It’s tricky business, this meditation thing. The question came in, “How do you meditate?”
Many of my friends who work with Runes, like my Sagittarius friend Elka, mostly, I’ve found that they all despise a certain little book because it’s woefully inadequate, and according to serious scholars, just plain wrong.
Now, I don’t recall if I cut the quote or not, whether it is in my Pink Cake collection or the discard file, but I did, I think, quote that author on the process of meditation.
If I recall, and this is all straight from my porous memory, what he wrote and how he defined meditation – in one form – was the process of reading a book and underlining passages, making notes in the margins. I can’t say I remember much else from the text, I doubt I even own a copy that book.
Meditation, in one form, is all about making the inner mind quiet and still. Then, from that calm, imagine a pool, a pond, a still body of water, from that calm pool of inner peace, drawing on that well, little bubbles come up and break on the surface. Those little bubbles, what sort of stuff pops up? That’s like a fart in a bathtub. Or, there might be more important nuggets.
I’ve found in the long years I’ve been at this, that my meditation takes the form of walking. Being of Best Western decent – Robert Earl Keen line gratefully stolen and duly noted – me sitting in a Zen-like Lotus position for two hours at a time, probably not going to happen. But I do achieve a trance like state as I lay a book down on my chest and fall into a light sleep while in a supine position on the couch. That’s a form of meditation. No, really, it is.
There’s another way I meditate, too, the walking part. Of that “Best Western” mindset, what happens, when I’m past the three mile mark on a short hike, when the rhythm of the soles of sandals slap against the gravel of the travel, that’s a meditative state.
There’s another form, too, chemically induced, and I never realized it until later. I would stop at one particular coffee shop, on Congress Avenue, and I would order up a simple shot of espresso. Hot and frothy, letting the warm elixir gently roll across my tongue, savoring the way the roasted coffee oil was gradually covering my tongue, infusing flavor (and caffeine). Been some years ago, but in the wan winter light, dusk, dark, marching and rolling towards the river’s edge, letting the evening’s libation settle, that too, can be meditation.
(cure for the common horoscope)
Pink Cake A commonplace book.
