MANAWA

I’m reading THE POWER OF NOW by Eckart Tolle.

The next morning before getting out of bed I consult the oracle cards JOURNEY TO KANAKA MAKUA as I always do. They are a source of guidance for me; a way to understand how I can make the most of the day. At least that, or some question like it, is the intention I have as I shuffle the cards most mornings.

How can I make the best of this day?

I run the question over and over in my mind; let myself feel and sense the essence of the question as the cards slide over each other with each pass. Sometimes as I shuffle a card will fall out of my hands. Sometimes more than one will. Sometimes as I shuffle it seems as if a card asks to be picked by poking up beyond all the others and just drawing my fingers to it. Sometimes when I feel the cards are ready I fan them out and pass my hand over them and “find” my hand stopping over the card that holds the answer. Other times I divide them into 3 stacks and put them together into one, picking the card that is on the top of the new arrangement.

Sometimes as I shuffle, at the very moment that my mind wanders a card will fall out of my hands or becomes difficult to put into the deck and it is the one that has significance for the “mind stuff” of that very moment – perhaps a “heads up” about what the day may bring or about the type of awareness required of me this day. Then I have to recapture what I was thinking, feeling or sensing; where my awareness was at that moment of lack of focus.

Or, I have been drifting for some time on automatic pilot and the cards scatter like my thoughts and I see a pattern laid out before me reflecting some pattern in my present behaviour which will have ripples throughout the rest of my day.

Sometimes one card doesn’t “feel” complete and I choose more messengers or they choose me; often I don’t know which is the case.

On this day I ask, “How can I make the best of this day?”

I shuffle the cards, keeping my concentration clear and crisp, one rises above and slightly behind the others. My fingers are stuck to it and wouldn’t move.

MANAWA – NOW

Out of all the 49 other cards that I could have picked this one appears! (I just find this so cool and magical!) I am reminded as I live this day that the past is just a memory and the future yet to be though both arise and move through me time and time again with such a painful intensity of emotion that sweeps me away robbing me of the pure joy that resides in each moment. Again and again I bring myself back to all that really exists – this present moment.

Really, as I type the words on the screen, and as you are reading them now ...in...each...fraction... of...each...moment...there resides the opportunity for such clarity that the whole universe, of which we are just a small part, opens up within and around us and we can realize the immensity and power in this "small, mundane" act.