TheBanyanTree: bouyancy

[Mike Pingleton]

Wonderful!  This made me float a little :)  And I so get this - those
ephemeral moments, often only fully realized in the mind's rear-view mirror.

-Mike



On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 10:58 AM, Teague, Julie Anna
<jateague at indiana.edu>wrote:

> Archimedes supposedly yelled, "Eureka!" while lying in a tub of water and
> happening upon the principle of buoyancy.  Eureka!  Just like that, he
> nderstood why things float.  Even things that seem solid and grounded are
> often unobserved to the naked eye) floating.  The earth's crust.  Icebergs.
>  Happy Women. Yes, sometimes I am floating, even when no one is aware. The
> ten percent of me you see is the tip of the iceberg deceptively looking
> like the whole kit-n-caboodle, while the other ninety percent of me is
> below the surface.  Happiness is bubbling up from deep inside me,
> detectable only, maybe, in the curl of my lips. I sometimes find myself
> bobbing in a whole wide warm ocean of happiness and in danger of floating
> completely away.
>
> Like Archimedes, I have hit upon the laws that govern my personal
> buoyancy: when I can forget myself, or what I think of as "self"--a body
> and a brain, the tip of the iceberg.  When I can let go of the demands of
> my physical body and stem the constant chatter of my brain which insists on
> looking in at me from the outside and judging, worrying, planning.  When I
> am completely and utterly in the present, only in *this* excrutiatingly
> perfect moment.  As cliche as that sounds, as many times as I have read it
> and thought about it, it is only when I experience it that I grasp the
> concept of "be here now."  I can intellectualize it, but I can only fully
> understand it when my head shuts down and my heart takes over.  At the
> time, I'm not Ego, that monkey on my back, outside myself observing that,
> whoa, I'm completely absorbed in this moment.  I am not thinking.  I am not
> Julie.  I am not a mother, lover, programmer, runner.  My thighs are not
> fat, my wallet is not thin, I am not too much or too little of anything.  I
> am just joy.  I am an experience.  And it is only afterwards, when I am
> reflecting on why I felt so content, floating, peaceful, buoyant, that I
> get it.  I understand what was going on.  Eureka!
>
>