I was at Perkins one lovely Sunday morning sharing a pancake and eggs meal with my partner. We were engaged it what we term “breakfast blather”; a menagerie of minutia tainted with tid-bits of playful thoughts leading one to the other almost endlessly. This particular morning, I found my blather rather bitchfull….going on and on blah blah blah … complaining about some tedious frustration. I don’t know about you, but I find that many people like their breakfast food “just so”. It’s easy to be picky about eggs. Being quite picking myself about the order of each morsel – pancakes to be eaten before the eggs, the syrup poured after cutting the pancake etc…I began my meal in the midst of my breathless bitching blather. In mid-sentence I raised my voice in exasperation and profusely professed “the waitress FORGOT to bring my pancakes!” Thankfully my body’s autonomic system dutifully remembered to take a breath! In that breath filled moment, my brain woke up, broke from its pattern of thought deluged mess and recognized my mouth was in mid-chew of a whole grain pancake, properly pre-cut and soaked with syrup! My partner and I spent the next split second roaring with laughter and noted the moment’s extreme example of NOT being in the present moment. Such was born the term “present moment, pancake moment.” We elicit this term out loud some times, to re-mindfully remark whether we are (or are not) in the precious present.
One day lead to the next, one breakfast to the next, and one present moment lead to the next. Sitting on the front porch one Fall morning, eating muffins and coffee, my partner and I started wondering about the origin of the saying “dead as a doornail”. We grabbed our version of the QPB Encyclopedia Of Word and Phrase Origins book to see what the story was. Well, one word lead to another and we found ourselves looking up the origins of sexual slang, starting dutifully with the origin of the word F*ck. Apparently it is of German origin for ”ficken/f*cken” - meaning to “strike or penetrate”. We moved on to “cu*t”, then “pap smear” leading us rightfully to “pervert”. Being a sex educator, I found myself easily moving onto all the words kids ask us about and could hardly wait to share these tidbits of word-origin-knowledge with my co-educators. We found it interesting that there was no reference to “pus*y”, but plenty of reference points for “bon*r” whether it was to have one, or pull one. Of course we judgmentally attached some sort of patriarchal purpose to this pattern, but fell all over that theory and ourselves, when we recognized there were no references for “ja*k off” or “ejacu*ate”.
As we laughed and cackled, we heard a familiar chirping sound draw our attention to all that surrounded us. Nature so kindly shared and comically marked the moment for us as we glanced at a humming bird feeding 4 feet from our conversation. Not only had the humming bird joined in, but also a very hungry bumble bee. We shrieked with glee at the way nature communicates with us, creating a word-image-choice noting that we were all having fun with “the birds and the bees”. Instantly we were able to feel we had truly entered the present moment. One cannot help but miss what is both obvious and not-so-obvious at the same time. There is a palpable feel to the power of the present. Today it most graciously played itself out through our bodies, as it removed that façade of day-to-day control, having us do nothing other than laugh. We could sense how one word lead us to another, one moment to another, helping us discover we had “hit the nail on the head” and entered that just-right place of the one and only --- present moment. End note: I figured I should use the asterisks for those “special” words, as I could only imagine how many hits my blog might get on some slightly popular Google searches and I wasn’t sure I wanted to invite too much scrutiny. The photo enclosed – was an attempt to capture the scene that played out before us. If you look closely you can see both the bird….AND…the bee feeding together!
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