The Circling Forms a Center
Some Days the Creek Disappears
After a storm, I walk beside the creek.
The new swell of water transforms. Submerging banks. Brown-white currents rushing. Louder now. Even the bridges look lower.
Most enchanting is how the water carries whatever it has snatched from upstream — colorful wrappers, sticks and leaves riding the current. Once, a plastic stool. Another time a pink stroller. Someone’s garbage bin. A beach ball on its way to the ocean.
Becoming fascination itself, I walk.
A kid again. Wonder.
Right now an orange pail hangs by its handle from a tree branch.
An odd ornament.
The remainder of the storm.
Eyes widen at the brightness.
Some days I hardly notice the creek.
Those are the days my head is full of its own weather.
There was a morning, just after waking, when I noticed something curious.
If experience flows like a creek, mine was flowing unusually easy.
Perched inside myself, I watched for a while. Perspective panoramic. The moment’s ingredients — sensing, thinking, feeling, meaning — coming and going.
Nothing caught for long. No obvious center to grab onto.
Just hmmm, there is this.
And hmmm, now this.
When the creek floods, I never think it should be some other way.
Debris — the evidence of us.
A different morning I wake up and there it is.
The old, familiar anvil in the center of my chest.
Everything narrows around it. The center thickens. Ache and uncertainty lodge there like the garbage bin — waterlogged, mud-packed, stuck.
Thought rushes brown — up, over, around.
There is only this.
That easy morning stopped flowing with a single thought.
An afternoon conversation. A face I couldn’t read.
The ache of not feeling understood.
Words replaying, taking over.
A flick of hot embarrassment — the signal that sticks.
The thought loops a dozen times.
Perhaps it isn’t thought that slows a creek.
It’s the circling.
Mostly, Sand Creek meanders thin. Its surface quiet, like a mirror with nothing to say about its reflection.
I walked it recently on that kind of day and noticed I barely saw the creek for all the chatter circling in my head.
Until something orange caught my eye.
A small bucket hanging by its white handle from a low branch.
An odd ornament.
The creek, again.
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On meditation
The mind has an inborn mechanism which causes its attention to shift from one thing to another periodically. It is a survival optimization.
In order to maximize survival, we needed to be looking around so that we would not miss the tiger that wanted to eat us.
Many people who begin meditation practices come to the mistaken conclusion that the goal is to stop all the mind’s thoughts and to exist afterwards in the pure quiet of having no thoughts.
This is an example of throwing out the baby with the bath water. 🙈
The goal is to gain control so you can choose when thoughts are appropriate and when simple presence is preferable.
Before we attain this control, the mind just thinks all the time - mostly about silly and pointless things. Just stand to the side and watch all the silly stuff it yammers about.
But thought control cannot be obtained without focus and intent. A meditation teacher will ask you to try to focus on one thing. And it can take you days, weeks or months before you can begin to hold a focus on that one thing steadily.
All of this is just a necessary preface to the real task which is to hold onto ‘nothing’ steadily.
Before you can do this you are like a man with one tool. Your one tool is ‘thinking’. And it is hard to say if you are in control of the tool or if it is in control of you.
After I meditated for a while and my mind got quieter, I realized, of course, that the real point of meditation is not to just be able to maintain quiet.
The real point is to be able to intentionally focus on what you want to focus on with a relatively unlimited attention span.
On a day-to-day basis, I discovered that when I went into meditation, it allowed me, in that silence, to remember myself and to remember clearly ‘who I am’, ‘what I believe in’, ‘what I want’ and ‘where I think I am in the course of my life’.
We all have these thoughts..
But they are often blown away in the wind of small daily events that constantly assail us. And we only reconnect to them occasionally.
We can often forget who and what we are, at the deepest sense, when we are in the middle of that blizzard of moment to a moment, things.
But when you learn to meditate and go into that silence for a few minutes each day, your memory of who you are and what you are about comes back to you very clearly.
And It’s like touching solid ground again. It reconnects you to who you really are before you stand up again and everything gets scattered by the wind.