Meditation // A Love Story
part one.
In honor of the 8th anniversary of my dedication to daily practice. Here are reflections on my 6th and 3rd year; originally published on Magic Inclined, in January and February 2021.
May we all find our way home someday.
x,
LDV
Meditation // 6 Years Journeying Into Myself
*Part one: A look back.
This morning I am watching the sun rise on the northernmost west coast of California, on unceded Tolowah land. The sunrise here is conducted through the constant mist, and the shades of the day draw in slowly. The clouds illuminate and wash my room above this weekend’s King Tide. The gradual nature of this dawn slows my mind as I contemplate the upcoming anniversary of my daily commitment to meditation practice. It tells my story for me: gradual illumination. cumulative effect.
I am sitting in front of my notes from three years ago, my reflections from the week I stepped into my third year of this devotion. I was in Northern New Mexico, floating gently around the high country beneath a blanket of snow. I have images pinned to two separate notebook entries. In the first photo, I am seated in an ancient church in town proper. The church was built on top of a native sacred site as so often happens in the story of religion once ‘God was removed from the earth and promoted to higher regions’... another time. I was compelled by the weather of generational pain and the idea of worship crashing like waves through folded time.
My words read:
Yesterday was my 3 year anniversary with Transcendental Meditation.
For all that it has given me, I am grateful internal. Like any perfect lover, it showed up and I stepped to meet it and I was changed in the center of a gold and wild life that didn’t need for anything. I am better for it: again and again.
I don’t know about the future, I know about right now. Right now is forever. Right now is freedom.
I was writing to some loved ones this morning from our large adobe in Santa Fe and some words from a writer to another writer crossed my mind: ‘The future stands still… but we move in infinite space.’
I don’t believe we are separate from our gods. Give me Krishnamurti, give me the desert romantics, give me a highway, give me a pen. Give me choices, give me action, give me error. Give me only today. Give me your hand.
Each morning, from wherever (forever), I sit and slow myself to meet the speed of the natural world. I no longer see the value in pretending I am faster than it. It is not perfect, it is a practice… and I have no aspiration toward a false perfection.
I liken this slowness to when one sits and stares at the same patch of grass or scrub or sea for a while, and the greater you stare the more you move into the subtle layers of that Thing. You can nearly see its every cell after a time if you let yourself. You can see the seasons within an inch, the cycles of birth and death exist within a single leaf.
Those seasons are inside of all things, and all people. I am able to meet them better for my commitment to a present mind. I see things more wholly, no longer simplifying the complex in order to barrel past the very reason I am here. I understand you better as I witness you more fully, and in that process, I honor me.
In the second image, I am at the top of a slot canyon in Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks near the Santo Domingo Pueblo. My tongue is out and I am smiling, face tilted toward the warming light after my ascent through the sandy, shaded twists of the terrain below. Looking at this photo now I know that I ran the way up to the summit. I recognize the charge of that happiness.
Yesterday I was still thinking about my TM anniversary and stillness and silence and it went like this:
In my mind, life is probably like a journey up a mountain. It begins with endless possibility and ends with a fucking view.
And so go ahead and run your way up the mountain, but at the end- what will you know of who you met? What were they here to teach you? What did you see along the way as you beat the body you were given for this exact purpose.
For me, meditation is this. I take each stride in relation to the grade below me. Sometimes I see a space that I am drawn to and I move harder for it, sometimes the world is telling me to be easy with myself and I stop completely. I want to meet the things along the way that inhabit each level of elevation and sing their song of place. I want to know the range of this vessel, and the earth it’s held to and the wind we share.
If I fall, I am fine. If that fall is my last I have seen what I was meant to. And if I make it to that view, I can look down upon all the stories that were mine and all the other Things and feel my place in that and let it all go knowing I am not important.
This is the way I feel most free.
Back to today and the year twenty-twenty-one and my Fog King seat at the edge of creation.
Three years after I penned those thoughts on the process, I look back and know them to still be true. I smile a little at the drama of the language. I feel compelled to make a few small corrections to the text and I do with love in my heart for the littler me, likely scribbling dreams on a takeaway bag in the moonlight. I hold that drama and the instruction like a mother, and isn't that what we are to ourselves through time really? ...regardless of sex or construct? How infinitely beautiful.
In the second part of this series on meditation, I will get into the specifics of the act itself and how that tool has served me in my life and with my craft. Thank you for walking with me as I acknowledged the growth I have made and honored and held the younger versions inside me.
6 years, over 2100 days, around 66,000 minutes of my life devoted: the rest of my time here to go.
x,
LDV
*this week's blog was written waaay out on the point in Crescent City, California on unceded Tolowa land.
