A trip in the park

I left behind my Tao Te Ching and headed for some real life living Tao in the park. I had been cycling around the paths between the lakes when I reached the point I would often exit and head out towards the beach - but today I felt more like staying in the park and saw a thin dirt path wiggling off besides another of the large lakes. As I followed the path a familiar smell came to me, it reminded me of the heavy rain the night before, it reminded me of a particular time of year, a certain type of earth, then I saw a mushroom.

I found myself off my bike, pushing it slowly under the large trees, toes in the grass, looking down, another mushroom. I followed the unfamiliar path interested in this part of the large park I had never been to. After some walking I was coming closer to a path I recognised but something else caught my eye. This was a very unique, twisted, dead grass. It looked like it had been deliberately twisted into a very porous bird nest and I took this as a message from nature to head the way it had made me look.

Again I headed off the normal track, through a swampy ditch and out onto an area with tightly cut grass. This was the edge of a cricket field and I walked where the long swamp grass bordered the very short pitch - more mushrooms, odd ones, not edible, like mini puffballs only visible due to the very short grass. As I looked up the most plainly interesting thing was a small group of huge fir trees, as I walked towards them maybe 300m away I saw more and more little puffballs and stooped down to see a few of them up close. ----

As we take a while to process reality, it is really the past that we call now. The future is going on invisibly in the now and we are seeing the recent past - in fact this is how we form the illusion that there is even time at all when there is not. The moment is all there is yet our living slightly after the moment due to the time it takes us to process, the speed it takes us to do this is the "speed of time".

Thinking no time has passed is because, no time did pass, it never does, you form the illusion that it does - the times it appears to not pass is because you are so in the moment that you form no time.

---- I arrived almost instantly and was underneath the huge fir trees. As I walked on I saw larger and larger mushrooms, I saw leaves of plants resembling mushrooms and I took each one to be nature guiding me along where she wanted me to see. I went through more swamp-like land, I was expecting to see a snake and the grass slithered over itself, the sun cast individual rays and danced like a laser show off the distant lake, birds left multicoloured trails behind as they flew.

No time later, the sun was much lower in the sky, I realised I was inside a massive mushroom, I opened the door and walked out of the park.

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Tao Wow | Daily Cup of Tao