The Wavelength of Light
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Physics for Artists
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Angry Post-It Notes
It’s not working so well just yet.
I not only have monkey mind, I have an attention deficient hyperactive monkey on speed mind. One minute I’m there, dutifully breathing, trying to sit still, then I’m making a to-do list and then I’m in the middle of an imaginary conversation at work about an imaginary situation that will never happen. But it could, Ms. Monkey insists, and what will you do then? and I obediently follow her around and around and around entertaining that remote possibilitity.
Last week our teacher started talking about anger—first notice the mind of anger or irritation or annoyance, then gently redirect the mind from this inappropriate attention to a virtuous object. It feels like there are about as many virtuous objects knocking around in my mind as there are Buddhist nuns in South Carolina. Our teacher says all her students claim that anger isn’t a problem for them—they wouldn’t be in a meditation class if they had anger issues!—so the first step is recognizing our anger. Take a Post-It, she suggests, and make a tally mark for each time you notice your mind shifting into that angry mind.
I haven’t actually made it yet through a whole day remembering to keep my tally. My Post-It keeps getting covered up on my desk. And I was afraid I would come home with pages and pages of angry Post-It notes. This is what I imagined:
I will say, though, I have much less angry mind now than I have probably in years. Things that once drove me crazy have begun to seem just not quite so earth shattering, and even when I do get angry, it seems less and shorter. Yesterday’s actually looked like this, and that was getting through lunch, so that was pretty good, actually.
The meditation class has only been going on a couple of months, so I don’t think I can chalk all that up to my teacher, though she’s very good. It’s been a long process, one patient and loving intervention after another with my codependent inner self. The balance between a little self-affirmation and my overly critical inner voice is pretty delicate, I have to say, and I think I only got that little bit of balance by noticing that I was very very hard on myself, far more than I would ever have dreamed of for someone else, and in fact, sometimes just plain mean. I still feel like a fruitcake, a stereotype of white girl in art gallery pretending to meditate (see what I mean about meanness?), and any second now I could break out and start shedding my childhood traumas by running with wild wolves and loving too much, or whatever the new trend might be.
But one morning in class, I lost myself a moment or two or ten in this absolute quiet, a deep purple mandala blooming over and over again in front of my closed eyes, my body gone, I think—I couldn’t feel my hands in my lap, my feet on the floor, the backs of my knees pressing against the titled seat. Only this silence, this still moment of peace that brings me back the next Thursday and the next.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
We just got home from church
Friday, July 16, 2010
The house is quiet
The house is quiet, an oddity I am still unaccustomed to in daylight. Hayes gets home from work in about another hour, but the kids won’t be back from their week at their dad’s until Monday. I hear the hum of the air conditioner, Sylvie snoring her teeny kitty snores every so often, the soft tapping sound my keyboard makes, but behind it all, the quiet.
Summer days go slow, especially when Laura and Will are gone. I usually wake up with Hayes so I can see him a bit before he leaves and then walk on the dirt road behind the house before it gets too hot. Really, even 8:30 is too hot in South Carolina. I work in this desultory way, caught between the tasks left over from last semester and those coming up next year, trying to write and washing clothes in between attempts so that tonight I can say at least I managed to do something today. Kitty comes in and rubs my leg with his head, I run out of printer paper, I make spinach salad with dried cranberries and mandarin oranges and walnuts and feta, I watch the sun move across the floor, I wish for a Sprite and try not to drink one because of the sugar, the calories. Some bad WNOK song lingers in my head from listening to the radio with Laura in the car last week, but it’s only an echo. I haven’t heard SpongeBob SquarePants’s squeaky voice for days, and I both do and don’t miss him chasing earnestly after jellyfish. Sometimes I wander through the house, beautifully clean and staying that way all week with the kids away, and I wonder if this quiet will be all I hear when they grow up and move out, which is coming sooner than I’d like.
But it’s not an empty quiet—rather one filled with potential. I can play Ella Fitzgerald or Chopin or crank the Black Eyed Peas and no one will complain, though I always feel pretentious listening to the classical music, even when I’m alone. Something about the quiet focuses my attention, and in these long weeks in the summer I can let that attention flit here and there without shame. It feels decadent, lush, fruitful. It is decadent.