Coffee Contemplation: Deeply Inhaling Life

Audio narration by David Marlow

David Marlow: [00:00:00] Here's your coffee contemplation. Deeply inhaling life. Embracing the beauty of now. Earlier this week we had the grandkids over the older two and went to the park. And on the way home, the kids have certain paths we follow and there's one through what we call the dark forest. And another is the shorter way.

And my wife came with us this time and she brought her scooter cause there's quite a, quite a walk. And so she was riding a scooter. And at any rate my granddaughter C decided to walk. Well, she wanted to go through the dark forest, which the scooter won't go through. And so she and I took off and walked that way.

Well, it just, it hit me how much she was doing what, what I just said, your coffee contemplation of deeply inhaling life. She was just taking in everything as we walked along and there's a lot of oaks on the hill above our home and that's where the deep forest kind of ends, goes through that part of it.

And she [00:01:00] noticed acorns all over the place, really big ones. In fact, there's one that she took a picture of here in the article, and you can see, and they're, they're a really good size.

Beautiful old oaks that have been on that hill for some of them a hundred years or more. At any rate, we took time to look at acorns and noticed the mushroom growing on the stump of one of those old oaks that Village had removed not too long ago.

I wanted to invite you to contemplate in that same way. Just taking in life, deeply inhaling life, experiencing it, enjoying it. Being mesmerized by acorns and mushrooms and time with your granddaughter if you have one, a friend or even yourself, or, you know, walking from the park.

It was a great day for that and so that's the coffee contemplation. Then I happen to love the [00:02:00] poetry of Gideon Heugh. He’s a poet that I've kind of gotten to know through his work. I don't know him personally, but I've gotten to know him through his work. We do have a mutual friend who introduced me to his poetry.

I want to share a poem of his with you and invite you to both contemplate that and check out his work, because he's got some, he's got some great poetry and books. He's an artist who's trying to live into his Ikigai. His poem to spark your coffee contemplation is called Don't Settle, and it aligns perfectly with what we're talking about here.

DON’T SETTLE
Don’t settle for a pale copy of reality –
scratching your life on tracing paper
instead of splashing your own colours
upon the expectant canvas of the world.
Don’t settle for a blurred vision of existence –
hyperventilating among the tangle of your busyness
instead of slowly, deeply inhaling
the limitless miracle of now.
Gideon Heugh, from Rumours of Light, 2021

Quest well