I walked with step-by-step, breath-by-breath deliberation across the mammoth expanse of Chicago’s Grant Park. My felt moment-by-moment sensations—rich, textured, and intense—made the expanse of the park feel intimate. I mentally counted the seconds of my inhales. The seconds of my exhales. Someday my breathing will stop. Every second counts.

What was happening? Everything. How else to explain being alive?

Everything that happens happens right now.

My walking and breathing were my current state of affairs in life. Every waking experience is personal—if you are a person and are awake.

Honor your feelings. Your thoughts. Open every drawer. Unlock every door. Drawers and doors are meant to be opened.

A windy day in the Windy City. A bracing baptismal breeze of cool moisturizing mist swept over me in vertical waves at irregular moments—refreshing on a muggy July day. I was a considerable distance from proud Buckingham Fountain, with its computerized dance of playing water jetties, but could still catch the humidifying drift as it suffused the air. Children near the fountain would squeal and run to avoid being captured by it. I watched the teasing approach and avoidance dance of the youngsters with delight. It was as if they had just discovered water—or the potentiality of it. Adults near the fountain stood still and quiet, as if they were asleep.

It was a perfect day—an original day. All days are original and perfect. You could not ask for anything more—nothing more was needed or desired. This was it.

I stopped and let my small black backpack slowly slip along my arm to the ground and lowered myself down to the carpet of grass. I sat near a row of barberry shrubs under a sheltering white pine. I felt my body contact the earth.

The big sounds of the City with Big Shoulders were currently evidenced by the smashing noise and reverberating thuds of a distinguished-looking brick structure a block to the west of me being demolished. The unmerciful punishment was competing for attention with the sounds of commerce and commercialism. Conceit filled the air. History was taking its licks.

Drowned out by the noise of urban smugness was the gentle slapping of the waves on the lakeshore boulders. The warming sunshine, loved because of its inevitable decline, gave me an uncompromised sense of the sacred.

I focused my attention on a tenor saxophone overplaying the eighties disco hit, “Don’t Leave Me This Way.” Amicably chatting people on the sidewalk with disengaged looks ignored the plea. An occasional explosion of laughter from a private joke would disrupt the moisturized air.

The intensity and clarity of the cloudless, cerulean sky domed the unrestrained cityscape. My eyes swept up and down from the intensity of the color overhead to the paling of it at the edging horizon line of Lake Michigan.

I fanned my hand across the recently sheered blades of lawn in front of me, and noted the dozens of shades of green making up the living carpet. Only my sweeping arm cast a shadow under the high noon sun.

I felt connected to my own being.