The Daily Disciplines
Everything we do is practice for the next time. When we cease to practice, we lose our fluency, and memory becomes imperfect. Some things are practiced by default- when did you last consciously practice eating? Other things require conscious effort. My handwriting is slow, laborious and has lost its fluency. I type without thinking.
When we took our young children back out to the desert where we had lived, they were profoundly uncomfortable with the open spaces. We noticed our son was happier and less fractious whenever we went walking in the enclosed space of mountain gorges. We become used to, and are affected by our environment. Years before, leaving the desert, my wife and I were depressed, dislocated and disoriented by urban life. A day out walking in the hills begins to resurrect memories and instincts which have been lost to our consciousness.
As urban westerners we live in a profoundly artificial environment. It is possible, even easy, to avoid the outside world for days at a time! Enter the garage by an inside door from the house, drive out using the automatic door opener, drive to the underground car park, and take the internal lift up to work. Leave before it is properly light, and return home after dark. We live in a world which we Australians especially, think we control. In truth, we are irradiated with uncontrolled advertising and other stimulation, rarely alone enough to be in silence, and uncomfortable if we are. We live in a noisy, crowded and driven world, which is the anathema of all that our spiritual ancestors learned is necessary for health. We have stepped out of reality into an artificial place.
The spiritual disciplines are designed to bring us back into the real world from our artificial place. They create time, silence and space for us to re-engage with the depths of life. They patrol the corridors of the mind, as someone has said, re-minding us of what is really important. Religion without practice becomes merely an idea, caught in the currents of the ideas round about, without the anchor of reality.
Life
In a clear running stream one pebble slips against another and a third falls across them. The new eddy traps one of those fine grits which the water sometimes carries. After time, a stain of sand is found between the pebbles. And there was silt.
And a seed lodged against a tiny ripple in the silt. It was trapped, unable to be lifted free by the eddies around the pebbles. As the root grew and wormed down into the silt, and held fast, a shoot began to grow in the river and raise its head above the water. A small twig jammed between the shoot and the pebble, and the silt began fall more often. And there was an island.
The water was heaped and packed and salted in the cells of a little tree, as it grew above the water. The tree, and slime, and bugs, and other watery things glued the island together, even as the water dissolved other parts of the island.
Then the Something that made the water gather into a tree began to slow. And the tree died. The water seeped from the tree, leaving only a shell. The sand grains chipped away at the shell. Other slimes invaded the shell, bacteria ate at the slime, and layers sloughed way away. And the island died.
One day a pebble slides from its rest across two others. But the water continues to run.
Andrew Prior
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