My mindspace opened in a similar way this morning, onto an image of the last time I was meditating with a friend of mine in a park on Friday. My friend is seven years old - just going into second grade - and had used his boyish hyperenergy to run out in front of us on the trail we were hiking. When I caught up to him in the grass by the parking lot, he was sitting cross-legged with an exaggerated long expression and his hands resting palm-up on his knees, fingers touching like a little Buddhist monk. It was clear that he'd been doing it partially as a joke, but he must've been sitting there for awhile, and he resisted getting up when I addressed him.
Intrigued by his interest - the kid is intelligent and has a keen depth of insight, as I believe many children do - I told him we should move away from the path, and we sat down on a shady patch of grass looking into the forest. Our eyes closed, and I found myself entering a normal posture of meditation, which I found strange, considering that he's seven and there were only two of us. When we both got distracted by a couple people calling to one another across the parking lot, I told him to just hear it and let it go, to let thoughts come and leave without reacting to them. I opened my eyes and glanced over at him to my right - he had dropped his playful expression and had this air of serene calm over him. After about half a minute, he moved down in front of me off of the little hill we were sitting on, repositioning his sweatshirt under him in order to be more comfortable.It was clear to me in May that some important brainwork I'd have to do this summer would be a reconfiguration of my understanding of family, of nationality, of belonging, my expectations for the future, my priorities, the way I see myself and my religion - everything I've had firm thoughts about in the past and since deconstructed. These are things I did on a daily basis, sometimes multiple times a day, from seventh grade until college, but I got bored as I found myself capable of emotional maturity. That has also meant, however, that many of the emotional qualities I was best at a couple years ago have gotten traded for entirely different qualities, and the original strengths have become weaknesses. I no longer overprocess, but that itself is a shift which I find myself having to process - the irony.
For one, I've begun to self-identify as Quaker. Not only is it the only religious ideology in which I've felt comfortable for any significant stretch of time, in the objective, modernist sense, but the dogmatic parameters of the community are loose enough that I don't feel threatened by anything people say. I still hesitate to say that "I am a Quaker" to other people because I'm still fairly uneducated on the kind of thing you'd have to read to know and I've only been attending Meetings for half a year, but I intend to stick it out.
Another thing is that I'm re-confirming to myself - in the midst of a pretty intense submersion in queer language and culture this summer, as I'm throwing out norms left and right - that I still deeply want to be a parent one day. I don't want a husband, I don't want a big house, I don't want to be a homemaker, and I don't want to be a woman as much as I want to be an adult. But I want to have a partner and family, and I want other childhoods to be part of my life when I've grown a few decades removed from my own. I want to teach a couple kids my language and culture. I like the grandma / grandpa / uncle / neice / nephew / grandkids dealie. I'd love for it to work out that way.As I sat on that piece of grass watching that seven-year-old kid breathe and listen to the birds in Meeting this morning, I realized that it's completely unnecessary for my genes to be part of any child I raise. Most of the deepest love and pride I've felt hasn't been dependent on genes or pregnancy in the past - my best friends, the people I've been in love with, my teachers, my cat, my tree, the communities I've been part of. When my friend joined me in meditation for those ten minutes at the edge of a parking lot, we shared a unique bond that transcended any blood or familial or age or gender or sexual or even religious ties, and the same thing happens in community with Friends every week. I have believed and have taught myself for years, but especially in these past few months, that this bond exists between everything and everyone. Why not give more connections the chance to develop?
* * *
The image was fascinating today. It was one of this kid in front of me on the lawn, as I said - and soon an ethereal bubble of water appeared above his head - roughly 150% its size. It seemed to represent the state in which his mind dwelled, a representation of his mindspace.
And then it broke. I can't say it shattered - it's more that a massive torrent of water suddenly fell out from it down upon him, as though it had been relieved of the tension that had kept it in its spherical shape. He was drenched, but he did not flinch or turn or shudder or react in any way. It seemed to cause him some kind of glow, in the way a plant does after you give it some fertilizer and sunshine. The memetic counterpart to the above thoughts came through my mind - the vivacity of this child and any child's life, its strength and independence from blood ties. The water was still streaming down in a small, cylindrical waterfall - and suddenly there came an intermission to the scene.There were three tiny children of genders as fluid as the water - their genders flowed in and out of femininity and masculinity and androgyny and can't-tell and weird combinations of it all - that were climbing up a rope in the middle of the waterfall. This location seemed fairly similar to the one I blogged about in The Most Beautiful Nature I've Ever Seen, in a dreamlike kind of way.
The top child was blonde, had short hair, and was the quickest. The middle one had redish blonde hair and was very curious, but slower than the first. The third had mopish, curly, brown hair that stayed the same shoulder length regardless of gender. There was a playful back-and-forth banter between them, Blonde urging Red and Brown on, Brown complaining of splinters, Red telling Blonde to wait up, Brown getting distracted by something cool on the rocks. Each child's face and hair changed from moment to moment as genders and gender expressions changed, as if all their different cheeks and chins were nothing more than images in a stop-motion movie. The rushing of the water seemed to drown out their shrill, excited voices after a time, and my thoughts wandered into formless Brain Just Needa Process Stuff mode.
Four people gave ministry today, and every one of them mentioned the recently-announced verdict of the Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case. Their messages were about inclusion and exclusion and the horrors of racism and compassion and the importance of nonjudgment, the importance of making all these values a political reality for the communities we interact with. That fit particularly well with the first image and train of thought I had been following, and just as Meeting was about to close, it came back in a sort of classical recapitulation.
I was back at the edge of the parking lot and the kid was in front of me on the grass. But as he slowly turned around to look at me, he was not just a he - he was all genders, and all races, and all sizes, all shapes. Every seven-year-old child in one body, grinning at me soaked in this water, which had returned to a bubble above their head: a bubble that I now recognized meant family, meant mindspace connection, meant the Life and Light that binds us together, the water that flows in and out of humanity, the same formula in each body and animal and plant and bacterium. The breaking of the water was like a baptismal water and like a uterine breaking of water - the Living Water is what brings us into this life and whence we return when we leave. It is the Fountain with which we commune when we pray and what we see in our brothers and sisters when we call them by name.
It has been said that God, Jesus, is the Fountain of Life - in every other sermon I heard as a child, in countless praise songs, in Christian books and prayers and stamped into the fabric of the culture I was raised in. But I believe it is of equal worth - not blasphemous, not insane, not even unChristian - to say that we are also the Water of life. It is my deep conviction that God invites us with every breath we take to discover the extent to which we might one day incarnate that reality.
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