In the late spring when you sit under the oak tree in my backyard, which I do sometimes in meditation, you run the risk of having small worms fall on you. The oak trees get worms, some years are better or worse in terms of quantity and I suppose in terms of whatever it is that those worms turn into. I have no real dislike for the worms, I assume they are doing their thing and belong in the ecosystem for some reason or other. But I don’t like them on me.

In the fall there is a different experience in the backyard garden and that is spider webs (and presumably spiders but you don’t see them so much). As I walk through the yard in the mornings I inevitably walk through webs that are unseen in the shadows, and while I don’t mind spiders at all, the feeling of the web across my face is unsettling.

Some months ago I was sitting on a bench under the oak tree with my eyes closed, slow breathing, quiet mantra on my lips, and I felt something on my face. And the something on my face felt small and like it was moving.

There is what I believe to be a fallacy about meditation and that is that if you are doing it right you somehow lose the awareness of anything and everything else around you. There are types of meditation where you can be wholly distant from the conscious world, but those moments are few and far between for the everyday mystic with five minutes here and ten minutes there.

Most of the time in meditation you are working to separate yourself from responding to the conscious world, you are modulating reactions by noticing what is happening, not getting attached to addressing it immediately. But, and this is important, you are aware of what is going on around you. I sit and the dog barks; the dog barking is okay, it is what dogs do, I don’t need to react instantly, usually the dog stops barking before the thought is complete. I sit and smell the coffee, hear the birds or the washing machine, know somewhere in my mind that a bill has to be paid. That’s all part of the practice because those things exist with me in the world and some of those things will be there when I open my eyes in three minutes. You are not doing it wrong, you are doing it in life.

But on this day in late spring as I sat I felt the thing on my face moving and though I knew the worm would not harm me I also did not want it on my face, or on me anywhere. I told myself what I do when something is drawing my attention outward, ‘you do not need to react to this right now, it will be there or it won’t in another moment, be here in this moment now.’ And still my attention went back to the thing on my face. Back and forth for probably no more than a few seconds and I opened my eyes, brushed my hands across my face to find nothing, looked up to see no offending worms on this day, checked the bench which was clear. Whatever it was it had been likely just my mind.

That was the lesson for the day, it should be our lesson for most days: more often than not the thing that we think we have to react to right now is just a fear of something, it is not manifest in our world and it is not needing our attention at this exact second. There are plenty of things that need attention, there is often much to do right at our feet, but that thing that wants us to abandon the moment usually is not it. Be where you are, do what you can in that time and space, don’t be afraid.