Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

So often the honey is right under our nose, but we are too busy looking elsewhere to see it. The worst thing is not death, but blindness - whether intentional or not. These are some of the ideas Henry Miller deals with in a book of essays titled Stand Still Like the Hummingbird.

Miller, instead, says we need to cultivate an awareness and an acceptance of ourselves and the world as it is. Miller points to the Buddha and similar free men. This passage is particularly good:

"To such emancipated souls what difference could it make in what circumstances they found themselves? To them Paradise was not associated with a remote and isolated corner of the earth, any more than in a beyond, nor was it to be attained, as a state of mind, through an austere and singular manner of living. They were free in every sense of the word. It mattered not what role they adopted or were obliged to live out. They were in the world and of it, utterly. They renounced nothing; they made no distinctions; they counseled nothing. They were, and that was sufficient."