Rich and Thin
What does it feel like to be here?
When I’m overwhelmed, I might spend too much time online watching cats, dogs, comedians, and WNBA snippets, reading news, reading commentary on the news, reacting, scrolling, paralyzed. The thinness of online life misrepresents paddling in the shallows as a substitute for living. It’s the difference between the outline and the real story.
The past can be feel more real than the present. I recall sensations - the smells, the sights, the physical sense of being there - from a moment in the past when I was so preoccupied with my own thoughts that I didn’t notice what I was experiencing at the time.
How, in these dark days, can one both resist the avalanche of fascism and experience the richness of one’s own life, even to experience the richness of the resistance? To know what it feels like to be here?
Trump has been good for business at our meditation center. We have increasing numbers of visitors who are looking for a way to find a little peace in community.
During meditation, it is possible to have glimpses of insight like chinks of light in the ceiling of a darkened room.
Dropping habits of thought, even briefly, can open us to unfettered experience. Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön recommends taking three breaths to wake ourselves up:
Pause practice—taking three conscious breaths at any moment when we notice that we are stuck—is a simple but powerful practice that each of us can do at any given moment.
Pause practice can transform each day of your life. It creates an open doorway to the sacredness of the place in which you find yourself. The vastness, stillness, and magic of the place will dawn upon you, if you let your mind relax and drop for just a few breaths the story line you are working so hard to maintain. If you pause just long enough, you can reconnect with exactly where you are, with the immediacy of your experience.1
We can use sensory exercises to break through the film between us and now. What does something smell like, feel like, look like, sound like? The scent of a crushed basil leaf offers us an opening to richness. No experience is permanent, but, brief moment by moment, we have a chance to stick our heads out the window and be here.
dandelion chain I weave myself into the meadow - Joshua St. Claire
Art opens the window. The novel pauses the march of the plot to bring us into the character’s intense experience:
Walking the monumental arcaded Paseo, past statues and cafés, he ogled the exuberant meandering crowd; men and women of all colors and races, Black, brown, tan, white, holding hands or linking arms, laughing, bickering, couples of various races in every combination and their rainbow children, so different from the American South, and from his own homeland. This freedom - purely imaginary to him until this moment - struck him perhaps more than anything else: the vitality, the here-ness of the crowds, thrilling simply in daily existence, in being. Even those with a mess of teeth or rough skin were dressed as if for a party, the women in fluttery sleeves and clinched waists, the men in dress shirts and pressed trousers, their black hair brilliantined and their shoes spit shined.2
Claire Messud, This Strange Eventful History
Smelling the basil…
Beautiful reminder.