Without Meditation
Dear friend,
My meditation practice vacillates.
The shortest meditation I know is to take a single breath. Just one. You feel your chest rise, and it’s as if you can fill your belly with air.
Sometimes it’s enough to breathe like this.
When we were kids, we’d take turns on the roundabout in Vulcan’s Park. One of us would try and make the thing spin as fast as possible while the rest hung on, weak-limbed; giddy and helpless with laughter.
Losing our grip on the cold, rust-pocked steel and the smooth, worn wooden planks of the ride.
One conscious breath is the moment the spinner stops their relentless push and shove. The blur of the world comes back into focus, and motion finds its resting place.
You can extend the practice to another breath and then another.
Head spinning, you can lie down on the grass and feel the earth cradle you.
You can come home.
To yourself.
When my practice is on form, it’ll be an hour or half.
Once or twice, maybe three times a day.
You wander away from the merry-go-round, fascinated by the great oaks. The ones for whom centuries have passed. Dawn to dusk at the still central place.
Listening to the chatter of your own mind, like starlings murmuring on the rooftops back home. Great clouds of sky fish.
Sunlight glinting on water.
Beauty shines through.
Why then is it so hard to remember?
This most simple of things?
Mind immersed in breath.
Till tomorrow,
Love
Mikey