As I've mentioned, unlike ever before, I legitimately start to feel spiritual unrest when I spend too much time out of meditation now, so I have very randomly decided to plop down on the spot to recenter my mind on two different occasions in the past couple weeks. Too much time has passed since the first to merit a post of its own, but it was probably one of the most beautiful meditative experiences I have had. Driving home from a coffee date, one day, I was suddenly filled with an antsy anger, perhaps regret, for the way I had portrayed myself in the conversation. I'd been stuck at home for a few days and hadn't gotten exercise, either, so leaving this meeting, I suddenly felt extremely claustrophobic and embarrassed of myself, pulling off to the side of the road completely spontaneously to charge into the woods.
My first attempt to do this resulted in my landing in a ditch, which had a couple passing bikers worriedly looking at me over their shoulders, because my back wheels were in the air. No matter - I got back on the road, and Lo! there was a trail, maybe 100 yards ahead of me.Maybe it's because I'm older, or because I've been in Michigan winter with nothing to see but grey for half a year, or because it was completely in the middle of nowhere, or because the sun was shining just right through the trees, but it was legitimately the most beautiful hike I've ever hiked. It seemed to be primarily built for mountain biking, because it was fairly narrow and rocky, with as many bikers on it as runners. (I was clearly the only awkward nonathletic person there, in my skinnies, sweater, and sneakers.) The first leg of the trip was me cathartically running out my frustration to a Protest soundtrack, and the second half, I put everything away so that I could pay attention to the finer details of the forest and soak in the smells and sounds.
There were two mountains, essentially, that I climbed down and then up, with a swampy valley in the middle of them. This swamp had a wonderful, fairly new, wide wood bridge spanning it, and halfway through, there was a bench (just half a log on two more logs - Pacific Northwest style). On my way back, I sat there in silence for 40 minutes, and it was incredibly healthy for me. I learned something very interesting, but now I don't remember what it was. I almost like it better that way - the experience is something I like to remember and then let go of.
That was a week ago. Yesterday, I and a friend of mine were walking through this random little town that literally has only one street and a single coffee shop. We happened upon an adorable, eccentric old house-turned-store, where I found a couple candles and a ring. I've amassed a decent collection of candles, now, and wanted to test them out, so I made a makeshift table and put them all on it. My family later remarked that it looks like I have a shrine in my room, but it didn't even occur to me at the time that it might seem that way. I do suppose meditating cross-legged in front of a small table with eccentric-looking candles on it is fairly nonwestern. Whatever works.
One of my candles has a difficult wick that I was trying to test out today, and the fire gave me the same antsy desire to explore, to be quiet, to be free, to be full, to escape, that came to me last week. So I lit all the rest of the candles and arranged them symmetrically, turned off all the lights, and sat down. It wasn't long before I was interrupted by my family to go watch Star Wars, but one of the most incredible, erm, visions came to me.
I had spent almost no time in Observation before the image came: a very plain, poor, victorian-era little girl was hugging her young mother. The image wasn't clear, though I would describe it as faded, rather than dim, but the world they lived in is the same world I created in which to imagine Great Expectations when I read it.
The girl had long, wavy, sand-colored blonde hair, slightly tangled, but only from play. She wore a light brown dress with three-quarter sleeves and a little white frock - perhaps apron - with frills on the straps and hems and a white bow in the back. In this first image, she was incredibly distraught. As has been the case before, despite the fact that I was not the girl, nor the mother, nor did I find that they represented my relationship to my mother or any tentative daughter, I could feel the girl's pain and the mood of her surroundings in perfect detail.
As children often are, the girl was thoroughly saturated with the sadness - a very plain, very pure sadness that sunk to her bones. It was the kind that makes you feel so helpless you forget about everything that was good, and tears seem like a natural outpouring of your state of being. That state of being where, if only you still remembered something that was good, the misery couldn't possibly be so miserable.
It was a deep pain, not just the scrape of a knee. I don't know what happened - perhaps she got betrayed by some friends, or teased, or kicked out of a game, but I get the feeling it was accompanied by harsh movement and some kind of physical consequence. Do you remember that deep ache that wells up in you as a child when you've cried so much the whining becomes an expression of the ache in your abs? It was that kind of all-consuming ache, accompanied by shame and rejection and emotional hurt.
The mother had a small frame, dark hair, rosy cheeks, a dainty nose. She cradled the girl in her arms so beautifully. The two fit together like a puzzle, as if they had always been meant to be together, to comfort one another. Her mother was a safe haven for the little girl, a home base from which she need never depart. She was warmth and beauty and simplicity and goodness to her, and the girl could see absolutely nothing wrong in her.
This scene faded into a nature scene. She had run a long way to arrive here, and she'd discarded her shoes by the edge of the clearing in which I found her. It was a waterfall, maybe three meters wide and three or four stories tall. There was a perfectly clear pool at its base, and the vegetation was overflowing at the seams. It seemed to speak of pixies and fairies and dwarves and magical kingdoms in some kind of subtle way; there was magic in the air. At least, that's what it seemed to the little girl, who had run a very long way, and had just reached this oasis, and knelt by the water to wash her hands and face.
As she was exploring the area, turning up rocks and splashing in the water, a little boy about her age came out of the woods, or perhaps a cave to the right of the waterfall, and told her that he could show her something cool. Again, typical of children, it didn't really seem strange to her that he was there, nor did she think to ask for his name. It didn't occur to me that he had no identity and that I didn't know where he came from until just now.
He was a skinny boy with a feminine face - pink lips, sharp chin, pale complexion. His build was small - smaller than the girl's - but he'd clearly found his way around the direction he'd come from and was eager to show it to the girl, despite his shy, quiet disposition. The two children waded through waist-deep water into a cave to the right of the waterfall, behind some bushes and through a nest of ferns. There was a long cliff face that went on for significantly longer than the waterfall, and the cave was a relatively shallow, but impressively cavernous space that had evidently been appreciated by some kind of carnivorous animal before us. The boy had been collecting stones he'd found in the pool and in the cave, sorting them by color and shining them to make them look nicer.
After he'd shown me his rocks (as the victorian girl had now morphed into my consciousness, almost as though in freedom, she became me), I asked whether he'd explored much further - maybe, up the cliff. He said he hadn't tried to climb it, and wondered whether we even could. Before he'd finished his sentence, I had made my way through to the cliff face and had climbed up a couple feet - the slope was slightly to my advantage, but it was clearly a difficult climb for such a small kid in a damp dress and bare feet. The boy was afraid and questioned my decision, but I pointed out that there was another cave behind the waterfall that we could get into fairly easily if we climbed carefully.
And so we did - each climbing carefully a story up and about twice as far over, into a far more impressive (though damp) cave than before. The story ends here, but the moment is one I feel deserves description. The waterfall was out of reach from the mouth of the cave, easily three times an arm's length, but we could feel the spray where we crouched together, playing with some stones we found on the cave floor. Outside the cave, watermark rainbows where the sun touched the spray, and from our vantage point, we could see the splashes and ripples the waterfall made in the pool below from its own point of view. The green was so green, and the blue was so blue, and the black so black, the white so white. As if everything was more purely exactly what it was, and everything was more easily understood.
Her mood was such contrast to the state I had found her in. It was an escape for her, no doubt, to come here and play, explore, lose herself in the beauty of a magical world. And what incredible beauty. I'm not sure I've ever felt a place more eternal, old, wise, calm, living, so bright and full of color. It was genuinely a gift to be given a window into that world for a moment, and to experience along with these children, and especially the little girl, the release of pain and frustration into life and light and goodness.
