My friend Mars asked me to give a talk for his birthday party on Monday, [[2024-07-22]]. The topic: Birth, death, life design, and the preciousness of the present moment. (Oh, is that all?) Here are my notes for the talk; the actual presentation was heavily improvised from these. ## Birth We're not just celebrating that Mars isn't dead yet. Something is new about him now, has been arriving, something that is only possible now. When you interact with him tonight, feel what that might be. It doesn't matter if you can't put words to it. Let the feeling of it come out in how you interact with him. Notice that something in you is also new. For some of you it's bold and obvious, a shock, you're still wobbly in it — for others it's hardly here yet, a whisper, a tickle in the mind. Today you can celebrate that too. Call it to mind and feel it… [[We're alive]] ## Presence Peace is every step —[[Thich Nhat Hanh]] There is a stillness—it's the eye of a storm of birth and death, arriving and leaving, some quickly, some so slowly you hardly notice, like grass growing [[Underground we sit]] Attentional training: lots of things are happening but they don’t push-pull you Liberation in spaciousness, in the present ## Life Design How you spend your days is how you spend your life. Life design is ritual design. You’re in the middle of a ritual, being asked to contemplate ritual design. Like all things true to life, this evening is [[fractal]]. ### Yin and Yang aspects of life design Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Chaos is where fertility comes from. It's only chaos when we don't see it clearly. It's like the early European explorers thinking that the Amazon was a wholly wild and uncultivated place, when in reality it had been managed and tended to by the indigenous people for thousands of years. The Europeans couldn't see what they didn't know how to see. Anyway the point is that we never start a design from a blank slate. You're already walking through the forest of your life as it is in this moment, full of currents of influence, relationships, habits, intergenerational trends… Like the indigenous agroforester, the design question starts with, "How do I tend to what's already here?" Move some tree branches so a rare medicinal plant gets more light. Carry seeds. Make good soil. Design in dialogue. Everything around you is material for creation. ## Presence What's already here? We tend to get carried into the past or future by the currents of our thoughts and feelings. Now I invite you to sit in the eye of the storm and just admire all the movement. All of your stories about what could be, what's wrong, what needs to change, how good it will be when *that* is different, how heavy it feels to carry what you carry… Put it down for just a moment and look at it through the eyes of the love that is here in this room. ## Death Now this talk makes way for what's next. Whatever stays with you after this is yours to keep. It's always been yours. My job has been only to feel my connection to this, to speak and sing out of the feeling, to stir the parts of you that have always known this, as I have been stirred. Birth and death are precious; birth and death move through each moment; each moment is precious. It’s so simple. Why doesn’t it feel like this? We forget this. We resist it. Until, by grace and patience, by overflowing, we don't. Until we wake up and the armor cracks and the walls come down and the heart breaks open again, breaks to grow.