Photo by Fallon Michael on Unsplash

There’s a siren outside my window. Somebody’s going to emergency, somebody’s going to jail. I don’t live in New York City anymore. I haven’t in five years. I miss it sometimes, like I miss my coked-out party girl days, like I miss my exes when I’m lonely.

I missed New York something fierce all winter. In Vermont, everything dies with the changing of the seasons. There’s a wisdom in it, sure, but between the chronic Lyme and the polar vortex, I had a hard time finding it. Down in New York, the magnolias are already in bloom. Here, the trees are empty, the roads are muddy, the people are slowly waking up.

The other day, I found myself complaining to a friend about my ennui. “I look outside, and everything’s just white,” I said. “White snow. White mountains. White people. It’s all the same, every day, and I’m sick of it.”

Instead of laughing, he looked genuinely surprised. He said he saw nothing but changes outside. The skunk cabbage was springing up. The rivers were overflowing with melted snow. There were more birds in the trees. His view was one of a thousand tiny movements, emergences of the next chapter, the beginnings of new life.

All I saw was white.

What my friend noticed was both a place and a time, the subtle transition of a place over time you only see when you really pay attention. That’s the kind of sight that comes from really knowing somewhere. Despite all my lofty words about learning to engage in my ecosystem, I don’t know it. These days, so few of us do.

I have to ask myself: Do you know where you are right now? Not just as a point on the map, as a concept of location, I mean — do you really know it? Do you know its needs and its history, its traumas and its gifts? Is it a friend to you? A mentor? A home?

Or is it just a back-drop?

In 1997, Eckhart Tolle published his now-world famous book The Power of Now. I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but in case you haven’t, it’s a guide to finding inner peace and spiritual liberation by doing what spiritual teachers have recommended for thousands of years: detach identity from the whirring (and worrying) of the mind.

The mind pulls our attention to past and future, to past regret and future anxiety, creating unnecessary suffering in our lives as we focus our attention on things that happened, or might happen, rather than on what is happening.

When giving talks to an audience, Eckhart will often begin with the tongue-in-cheek, “I’m happy to be here… now.”

With the success of his book, “the now” has become synonymous with the kind of alert, aware spiritual state of presence. When we are fully focused on what is happening now, we cannot simultaneously be judging it. We aren’t worrying about it either. We are not judging or worrying about ourselves within it. We’re just here: with this, with ourselves in this, as this. It is.

The joy and peace we find in focusing our full attention on watching a sunset, swimming in the ocean, sitting around a fire on a cold night, this is the kind of joy available to us always. It’s only our fixation on our thoughts — our worries, judgments, status, anxiety, the past and future — that pulls us away.

As much as I love New Age spiritual teachings, and as much genuine help as they’ve been in my life, I have little patience for spirituality that isn’t embodied. To me, “being the change we wish to see in the world” requires that we take actions in the awareness that we impact the world. The change I wish to see isn’t just my own happiness, but a world in which flourishing and well-being are accessible to everyone, human and non-human alike. To prefigure that world, I have to act in ways that bring healing and liberation to more than just myself.

I’d rather challenge myself in service of a better world than chain myself to being #highvibe at all times and balk at any whiff of discomfort.

To be present, in the spiritual sense, is to keep your mind where your body is. It is not to judge what is happening, but simply notice it, accept that it is happening, and choose from an aware position what to do next. As Ram Dass would tell us, “Be here, now.” When we put aside the fears and judgments, the past and future, and let our minds be with what’s happening around us, we are focused on the now.

But that now has a corresponding dimension: the here.

If you are at all present, in a spiritual sense, your consciousness is not divided between what’s here and what you wish were happening instead. You are accepting what is here, but that doesn’t mean all action simply stops with acceptance. If “what’s here” is suffering, that is something to notice. The next step is to decide what you will do with it.

When we take action from a place of presence, we take action here. When we give care from a place of presence, we give care here. What we are present with is not only the present moment, but our present physical surroundings and internal state of being.

Just as we drag ourselves into suffering now by fixating on our past and future, when we fail to attend to what’s happening here, the here falls into disrepair.

