The Deepest Presence I’ve Known

Awareness meeting itself

My view from the boulder that day

A year ago, in January of 2023, I kicked off the new year by renting a long-term airbnb in Sedona, Arizona.

I’ve been reminiscing about my time there recently. More truthfully, I’ve been allowing myself the indulgence of a little mental escapism. I find it easier to be grounded in the things that matter most to me when I’m there than I do when I’m at home.

That’s not all too surprising, really. Isn’t it always easier to be less jaded, more open, and all around just a little softer when we’re not caught up in the rut of our routines and the prickly responsibilities of “real life?”

That said, Sedona has always been more than just the average getaway for me and it turns out that something like three million annual tourists would seem to agree. Those who know me well know that I am a water-loving girl at heart (I will never, ever turn down a beach vacation), but this desert town is a gateway to Awe in a way that even the most perfect blue ocean has never been for me.

Awe is one of the reasons I love being in the natural world. It is, for me, the combined effect of being humbled by abundant beauty, being immersed in a raw indifference to any of my worldly accomplishments, and occasionally, on a good day, a vista so grand that I’m simply stunned into forgetting to identify with the Story of Jennifer at all.

What remains is Presence.

Most of us, myself included, require a measure of intention to cultivate and maintain presence throughout our day to day living, hence the idea of practice. Some days, mindfulness comes easily, meditation is deeply restorative, and there is no end to the amount of space I could hold for another being. Other days, presence is, at best, like a star visible through a small gap in the cloudy night sky – an encouraging guide, familiar, constant, but ever out of reach.

The thing about practice, of course, is that the expansion we seek, no matter the context, isn’t ever linear. This can be a jagged-edged nugget of truth at times, especially for the achievement oriented among us. Another more gracious truth about practice is that once our awareness lands upon a new level of understanding (not to be confused with mastery), it becomes much easier to experience it again, more deeply.

Not easy, mind you. Just easier.

I say all this because, as my mind has wandered westward and back in time these past few weeks, I keep returning to a particular moment that transformed my understanding of presence. I know myself well enough to recognize that I’m secretly hoping the memory will be a portal, dropping me back into a state of being I long for. Experience gently reminds me that it happened once and I can trust it will happen again.

“But,” my ego-driven longing asks, “when?”

. . .

It happened one late afternoon early on in my stay. For anyone who knows the area, I drove a short way out of Sedona, down into Boynton Canyon and snaked my way along the winding road to the Arie Trail Head. It was an hour or so before sunset when I got out of my car and found myself alone in the wild landscape.

There wasn’t a sign of humanity anywhere. No buildings, no power lines, no other cars in the parking lot and no hikers coming and going. Even the road I had taken was hidden after the first curve out of the parking lot. Most significantly, however, I was struck by the depth of quiet I had stumbled into.

I stood beside my car for several moments, listening in every possible direction, straining to hear anything other than stillness. I couldn’t detect sound or movement whatsoever, though the dense quiet felt anything but dull and lifeless.

It had been my intention to take a short hike, but the noise of my shoes on the trail seemed rudely loud, like I was disturbing a sacred space. I chose instead to sit for a while on a large boulder beside the trail, reveling in a glorious show as the red rocks appeared to catch fire from the sinking sun.

I sat very still, listening and trying to understand the quality of silence. It was alert and vivid, awake even – a dynamic absence of sound that is almost impossible to find in the modern world. For minutes at a time, nothing moved, and then I would see or hear the darting swoop of a small bird as it settled into the tangled bushes just feet away. The silence would resume.

I have no better way to describe it other than to say the silence was vibrating with awareness. I felt as if the entire landscape and space containing it was aware of me. Just as I was present with it, it was consciously present with me.

As I contemplate it now, the level of awareness I sensed that day is frankly almost absurd to try to wrap my head around, far too big for the limitations of my human mind to articulate, and yet, something compels me to try. This state of Presence was aware of every single element of its own vast being – every single living creature, pebble, branch and pine needle, every groove in the majestic iron-rich sandstone and every trickle of water running through gullies fed by melting snow.

It was fully and only occupied with the activity of Being. Any Doing within it (like a tiny bird darting from branch to branch or a would-be hiker sitting on a rock watching the sunset) was simply a byproduct of its own being, not an end in and of itself.

Eventually, sitting beside the trail, trying to know this presence, my mind began to fatigue. The mental grasping, the need to understand naturally faded making way for a stillness to emerge in me that matched the stillness around me.

It was an exquisite moment of equilibrium.

Of Peace.

An encounter with the Divine.

In retrospect, I would describe it as being like a drop of salt water encountering the ocean for the first time. My human limitations couldn’t begin to comprehend the scope, but I was unquestionably able to understand the feeling of home.