Lately I’ve been interested in meditation. I’ve been reading a little about it, and trying my hand at sitting still, but it’s hard. I’m accustomed to throwing my attention far away, to follow distant threads on the internet, in a book, or in a show. It’s easy to follow a recipe, to follow a route up a hill or through the forest and it feels good. But what about right now, simply being? To follow the route inside? I know that sometimes I take a walk or a ride to find myself, to reach a state of peace, but I’m also interested in the reverse, to start here to reach there.
When I’m sitting still I can feel my mind racing, I can feel it accelerate like a car engine in neutral, wanting to do something fast. I can feel time passing; it feels like the slider bar on an mp3 playing, a burning fuse, a tire rolling on a road. I can feel tension floating under my scalp, sadness in the back of my head. I try to bring everything back to now; breathing brings it back. My breath is like a pendulum but different at every tick. On the inhale I look inside, and on the exhale I bring up what I find, remembering to not get lost, to follow the air up back to the present.
A few days ago I sat on the beach for a few hours, looking inside and staring at the waves. There was a small harbor seal lying on the sand; it was strange. A man was walking two labs, slinging a sandy tennis ball for them with a scooper, and the ball rolled right up to the seal and the dogs were wagging their tails and sniffing him as he barked with fright and pulled himself through the sand with his flippers, trying to get back into the water. The man yelled at his dogs but they were too interested and he ran up to them as the seal swam away. I was sitting feeling emulsified with the sand water and sun. I was sitting with my eyes closed and my sunglasses on. I was staring at the horizon, wishing I would see a whale. An ownerless dog sniffing driftwood came to see me; I petted his back and he sat down beside me and stuck out his tongue and we stared at the sea together. He was so calm. He stuck out his paw to shake. Some kids walked by, looking self-conscious and conscious of me. I found myself crying but it was nice. Who knew if you just stood still and thought about nothing you would cry? It’s as if some long compressed pain just floats to the top and it feels good to let it out.
Finally I saw a whale on the ocean. Or I saw its breath, a column of mist. I watched it breathe eight times over twenty minutes as it swam north and the kids walked by again and I wanted to get up and leave before they got there so they wouldn’t think I was weird, but stayed as a personal challenge.
On Sunday I drove up into Trinity County, into the Alps on a dirt road where I saw no one, fourteen miles on a single lane road bouncing over rocks to a trail head with parking for one car at Green Mountain. I walked up over a peak through a burnt forest and it was creepy, I didn’t know where I was or where I was going, only what I’d seen on the map, which didn’t prepare me for where I was. There was orange peel fungus growing out of the loose dirt in the trail, it looked like dried apricot in acorn bowls. The trail was unpleasantly steep as I climbed up over a ridge, then dropped down lower than I’d climbed, down to a saddle below the peak where a little spring emitted from the side of the hill, only to be reabsorbed a few feet later. A Western Tanager watched me from the top of a pine as I checked my legs for ticks for the hundredth time and wondered the thought that I kept wondering but couldn’t answer: where am I?
