Lessons

There is something graceful in the silence after the last pages of a book. The weight of the closed hardcover in your hands, the pages a little more worn than when you picked it up, the resoluteness of closing the back cover of the book and exhaling into a world that isn’t the same anymore because the perceiver—you—cannot look at it through the same eyes anymore.

I meditated for the first time in a while today and it was this feeling, the after-book feeling, that facilitated this decision. Suddenly my vision felt new to me, the silence on the mountain was spacious and I could almost dissolve into it. I got up from my chair and knew I was ready. I walked to the meditation hut.

It’s hard to begin after you’ve been away from the sitting for a while. There are expectations, lofty goals, and foolish anticipation. But when it comes down to it, there is only the moment. Nothing is stable but instability. This is how it is that I must find comfort. Where one day I can regret the loss of a woman lover, and the next be headlong ready to jump into the whatever when my Colorado friend teases me (“I’ll make the waffles if you make the coffee,” he says and I’m thinking My god, why are you so far away?). Or where one day I can run break neck down the soccer field and the next day I cannot even climb a flight of stairs. Or where, on the way down the mountain, the truck tires are all full of air and I can safely check my mail. But how on the way back up the mountain, the mail sitting on the passenger seat beside me, the front right tire goes flat and I am staring up at the sky wondering how it is that a person gets a flat tire in her own driveway while being on crutches in the middle of a two-inches-in-one-hour rainstorm.

Could there be any better proof that life is never what we think it will be? That it’s always in flux?