I awoke in a fairly primitive private
campground on Bahia de Los Angeles several hours south of Mexicali, Mexico. I
spread my yoga mat right above the water mark on the beach to perform my
morning meditations and yoga practice, breathing in on my mantra “I know your
Greatness”, breathing out to “I feel your love.” This is my usual mantra when I
want to quiet my very busy monkey mind before I begin my focused meditation, this morning on
the nature of nature around me.
I use a convenient pattern for my meditations in beautiful
places with abundant sounds of nature all around. I start with the most
distracting – the shrill call of birds or the booming of the waterfall,
bringing my meditation into thoughts of how I can interact with nature around
me, how I can share the experience of this perfect state to improve my
relationship with Tao.
This morning, the penetrating call of various shore birds did
not disturb my meditation but morphed it into meditating on how it would feel
if I were one of the very same shore birds, flying on the thermals above our
small camp, struggling for shared space on an outcropping rock. I felt
gratitude for the shore birds that they called my attention to their morning engagements,
competing but not competing for the miserly space of the rocks. What must it
be like to be of nature, in nature and in communion with nature like that?
My monkey mind feels my foot slip slightly in the sand,
seeking a less tenuous foothold. I turn my attention away from being to
doing for this moment. But my desire for deep meditation is
stronger than my monkey mind and I wonder what it must feel like to be one
grain of sand in that vast beach, being tossed around by the waves and the
persistent wind? How does it feel supporting my body? Is it fulfilled by its
nature? Of course, nature surely does not ‘feel’ as we feel but water must
still pass across scruffy rocks and birds must still vie for footholds on mossy
rocks and sand must still mold itself in order to support my foot.
My meditations turn to our own natures. Surely I ‘felt’
not only the slipping but also a human emotion when my foot slipped deeper into
the sand – annoyance at the interruption? Concern for my stability here on the
beach? I quieted my monkey mind, listening with my eyes closed, hearing the
‘beingness’ all around me – the surf, the birds, the sand and even two shore
grasses rubbing against each other as the wind shifted their relative
positions.
As a Taoist, I believe Chi is an equal-opportunity energy.
Birds may have it more naturally, even, because they do not need to ‘think’
about how inconvenient the slippery moss on the rock makes their perch. The waves follow
their ancient pattern of ebb and flow without wondering about the rightness or wrongness of their motions. The wind flows around obstacles in its
path naturally. Nature exists in ‘being’.
We humans, however, have
been gifted this thing that separates us from ‘being’. The Christian Bible says we have been given intelligence
through our Foremother Eve for reasons which we may find through our Bible Studies.
Perhaps, as some would posit, we have been given this gift in
order to be better stewards of all that is nature (pretty much everything on
Earth and beyond that is NOT us). My meditations lead me to thinking
that Nature is in sync with the Tao at all times and does not need our help to
‘be’. My meditations cause me to think that perhaps it is this need to
understand that creates the separation from God (or Tao), that causes lifelong
searches for meaning and ‘goodness’ and unending confusion between ‘being’ and ‘doing’.
As a Taoist, I often think human life would be so much
simpler and in sync with Tao if intelligence, this special ‘gift’, had never
been given. To be one with the Earth in ways which we may never understand due
to the ego attached to intelligence is the constant struggle of my meditations.
How do I become so humble so that I can properly recognize the contribution of
the warm sand under my body? The call of the shore bird losing its foothold on an outcrop reminds me that I am
so privileged in my meditation seat on my nice blue yoga mat with the reminder
“Breathe” written in blue at the end.
I sit in lotus, my hands outstretched in an attitude of
receiving and yet my monkey mind still races to divert my attention from my
meditations. I hear the boat cruising by; the bang of the morning skillet in
the campground behind me. I let these noises float through my consciousness
thanking them for their lesson in proper meditation. I bow to the inevitability
of the superior ability of my monkey mind to divert back to ‘busyness’. Yet, I
yearn to be one with the shore bird. I wrestle with my monkey mind, finally, finally dipping into that River of Serenity I crave, achieving a deeply relaxed state of 'being'. For just a moment, I am one. And then that moment is gone and my monkey mind triumphs once again.
