Last weekend we traveled to the shores of Lake Minnetonka, ate a turkey, and enjoyed a little time away from the grind. I took a long walk along the lake and watched my mind's discursiveness unravel into looser coils of simple awareness. "Discursive thought accompanies every moment of my waking life," I re-realized, "and it wears down my sensory apparatus, makes me distracted and uptight." There's nothing like a lake for supporting this kind of awareness...
And it's true. Thinking is omnipresent. The constant judging, appraising, deciding, fantasizing, ruminating...it's endless. And when you start to pay attention to your thoughts (i.e. meditate), you start to see how they engulf and flood and even dictate the course of an otherwise serene mind, what Jean Kerouac called Big Sky Mind. Reader, hear me now: I wanna help make peace and goodness in the world, not drunk-on-ego confusion parades.
The thoughts swim in cool, deep waters of a natural human ability to be aware, spontaneous, and responsive to the environment (and that includes the other sentient beings navigating the Meat Wheel of existence). This is so simple, so basic, and so crucial to understand. I think I had forgotten. But, anyway, this weekend I remembered and the remembrance was like manna descending on my coconut-brain all along the shore.
1 comment:
now that's a great lake.
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