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When There Is No Future, Live for The Present
Some achieve mindfulness through meditation or yoga. For me, it was farming and loving a man with cancer.
I don’t think of myself as a spiritual person, but I have learned how to do something that many yogis strive for: I live in the present.
Some call this mindfulness or living in the moment. People go on retreats in search of it. They meditate and take vows of silence. They invest in plane tickets to India and Lululemon pants. My own spiritual path involved co-owning an organic vegetable farm for eight years and loving someone with terminal cancer for three.
While living in the Cowichan Valley in 2016, I spent a few hours every Monday spinning sheep wool and listening to a circle of older, wiser people talk about fiber and life. We drank spicy Celestial Seasonings tea from pottery mugs, and our fingers got sticky from the lanolin wax in the wool.
One day, the conversation turned to Saskatchewan farm wives and how they are (apparently) the calmest people in the world. The Zen-est. Nothing ruffles their feathers. (Which is, ironically, an agricultural saying.)
