The Great Thing About Smoking

Even on a Unity Tuesday, it is just so easy to forget what is really going on. Let’s run through some aspects of the present reality:

• This is the fifth Unity Tuesday in April, thereby making it a BONUS
• The full moon has passed us, but the new moon has not yet arrived
• We are nearing the precise center of spring
• May is about to begin
• That itch you may feel in your eye represents the physical manifestation of the return of life to the countryside

That last bullet brings me to my main point – one of the great things about my smoking habit. Yes, I still smoke. I’m down to between two and four of them per day. It is this precise moderate level of usage that causes me to stand on my tiny back porch almost exactly one time per day in order to have a cigarette there. It is there that I am forced to share the space with this strange tree-bush-plant.

The great – and utterly simple and, to some, silly and ordinary – thing about looking at this weird piece of New Hampshire botany on a once-daily basis is that I have been fully conscious of its transformation from winter-state to spring-state. I’ve watched as the little nubs on the branches grow into buds, the tiniest bit at a time, until now I look at them and I’m pretty much seeing little LEAVES.

So I’m lucky today, on this Unity Tuesday, for my opportunity to see fully, with my own two eyes, the life returning. I’m lucky to be aware of it. As I’m guessing most of you did, I spent much of today unable to think or reflect on this life, but this life is more real, more potent, and more powerful than anything that we did today in our petty human occupations. This life was here before we arrived, and the life will be here after we are gone, and the only possible contradiction to that concept lies in our acceptance of the fact that there is no actual difference between that life and this life.

Now, you might wonder whether or not I could experience this awareness without the use of harmful tobacco products, or whether you yourself might be able to do so without blackening anyone’s lungs.

Sure. Anything’s possible.

Salaam and happy Unity Tuesday.