Direction

It has been a weekend of seeking direction and finding new paths...

Backtrack to Saturday, when I went to a workshop on meditation and memoir led by Barry Spacks and Kimberley Snow. Barry started by telling us that a poem or memoir should offer a fresh path through long-known places, a way of going that’s odd and new. There needs to be a logical sequence and a point, yes, but also unexpectedness, revelation, surprise. Good writing, he said, should have what Robert Frost called “the straight crookedness of a good walking stick.”

How do we get there? The premise of the workshop was that this fresh path begins some place beyond the limitations of our ego, and that meditation can take us there. If we delve more deeply, we can see that the mind has its own GPS -- well, that's my term for it, and you'll soon see why it has presented itself -- it is constantly navigating and positioning us and making sense of the world, either grasping, pushing away, or remaining in neutral, but usually caught in the ruts of self-consciousness.

“We are deluded about the way we perceive the world,” said Kimberley, “because we perceive it from such a narrow perspective, that perspective being the I. It’s as though we are looking at the world through the eye of a needle and excluding everything outside of that little tiny space.”

I always write from the I. As you can see, I’m doing it right now. (But hey, this is only a blog.)

The basic idea, though, is to move from the “I” to the “now”, and one prescription for going deeper in one's writing is to alternate writing with meditation.

So we tried a couple of different meditations immediately followed by short periods of free-writing. There was a contemplation meditation for writers, a loving-kindness meditation, and a Tonglan meditation in which we were to absorb someone else's pain and send them white light instead.

These sound a bit trite when listed like that; I assure you that they are not, and I have great respect for people who have studied and practice these techniques. In this context, though, it was all introductory and perhaps somewhat cursory, and I am afraid I have no breakthroughs to report.

In fact, I don't seem to have much knack for meditation at all. If someone tells me to focus on my breathing, for example, I start worrying about my breathing. Which probably proves that I really, really need this. It is obviously something that requires sustained commitment and consistent practice. But I was reassured by Kimberley’s expansive definition of meditation, and by her suggestion that we could find what works for us, and integrate it into our lives.

She spoke of meditation in many forms: as an attitude, as mindfulness, as not reacting, as sending out kindness, as sky-gazing, as concentrating on something beautiful, as simply pausing and staring into space. She said that even just walking into a room and asking, “What can I do to help?” rather than “What do they think of me?” could be a kind of meditation.

“Dharma belongs to whoever uses it,” said Kimberley in conclusion. “Feel free to take these traditional practices and make it something that works for you. Make it your own.”

Well, we’ll see how that goes.

So today I tried a bit of sky and valley gazing as my meditation. Yeah, I know that’s quite a stretch, but I had a long-standing appointment to meet two girlfriends at Midland School and go for a backcountry wander. There was rain in the forecast, but the day held it at bay while the clouds congregated above the mountains and sun and shadow played a bit longer upon the fields.

At the school grounds, a spunky little Jack Russell appeared and began to follow us, and before long we were following him, climbing a narrow, sandy trail to an overview from which we gazed upon the Santa Ynez Valley in one direction and the mountains in the other. Occasionally we even stopped talking. (Does that count as meditation?)

Our walk, come to think of it, had all the “straight crookedness of a good walking stick” – a sequence and a point, yes, but plenty of surprise and unexpectedness. Which is another way of saying that none of us knew where we were going. In truth, we hadn’t even walked very far, but eventually we had to admit that we no longer knew exactly where the trail was, and the fickle little Jack Russell had gone back home without us.

Fear not. I had my iPhone with its GPS device (see?), and when Monte had explained this thing to me before my travels last month, I had actually paid attention. So I turned it on, searched for location, and lo and behold a map appeared with a little blue ball showing the spot where we were standing. It works!

Then I requested directions back to Midland, and just like magic, a purple path appeared with a green dot at its start and a red dot at our destination. The trick of course was to get the blue dot that was us to the green dot that marked the start of the right trail.

We walked sort of to the left, and the lively blue ball followed our movement, and we could see we were going in the right direction. When the blue ball merged with the green one on the purple trail, we were elated. We had bravely ventured into unknown territory, successfully utilized technology, and still had time for lunch in Los Olivos.

Now I am loitering contentedly in my ego and writing from the I, and though I am not exactly anywhere, I'm not exactly lost. It was a good day and the rain has come.

Subscribe