sunflowers – acres and acres - and let you walk among them. It is breath-taking. So many circles of purple-black with a rim of yellow against a backdrop of greens and a light blue sky – like nature is looking with 10,000 eyes upon the world.

Have you ever needed to be still?
Not to be disturbed but be left all alone?
Some people are afraid to be alone.
They fear the quiet, that space.

Other’s revel in it.
In that quiet contemplative space much may occur.
Or nothing feels like it is happening.
It may be just dead silence.

What is good is to realize often when we would like to be still,
We just avoid it
Or when we are forced to be still, for example, like an illness,
We appreciate what we had.