raining flowers

I'm sitting under a frangipani tree, on top of a hill in Goa, India. And as so often with these trees, the tree itself is covered with flowers – barely a leaf in sight, but so many flowers. Perhaps even more amazing, though, is that the ground around me is also carpeted with fallen flowers. They are everywhere, hundreds of them, and as I speak another flower has just fallen upon me. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that it's raining flowers. And each of them has such a beautiful bouquet, perhaps my favourite smell in the whole world.

There's another one, landing right next to me. And seeing these flowers, smelling these flowers, it evokes strong feelings in me. There's the feeling of beauty, when I really notice them, when my awareness is fully with them. I can see, though, how easily the mind wants to start taking them for granted. It's seen these flowers before. It's smelt these flowers before. It knows them, so it doesn't need to pay attention. That's the way the habitual mind works. There's a certain efficiency in it. But it's also a mistake, because by taking things for granted we assume that nothing has changed. We assume that this particular frangipani flower is identical to the others. But looking at the flower I've picked up, I see that it's not quite identical. One of the five petals has a slightly different shape. The way the yellow colouring merges into the white is also unique in the detail. And here is another one fallen at my feet. Now I'm holding both these two flowers, and of course I see that they're different, and in different stages of openness. Even the smell is subtly different.

So when the mind goes into this habitual way of thinking, we miss the detail, we miss the uniqueness, and with it we miss the beauty. We only really sense the beauty when our awareness is properly on something, not on our memory of it, not on our idea and expectation for it, but when we pay attention to our senses, directly: the sight, the smell, the sounds, the tastes, the feel. This is where beauty is sensed.

Seeing all these frangipani flowers, I see how easy it is for us to forget about beauty, and live in our stale habitual mind. And in a way when something is abundant, as these frangipani flowers are, it becomes all the more easy to make that mistake. There are so many flowers here, how can I fully pay attention to each one of them? It's not possible, of course. Time is too short. But I can pay attention to one or two of them, a few of them. And it's better to do that, it's better to really see a single flower, than to live in the habitual relationship with them all.

All of this is coming to me, as I sit here with frangipani flowers raining down upon me. There's another one, and another.