The Being Mode
“This is the Being Mode.”
The Being Mode. Is that like a la mode? Can I have some ice cream with my being?
The Being Mode is why I moved my desk to sit beneath these lovely windows. I sit and sit here, looking out at the sky and trees. Chipmunks scamper beneath the evergreen bushes that separate our house from the one next door. Today, the sky is void of color. The trees that just a week ago were ablaze with color stand largely bare, limbs exposed.
They are going through the motions of the seasons, cycling towards the winter months, though temperatures remain mild for late October. The remaining leaves shimmy in the wind, some more tenacious than others for reasons I cannot know. I stare through the glass, grateful for the view, the panes between me and the outside world that allow my wand to minder – or mind to wander, as I meant to write!
I am being. I am in being mode. Are we ever not being? I think what this phrase implies is the conscious part of being, the awareness that we are being, being as a verb, an active state. But does that somehow contradict the state of being itself, which requires no special knowledge, no consciousness, when in fact maybe awareness takes us OUT of being mode and thrusts us into thinking mode?
At the end of the day, to fall back on a cliché, being just is. There is no mode that is or isn’t being. Maybe it’s the freedom within a single breath, the freedom for a lone inhale, a long exhale, when there is no purpose, no goal, no striving, no project, no task, no label. The breath just breathes. Yes, the being just is. The trees look unmoving but they, too, are being. They are in being mode. The song plays and it brings me into being, the word Hallelujah ringing in my ears.
When I was a kid, I thought an earworm was an actual worm. Eeeeew, I thought. How gross and awful. But now, I see – the earworm is the music that slithers in through eardrums, some magic of hearing no amount of science can make me understand, and works its way into my brain and sends a feeling to my being, and now we are back to being, and maybe the body is also swaying a bit, and my lips spread into the shape of a small smile and for a single moment of existence, I feel such peace, I feel this peace spread throughout my body – or is it my being? And what is the difference?
This, I joke to my kids, is why I don’t do drugs. Who needs drugs when being mode is such a trip, such a strange marvel, in a world with glassblowers and flute players and the miracle of trees meeting sky? But of course, being is also so brutal sometimes, so many terrible things happen and our being mode gets pummeled into pain so intense that being must shut down in order to protect the being inside the being, and then one can only hope healing becomes available, one must climb one’s way out of the canyon where all seemed lost.
The being mode might come back, it never left, but to uncover it is the quiet and fierce work of a lifetime, to coax it back into joy, to honor its pace, to let the seasons turn and unfold and die and come to life and back again, to wait out the times that seem unmoving, only to realize that the waiting held so much change, the light never stayed in the same place forever, nor did the darkness ever consume you for good.
Being mode, I’m finding out, is an ever-present option, but I must recognize the door when it opens, and walk through it, then through it again, then keep walking, always with two feet on the ground and two eyes on the sky and one hand on my heart that keeps time all along.