Dwelling in This Moment: The Only Creative Act We Have

“Dwelling in the present moment, I know that this is the only moment.”

This line, drawn from a prayer by Thich Nhat Hanh, closed a concert I attended last night. The artist Glen Phillips led it as a community chorus sing-along, and something about the simplicity of it — voices joined, the room still, the words offered as both prayer and reminder — landed in me with unusual weight. It had been a few days of navigating mechanical car troubles, the labyrinthine frustrations of federal student loan forgiveness paperwork, and the energetic preparations for a family celebration this weekend. These are the ordinary textures of a human life. They are also, collectively, exhausting in the particular way that accumulation exhausts us, not because any one thing is insurmountable but because the sum of small resistances can gradually erode our attention away from what is real and available right now.

And then the wider world presses in as well. A fragile ceasefire between the United States and Iran holds its breath while analysts try to read its meaning. The cost of living rises in ways that register most painfully in the lives of people who were already stretched thin. Reports circulate about potential shortages ahead as energy reserves shift and supply chains respond to political decisions made far from the communities they affect. Airlines are cancelling routes. Businesses that once seemed stable are closing. Stephen Colbert is ending his broadcast run on CBS, and FCC Commissioner Anna M. Gomez has publicly named what she calls a “sustained, coordinated campaign of censorship and control” directed at Disney and ABC by the current administration. These are not abstractions. They are the conditions in which we are being asked, right now, to live.

All of this is happening. And the chant from last night kept returning to me this morning like a gentle hand placed on a racing pulse: dwelling in the present moment, I know that this is the only moment.

The Present Moment Is Not a Retreat from the World

There is a misunderstanding that sometimes accompanies teachings about presence, and I want to name it directly: the present moment is not a spiritual escape hatch. It is not a way of averting our gaze from difficulty or pretending that what is happening in the world does not matter. Thich Nhat Hanh himself was a man who walked through war, exile, and the grief of watching his homeland suffer enormous violence. His teachings about the present moment emerged not in spite of that suffering but through it. When he offered the practice of dwelling in the now, he was not offering a vacation from reality. He was offering the only place where reality can actually be met.

Fear pulls consciousness in two directions simultaneously: backward into what has already been lost, and forward into catastrophic imaginings of what might yet be taken. This dual motion is exhausting because it asks us to inhabit two times that do not exist, the past that is done and the future that has not arrived, while surrendering the only moment in which anything can actually be done. The present is not merely a philosophical nicety. It is the location of agency. It is where the Creative Process lives. It is the only moment in which Love can act.

When circumstances feel unstable, our nervous systems are conditioned to scan the horizon for threats. This was once useful for survival. It becomes a liability when the “threat” is a political climate or an economic pattern, something diffuse and systemic that cannot be outrun or outwitted in a single moment of action. The spiritual invitation in times like these is not to stop paying attention but to anchor attention in the present rather than letting it drift into the fear-futures our minds are so gifted at constructing.

The Creative Process Requires a Present Participant

In the work I explore in my forthcoming book WHOLE, I return again and again to the understanding that consciousness is not merely a witness to events but a participant in shaping them. Unity philosophy has always held that the inner and outer worlds are not separate domains; the field of human awareness participates in the field of human experience. This is not magical thinking. It is the recognition that the quality of attention and intention we bring to any moment enters the creative stream of what unfolds next. We do not cause everything, but we are never causally neutral either.

The implications of this understanding become most important precisely when circumstances feel most out of our control. If we are spending our awareness in fear, rehearsing worst-case scenarios, amplifying division, and reinforcing the consciousness of scarcity and threat, then we are contributing that quality of energy to the collective field. We are, in the language of Sacred Repatterning, reinforcing the old pattern rather than planting the new one. The invitation is not to be naive about what is happening but to be intentional about what we bring to it.

Sacred Repatterning is the practice of meeting the world as it is, without denial, and allowing Love to reorganize what happens next. It does not ask us to pretend that the ceasefire is not fragile, that the cost of groceries has not risen, or that the encroachment on press freedom is not real. It asks us to meet all of that in a particular way: grounded in the present moment, aligned with Love, and consciously choosing what pattern of consciousness we contribute to the collective field. This is not passive. It is among the most active spiritual disciplines available to us.

What the Collective Consciousness Needs Now

Every tradition of contemplative wisdom understands that the quality of the inner life shapes the quality of the outer world, not instantaneously, not mechanically, but genuinely and over time. When enough people root themselves in love rather than fear, in Oneness rather than separation, in the present moment rather than the anxiety of imagined futures, something shifts in the field that surrounds and connects us. This is not sentiment. The mystics across traditions who have walked through history’s darkest chapters have consistently testified to it.

The panentheistic understanding at the center of my work holds that the Divine is not outside the world looking in but lives and breathes and moves within all of it, including within the confusion of this particular moment in history. There is no circumstance so frightening that the Divine presence is absent from it. The question is not whether Love is available. The question is whether we are present enough to meet it, and to become its expression in the situations that surround us.

Right now the collective consciousness needs people who can be still enough to hear what Love is asking, courageous enough to express it, and grounded enough in Oneness to refuse the ongoing cultural invitation to treat other human beings as enemies. We need people who can hold the tension of an imperfect world without collapsing into either denial or despair. We need people who can say, with full awareness of what is happening: I am here, in this moment, and Love has something to do through me.

A Simple Practice for Today

Whatever the news brings today, whatever the frustrations of ordinary life add to your load, there is a practice available to you right now. Pause. Take one slow breath. Let your awareness settle in this moment rather than racing ahead to the problems your mind is already rehearsing. Notice that in this precise instant, you are breathing, you are alive, and Love is present. From that ground, ask one question: what is the highest expression of Truth available to me in this moment, in this situation, with these people?

This is not a practice for people who have it together. It is a practice for people who are walking through the complexity of a genuinely difficult time and choosing, moment by moment, not to surrender to cynicism, despair, or the illusion of separation. It is Sacred Repatterning in its most elemental form. It is how we reorganize the energy field and collective consciousness through which Love can rule.

The concert ended with voices joined in that simple chant, and the room was peaceful. Not because the world outside had changed in those few hours, but because for a few minutes a roomful of people had chosen presence over anxiety, community over isolation, and the truth of this moment over the fear of the next one. It was a small act, and a Creative Act — one facilitated by a heart-centered artist who understood that presence is its own kind of power. And real acts, rooted in Love, accumulate in ways that matter.

Breathing in, I calm my body and mind.

Breathing out, I smile.

Dwelling in the present moment, I know that this is the only moment.