Still Life

high road

calf

urchin

kelp

The road was deserted, the beach empty, and the air mild and motionless. It was Sunday, with all of Sunday’s special kind of slow, and I rode my bicycle with lazy legs and wondered where everyone had gone. Monarch butterflies darted about -- quick flickers of bright wings -- and cows grazed peaceably alongside new-to-the-world calves, some of which ventured from their mothers’ sides and peered at me with curiosity.

In my other life, November was a time of chill and gray, but now I stopped to remove my sweater and stuff it into my pack, already hot without having yet begun to pedal up a hill. Only the yellowed leaves of sycamore and cottonwood hinted of fall, and that certain diffusion of angled sunlight, and the prevailing sense of vacancy -- I had the feeling of having slipped into some in-between zone, either too early or too late for the main event. I was riding into a still life.

At Bullito I turned left and crossed the railroad tracks to look at the beach. It was messy and kelp-strewn, and the sea was nothing but streaks of glimmer and shine. I decided to dismount from my trusty two-wheeled steed and find a shady spot along the bluff within the sound of the surf to try my hand (or rather my head) at the meditation thing. I attempted first to empty my mind, then tried to picture a limitless sky beyond the ego-eye of that needle through which I view everything. I failed abysmally.

Here's how it went: I was distracted by a shift in the temperature, a vague need to pee, the buzz of some passing insect...you get the picture. Rather than conjuring up peace and light, I succeeded only in unleashing a list of things I needed to do when I got back home and an assortment of my most current worries, most of them insoluble. After five minutes of this I concluded that I would do better at meditation if I were sitting in a chair in my own living room, and I told myself that I would try that later. Adding this little fib to my portable roster of shaky resolutions, I set out on the bicycle again.

Sometimes I think that riding my bike is meditation for me, and I suppose to a certain extent that is true, but really, I need to sit still.  My friend Dan, who for many reasons is a credible source, tells me that for him, getting meditation "right" meant letting go of the need to “get it right”, which I suspect is the case with a lot of things.

I evaluate myself way too often (and boy, am I stingy with the As!) and instead of losing myself in the process, I tend to look at wishful goals and outcomes.

It's too soon to concede defeat, though. I haven’t put much time and effort into this yet, and I need to be consistent, but I shouldn’t over-think it, which is what I am doing right now. Sometimes, Dan says, it’s simply a matter of sitting in a chair, or being aware of what one is doing while doing it.There it is again – that business of sitting still.  I so seldom do that.

But after I got home and put away my bicycle, I didn’t just bolt upstairs and move on to the next agenda item. I lingered outside, looking and listening, being still. The scent of lavender and sage mingled with that of the fledgling paper-whites along the driveway, and I was startled by a hummingbird, and I noticed that the world was shining.