Belly of the Whale

Since yesterday, I have started singing. I don't know why. It is a lovely feeling, having tunes arrive into your ear as you walk through the puddles and the rain. I have a truly terrible voice, but the stupa empties at night and in the rain, business is rapped up, or people are not encouraged to linger and stray.

I have felt oddly vibrant - and also more aware of all the time I spend sitting. I sit all day. I exercise well, intensely, but the day is spent entirely in my mind. This is new for me. I am used to biking to school, running errands, moving back and forth, often racing or timing myself, pushing, never still - even in study I am distractible, uneasy and ill at rest. I think late into the night – often three, and wake up late and tired.

When I had only recently arrived to Bouda, a senior monk, after hearing my cause for coming and living with them, commented that our very culture breeds quick-minded, ill at ease people - people who eat on the run, work while eating, drive, talk, and apply make-up all at once, can hardly sit still - we never slow down. I agreed with him but noted that there are plenty of dim witted slow people as well. I didn't feel a particular affinity to the comparison and was more interested in dealing with my problems personally.

Now I see more clearly the validity or relevance of his observation: I am now immersed in a lifestyle that moves at a geologic slowness. Movement is invisible, inaudible in my day to day life. Consequently, perhaps my mind is absorbing, cooling, softening, and becoming, at last, malleable to the influence of yoga and meditation.

I hope this is so. This is the first step in the most important process I have attempted: the control of my mind. I have so long had trouble sleeping, struggled with memory debility - it is a part of me that is wild, untamed, and therefore not being used as productively as I would want and will need it to be. It is an expression of myself; I want it to be wild, but wild like a wave - I want to learn how to ride it and use its power to a greater benefit than I am capable of now.

In the last year, a few luminaries have shown me what a beautiful mind is really capable of. Limitless almost, certainly beyond any shallow limits my reason would propose. I believe, and now, at last, I am learning; I am beginning the road that long I have been eager to walk, but the time was not ripe or ready. Now, once started, I will take the work, this joy, to my old age and the grave. It is an expression of spirit, as real as any I have experienced, even with the inner mental rebellion.

My life will be shuffled, rearranged. I haven’t the time to entertain all that I love and cherish. In a temporal world we must let go, say goodbye to things that were once our all, our soul’s expression. (I should be saying “I� here.) But my soul sheds its skin and morphs into new shapes with new needs for health, for sustenance, for life and love. So what will shift, what will become dusty on the shelf until I have the time and will to meet it again and enjoy a fond reminiscence?

This will only be sorted in time and with a certain patience.