The hike was postponed for rain.
He scarfed escargot, craving fresh marrow.
His fatal flaw was galloping narcissism.
Ghosts of Van Gogh, irises bloom.
Once rescued, the lilac resumed blooming.
She poured Sunday peace and coffee.
Spring brought cut grass and bones.
When I meditate, the big things fall into perspective. When I sit and let my body relax, I can feel my bones and muscles, my blood and tissue, letting go of all the big ideas, the big worries, the Big Bad (as Buffy would say). My breath deepens, my shoulders drop. I would like to say that I let my worries go but it is really the other way around. When I fall into the sweet relaxation that mediation opens in me, worries let me go and my consciousness expands and rises up into the sky like a soap bubble. From that high-deep place the “big things” that occupy so much of my waking life seem as small as marbles in the dust and I wonder how they ever seemed important at all.
It took a couple of whole-day meditation retreats to reach this place. I like to think that I have meditated for years, but now I realize, I dabbled. I would do it when the timing was right or the moon was aligned or if I had not hit the snooze button and rose naturally, and meditation was a yummy doorway between dreaming and awake. But I never did it for more than 20 minutes. Tops.
I began attending a weekly Satsang in Napa and got to practice 30 minutes sessions. They were challenging, but I got the hang of it. Then, I did a couple of full day retreats at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre. These took a little more concentration, a little more physical discipline. I struggled at first, but when I stopped efforting so much. . .and when I forgot to try, it happened. The world and everything in it (including me) simply expanded and I found my mind floating in a sparkling pool of iridescent blue. I call this feeling Suspended in the Blue and it is completely, utterly, and deeply delicious. I won’t pretend that I get there every time, but now that I know how, it has become an unfolding, and I appreciate the practice as much as the experience.
Big worries? Meh. I breathe in, I breathe out. Everything else is optional.
The other night while eating Chinese and reading the winter issue of Ploughshares I discovered Lance Larson and his astonishing “Sad Jar of Atoms.” I tumbled into a rabbit hole of language love that I haven’t felt since my first reading of Louise Erdrich’s Last Report of the Miracles from Little No Horse. This is true love. Deep love. Crush love.
“Life is a jar of maybe, of who knows, whereby we grow older and bones turn brittle as hope. Some jars live along time, like sea turtles, like Benjamin Franklin, a jar of genius filled with Poor Richard and flirting in French. . .”
Lance Larson, poet genius, poet laureate of Utah, I love you. I want to hold your prose babies in my prayerful hands. I am lost in cadence and find myself in a place where words are texture and all sound is a dazzle . . all because of your “Sad Jar of Atoms.”
Thank you for your Byronic reference. Thank you for “a jar made of sizzle and cordite.” Thank you for your “river and the eye of a bird.”
One way to journal is to forget everything you know about the place you live. You learn to look at the world as if you just popped through a worm hole from some other verdant, vividly lush and distant planet. Instead of going about your regular routines, I bet you would begin to really see the world you inhabit.
How many times do you go about your business and then suddenly realize that you can’t remember the last ten minutes? That you had been on autopilot, with your body operating the family car, stopping at lights and pausing for pedestrians while your mind had zipped off to distant canyons and \ gullies of memory and illusion? You’ve arrived safely and no one was hurt thank goodness, but what would happen if you were fully embodied, fully present, each day of your life? Would you see the world differently?
My vote is yes. It’s a fact that we do not cultivate the practice of notice very well. We are bombarded by television, radio, the Internet, literally thousands of messages a day (the gist of which are of the most dire nature by the way, and another reason to unplug) and so it’s natural that we begin to shut down. In many cases, shutting down is a natural mechanism of survival. The trouble is, once you begin to shut out the ugly of the world, you inevitably begin to shut out the beautiful and remarkable and miraculous, too.
Almost no one I’ve ever talked to about it thought their story was interesting. But I’ll bet their story is remarkable. They just stopped noticing the details. They forgot that their life was miraculous in about a million ways. So here’s an idea: write about your life like you don’t own it. Write about last Christmas like you’re a staff writer at a big agency and you’re creating a storyboard for a movie that will be seen around the world and sent toward the great, central sun by powerful satellites and viewed by people who have no idea what Santa is about, and why people decorate trees with shiny glass orbs. Explain what your house looks like as if you were describing it to a blind person. Paint a picture with words to describe your dog to a boy who has never seen a dog in his life. Illustrate a journal entry about last night’s dinner with words so smoky and succulent that your nostrils twitch and your stomach howls. Visit your local grocery store like you’re a tourist from Hungary. Have you ever noticed, really noticed, now many different brands of bread there are? How many varieties of potato chips they sell? Go to your local Chamber of Commerce and ask for a directory of members and marvel that people do the kinds of jobs they do. Lick the inside of your wrist and then sniff it to see what your breath smells like. Stop living on auto-pilot! Cultivate an appreciation for each Now that shows up. Now, I reach for my water bottle and the cool liquid slides down my throat. Now, my fingers pull away the skin of an orange. Now, I call on inspiration, and she takes my hand and we walk.
persephone's step-sisters 