Flying Alongside the Buck Moon

Two days ago, life gave me the gift of this moon. It was one night before the Buck Moon. For a few precious minutes, I disappeared into it.

As I stared at the moon, I found myself thinking: the present has layers.

There is a functional present. I am flying from Milan to Bilbao. Outside the window, an almost full moon hangs above the clouds, illuminating a sky so beautiful it seems unreal.

But there is also a deeper present. One in which my mind stops wandering between the past and the future and comes into direct contact with life itself. With this moon. With this sky. With this moment.

As I looked outside, I became completely absorbed. A sense of unity emerged. My perception became extraordinarily vivid, and my heart filled with peace. The boundary between me, the moon, the sky and the whole of existence disappeared.

Experiences like this remind me why I love philosophy and meditation so much. They help me cultivate attention. Training our attention is one of the most important things we can do, because where our attention goes, our life follows (You can see my Letters from the Sun to Human Beings – Letter 1 – On Attention). Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” I couldn’t agree more. And I think that generosity should also extend to ourselves, because attention shapes the way we perceive reality.

An untrained mind lives captive to its conditioning. It reacts automatically, wanders endlessly, and mistakes every thought for reality. A trained mind, by contrast, becomes capable of fully inhabiting the present. And when we truly inhabit the present, beauty, wonder and gratitude reveal themselves in places that were always there, but that we rarely notice in our rushed, performance-driven lives.

To me, at its deepest level, spirituality is about learning to inhabit the present so completely that, even within time and matter, we catch a glimpse of something eternal. And we realize we are part of a greater, magnificent whole. To me, this is also where sustainability begins. Not with regulations or technology, important as they are, but with a way of seeing. The more deeply we experience ourselves as part of the living world, the more naturally we are called to care for it.

I am profoundly grateful. Grateful for this moon, and grateful for the reminder that reality is infinitely richer than we usually allow ourselves to see.

“All of life is sacred if we let it be.” — Often attributed to Rumi