photo: lorelei loveridge
For some reason, I came home from work, cooked dinner, fell asleep, and woke at 1 AM. Meditated after a bit and found myself remembering - daydreaming slightly as I was/am tired - in this meditation about our sits in the late afternoon as the Sierra de Monchique winds picked up. I remembered them howling as we sat. I remember looking across the floorboards in front of me aware of the sounds all around me. I remember the stillness of sitting there, shifting ever so slightly, and I remember feeling more awake in those evening meditations than in the sweaty afternoon ones. There was an endurance there that I welcome into my life today.
While the winds of politicking blow all over this planet, I find myself far more able to employ silence, and far more desirous of it, and committed to it, too. There's a time to speak. There's a time to sit. There's a time to talk. There's a time to say nothing. There is an absolute time for everything. But silence has given me a powerful ability to reclaim my life against a sea of troubles that swirl all around.
I sat there in my morning meditation and thought about things in between thinking about nothing, in between adjusting my posture - it's all in the posture - and images of the mountain came to me, a feeling of sadness came to me, a feeling of sitting together after the retreat came to me, memories of sitting before and during the retreat came to me, memories of that stone wall in the center came to me. It all fell away as I focused on breath and the sounds of the clock ticking in my house. Memories of that wind will never ever leave me. It was a reminder of the very essence of impermanence, the lesson we learned, and while it sometimes gives me an ache in my heart to think of this world as it is, I do find myself able to let go of the need to fix everything I cannot fix. I fix myself. I sit. I abide. I write. I connect.
Thinking of you all.
With love, Lorele
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Thank you for thinking of us and sharing your reflections, expressed with much eloquence.
Yes, of that wind I could say that it has not completely left me, I feel it sometimes howling within me and, at times, it feels what was howling there was not just the wind, it was me howling, us howling, all things howling in unison. In Zen, to speak of impermanence you sometimes say the wind of Mujo!
At times it feels the wind is still howling and it is in this incessant howling, in the: it is still howling right now, that the sheer unobtructed manifestation of impermanence cuts through what was past, what is now, what will be, to simply presence mouvement that is timeless.