Lighthouse Beach, Annisquam, Gloucester, Mass. (4×6″ oil on watercolor-paper postcard)

If we consider experience like a raging sea, in the middle of the sea there is a little island with a lighthouse on it, showing everyone who is lost at sea where to take refuge, where there is dry land, where it is safe. This patch of land is called ‘now’.

Normally we think that our suffering is in the now and so we try to escape our suffering by going into the past and the future. Actually, it’s only when we think of the past and future that we suffer. The now is the place where we’re safe.

—Rupert Spira