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11/09/2025

Today’s blog

Lynn Murphy Mark

Presence

I’m in a small book club. There are just four of us involved and we’ve been together for a couple of years now. It all started because the four of us are involved in various 12 Step programs, gratefully, I might add. We started with a book called, “A Woman’s Way Through the Twelve Steps”. It appealed to us, as women, and we read it carefully. It was helpful to read a woman’s perspective about recovering through a program whose literature is often written in “he and him” terms. The God of our understanding is also portrayed as a “he” throughout the literature that we read as part of our recovery. I can mostly look beyond the male references because I consider myself a liberated woman as much as that is possible these days.

We meet once a month. During the preceding month we will have read our assigned pages and come together prepared to discuss what we’ve digested. Because we are close friends, everything is open for discussion. The books that we read are selected on the basis of their potential to open new vistas and offer alternative ways to look at our lives. Together we have decades of 12 Step experience and have learned the importance of honesty in our words and actions. In our meetings we listen carefully to each other and we love and support one another when a knotty problem is up for review.

This time around we are reading one of the most powerful books I’ve had the privilege to encounter. Written by Eckhart Tolle, the title is “A New Earth – Awakening to your life’s purpose”. It’s not a new book. It was first published in 2005 and we have a new edition with a preface called, “Ten years later”, by the author. Of the group, I am the only one who had never read it. My enlightened friends remembered reading it years ago.

But now we are in our 70’s and 80’s and life looks a bit different as we are each aging as gracefully and gratefully as we can. Among us we have our share of health challenges and sometimes the challenges seem difficult to deal with. Like lots of us older folk, when we get together sometimes we start with the “organ recital”, a descriptor of our ailments. Thankfully, they are not the center of our meetings once we expose them. Since two of us are retired nurses we are a source of helpful insight and suggestions and then we can move on.

Oprah Winfrey picked this book as a Book Club selection. She was so drawn in by its message that she contacted the author and had a number of conversations with him about the book and its effect on her. She writes, “Talking with Eckhart all these weeks has made me aware of both the depth of spirituality and its simplicity. I now know for sure that spirituality can be something as ordinary – and extraordinary – as giving your full-force, 100 percent attention to another person without thinking about what else you need to be doing right then.” Here’s where the whole subject of Presence is brought up. 

Tolle says, “When you are present, when your attention is fully in the Now, Presence will flow into and transform what you do. There will be a quality and power in it. You are present when what you are doing is not primarily a means to an end (money, prestige, winning) but fulfilling in itself, when there is a joy and aliveness in what you do. When your attention moves into the Now, there is an alertness. It is as if you are waking up from the dream of thought, the dream of past and future. Such clarity, such simplicity.”

Staying focused in the Now can be a challenge for me. My monkey mind likes to jump around between what happened already, what’s happening now, and what’s likely to happen later. I am learning that of the past, present and future the most important moment with the most potential is happening Now. Past may be a source of rich lessons, a collection of insightful memories, a path to painful or joyful remembrances. Future is a palette of plans and possibilities, always subject to change. Now is all I’ve really got.

Yesterday as I was driving home after our meeting my mind was centered on the trees that have changed from green to shades of yellow and orange. I was absolutely taken by their beauty, and their meaning – a time of year is coming that encourages reflection and careful thought about the real meaning of this season. Nature goes into a hibernation of sorts. Despite the frantic messages about “the Holidays” we are invited to quiet down and to be Present to each other as we gather to celebrate.

“A New Earth” is a book in my possession that is heavily underlined. It is definitely a keeper and definitely one that can be read again to gather different insights. We still have a ways to go in our reading, but each section we assign ourselves is filled with valuable information and thought-provoking concepts.