As I’ve learned the hard way, our bodies can end up very sick when we don’t pay attention to them. Contemporary American society is a deeply disembodied culture. There are still days that go by when I hardly notice I have a body at all. I’m a series of thoughts and some hands on a keyboard, some eyes and a brain making sense of words. I’m not present with the now — I’m reading the news or writing an essay or planning for the future. I’m not present with the here, either. I spent years taking Abilify to treat Bipolar 2 symptoms that went away when I switched to a less-inflammatory diet. Now, the symptoms I used to call hypomania I now know as gut inflammation. Go figure.

Mercifully, the wisdom of attending to our bodies — you know, these things we live in and depend upon for survival — is finally gaining popularity. With that attending has gone the act of tending. When we listen to how we feel, we know what we need, and we can care for ourselves better.

But my body is not the whole story of me; it’s the vessel I use to experience myself. “What’s here” doesn’t stop at my skin.

When I lived in New York, my college had a queer mixer called Ivy-Q, where queer students from all the Ivy Leagues were invited to come down and party. City College was half a mile uptown, but they weren’t invited. Our university was buying out Manhattanville and displacing long-time tenants (many of them, people of color) to expand its business school. Now, a once-diverse neighborhood is a campus playground where rich kids go to become richer kids with cocaine habits.

There were murmurs of dissent across my school, but there was no meaningful collective action to stop this. Morningside Heights was not our home, not a neighborhood whose soul we’d mourn to see gentrified away. It was just “where school happened to be.” We didn’t have any sense of rootedness in place, any sense of the here, and so, we let our here fall into disrepair.

Speaking of the here, New York City is 300 square miles of an abject ecological disaster. Prior to European settlement, the region was the Lenape homeland. Times Square was a thriving forest. What was then Mannahatta had over fifty unique ecosystems.

Rather than see what was here, accept it, embrace it, tend to it, my European ancestors arrived on this continent with an attitude of lack. They saw forest as timber to build houses, rivers as waterways to divert for irrigation, and people who had been tending the land for millennia as savages to be exterminated, broken and forced into obedience. Colonization disregarded the power of the here and built a civilization that is steadily killing the planet we depend upon for survival.

We’ve ignored the power of here, like we’ve ignored the power of now. We’ve beaten ourselves and each other into submission based on arbitrary judgments of what things should be, forgetting the sacredness in what they already are. We distract ourselves to numb the pain of how badly we’ve let what’s here fall into ruin.

When we think of politics, we think of Trump and Biden, not the day-to-day local politics that impacts our lived experience. When we think of sustainability, we think of building solar farms and buying EVs, not innovative ways we could reduce our consumption by sharing basic resources with our neighbors. When we think of redress for harm, we think of courts and the police, not of building circles of restorative justice and accountability in our communities.

We think the answers to our problems come over there. We outsource our power. We don’t remember how much we can change right here.

At least, we don’t until we have to. When fires and hurricanes roar through our cities, we remember that life is happening here.

But here, now, is where our fate is decided. This is my life. It’s the birds outside the window and the ambulance that’s long since passed by. It’s the weather outside today, the way it’s finally getting nice and soon everyone will be outside and smiling. It’s the fact that I have health insurance here, but not stable housing. It’s the community I’ve built, the lake and the trees, the Green Mountains and the Winooski River, the traffic and the bike path, my body and my place.

Here, now, this is my life.

My life is not in New York anymore. My life is not in D.C. or California. My life has nothing to do with Elon Musk, Ron DeSantis or Pete Davidson. These are directions I could outsource my attention to, or I could keep my attention here and tend to what’s around me. I choose not to be over there. I choose to be here: cooking dinner for the striking Goddard College workers, organizing ecosystem restoration workshops at the Pine Street Barge Canal, listening to my friends cry and riding my bicycle in the sun.

When I look over there, to my past and future, neither of which is happening now, to the regrets and the anxieties, the war and the coups, the drama and the trauma all over the world, I miss out on what’s here. When I focus on the here, I find meaning and joy. I find opportunities to make tangible change. I find power.

That is the power of here.