Category Archives: Meditation

Day 96: 9/29/13: Between Breaths

by in Beatles/John Lennon, Diving, Horses, Meditation, Memory, Poetry and tagged , | 2 Comments

Back to the pool today to review some safety procedures after last week’s debacle at sea.

Thoughts I had while trying to achieve neutral buoyancy at the bottom:

1. Tried to remember the name of the guru who said, “My religion is breath.”

2. Yoko and John’s fabled first encounter at the Indica Gallery in 1966: She handed him a card that said “Breathe.”

3. What my brother told me about coming home from a recent road trip to Vermont with a bushel of sweet “wild apples.” The beauty of those two words together healed something in me.

4. How the peace one feels underwater is a kind of addictive silence, like the silence of meditation. So many kinds of silences, far more than there are kinds of apples.

5. What a strange honor it is to be with someone while they take their last breath, their last taste of the world.

6. My father and I used to race our horses through an apple orchard. The horses had white apple foam on their lips. At a certain point, I crossed some invisible, unspoken line and he stopped letting me win each race.

7. The fundamental law of diving and of life: don’t hold your breath.

8. The curved forms of the free divers that swim with sharks. They know how to move so as not to appear threatening. Their bodies are lithe, beautiful. They are seeking, it seems to me, some impossible form of communion.

9. Manannan mac Lir is an Irish sea deity. He is a clown, a beggar, and a psychopomp who guides souls to the underworld.  He’s associated with the Isles of Apple Trees in the next world.  In a painting I saw once Manannan mac Lir took the form of a breaking wave of horses. I remember the fury of the foam.

10.  My dive teacher takes the regulator out of his mouth. He lies on the bottom of the pool and blows these crazy rings of air to the surface–huge and perfect. They shiver and break apart. I immediately think of my father smoking cigars while he watched 60 Minutes–the hazy rings, not weird and futuristic silver water rings, but earthly like the rings of a tree. What good does it do to remember so much? My teacher gives me the signal: Are you ready to ascend? I have almost forgotten where I am. I nod. Yes. I am ready. I look to the surface.  I breathe.

Day 86 9/19/13: Meditations on a Gaping Maw

by in God, Meditation, Teaching and tagged , , | 2 Comments

I’ve been meditating for a little over a year now. I try to do it twice a day, although I admit sometimes I miss a session or two. But my meditations aren’t limited to those periods that I sit for twenty minutes with my eyes closed. Lately, I’ve been concentrating my attention on this image of a great white. I’ve posted it before. I don’t know what exactly sets it apart from countless other terrifying images of white sharks with tooth-ringed-death-tunnel-cavern-mouths, but in this particular photo, the shark not looks as if it has ambushed its prey (the viewer?) but is itself, startled, surprised.

In my anthropomorphic projection, I read a sense of wonder in the black eyes and open mouth.

As I study this picture,  I remember something from the meditation lecture I went to a month or so ago in which Thom Knoles paraphrased the words of Guru Dev:

Transcend where you are

Go Beyond the field of thinking

Master non-thinking

Then Transcend that

After that my lecture notes are garbled, excited. Words like “simultaneous,” “integrate,” and  “alternate” fill the margins.

When I go beyond thought (thoughts largely involving “terror” and “death”), what is there besides the creature itself?  If I go beyond thought, am I then allowed to take in the silence of the shark, its essence, which feels a little like cold sea water seeping in under my skin?

Yesterday, I had students respond to E. O. Wilson’s famous line, “In a deeply tribal sense we love our monsters.” Why do we love them? I asked the class, scrawling their ideas on the board. “Because they are free,” someone shouted. “We want their freedom.”

Maybe this solitary project should become a group meditation.

Day 56: 8/20/13: Art House Sharks

by in Art, Diving, Inner Turmoil, Jaws, Meditation, Pop Culture | Leave a comment

Spent the first half of the day dutifully studying dive manual and watching short YouTube films about positive buoyancy, proper fin selection, and how to clear a  flooded mask. In the afternoon I attended two movies: Museum Hours at the Royal and Cutie and the Boxer at the Nuart with my dear friend Helen. Both were great–Cutie and the Boxer is a documentary about two married artists—Ushio and Noriko Shinohara–and depicts the art life with all its perils, poverty and messy devotion. At one point, Ushio and Noriko are eating supper in their chaotic loft, talking about “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and 80-year-old Ushio, an action-pop artist who paints with boxing gloves,  notes that  “Jaws” was Spielberg’s best film. While Noriko chastises her husband for his reactionary early work=best work credo, I had to agree with Ushio that Spielberg never topped “Jaws.”

Museum Hours is a meditation. It’s a movie about loneliness, life, death and relatable to anyone who has wandered around a strange city with very little money and become privy to all the ordinary alien miracles of empty urban spaces, the detritus of street markets, the odd beauty of trains at certain hours and the sanctuary of museums that both reflect and heighten the ordinary world. I loved seeing paintings fill an entire movie screen–scenes from Brueghel, beheaded Medusas,  ancient statues with sheared off noses.

I started imagining a new kind of shark movie–not a documentary or a silly exploitation film, but an art movie with winter light, museums and coffee.  Maybe a story about two dedicated shark researchers who lived together like artists, each with their own particular obsession–one devoted to lantern sharks and the other only caring about charismatic “man eaters” and their love threatens to illuminate or devour them at different points in the film. But in my art house picture, the sharks wouldn’t exist as  convenient metaphors for human frailty, beauty or power.  They would exist as subjects in their own right, filling the screen, so we might contemplate their mystery and gravity, as we gaze upon the statues of Gods with missing heads or wings.

Day 55 8/19/13: 10 Things I Did Instead of Studying My Dive Manual

by in Activism, Diving, Environment, God, Humor, Marine Conservation, Meditation, Shark Attack, Shark Conservation, Writing | Leave a comment
Shark!

Shark! (Photo credit: guitarfish)

1. Read about the swift but gruesome death of abalone diver Randy Frye in the waters of Northern California.

2. Watched a mini-documentary on technical diver David Shaw who died trying to retrieve the remains of another diver from the depths of a dangerous cave.

3. Meditated for 20 blissful minutes that were occasionally invaded by thoughts of decompression chambers.

4. Felt less alone after reading several articles criticizing OCEARCH’s machismo and brutality.

5. Marveled at Denise Levertov’s briskly paced poem The Sharks. 

6. Tried to do the dishes mindfully, but spaced out and started worrying about August almost being over, a reverie broken occasionally by hummingbirds.

7. Ate fruit

8. Thought again about Thom Knoles–of the failure of the stressed out intellect and how the expansive silence of meditation feels so nurturing, so full of presence.

9. Wondered for the trillionth time about the basic goodness or evil of mankind.

10. Marveled at the ability of writing to redeem boredom and to reveal the miraculous within the ordinary.