A Writer's Spirit: Building a meditation habit

It’s Lent, and I’m not Catholic; nor do I currently belong to a Protestant congregation that distributes ashes or fasts for the occasion, or even follows a liturgical calendar. But I’m up for any occasion for self-study, and when Lent rolls around, I try to find my own way to connect with the Divine.

I’m not one to deprive myself of anything I enjoy. As someone without a full-time job and benefits, privation for me is daily—and unremarkable. I’ve learned as much from it as I’d like to. There’s no need to cut out that daily cup of coffee when you drink Folger’s at home. 

When Lent rolls around, I’m more likely to adopt a habit for a period of time, and I try to make it one that I’d like to sustain for a lifetime. Sometimes these habits actually do stick; forty days or so is a sufficient period of time to begin a new approach to life.

My current Lenten practice is daily meditation—a longtime goal of mine. It sounds easy enough to make time each day for silence and breathwork, but the reality is that I put it off and lose the day’s opportunity.

It’s also very difficult to get alone time in a house with kids. A four-year-old sees a person sitting on the floor, and that just means one thing: play. The other day I was sitting, my hands on my knees in gyan mudra—that is, raised, my thumb and forefinger touching, my other fingers straight—when a cascade of Legos rained down on my palm.

My son likes making buses. This is what he calls anything with wheels, and these are such unlikely structures—elaborate staircases or towers or cages driven by leprechauns and superheroes, with minifigures lined up inside, eager for school.

I recently shared a social media post where I expressed regret about my difficulties with a meditation practice. In it, I mentioned that I was relying on guided meditations—and falling asleep halfway through.

My friends were so supportive. Several commented that guided meditations are perfectly good, and that I shouldn’t beat myself up for sleeping, and that following the lead of my body just made sense.

But I have a goal for meditation. I’d like to get in touch with myself. I want to be still and quiet with myself. For me, most days happen with the television on in the background; there’s a hockey game in front of me right this minute. (Go, Blackhawks.) A guided meditation can be a route to mindfulness, but to me it’s an extension of my usual state of passivity. There is something in me that is reluctant to accept an invitation into the silence. My relationship to my inner self is best described as wary detente.

This uneasiness with self infects my poetry, too. It’s why I most frequently write small poems that feature contained ideas. Longer poems are longer meditations, in reality—they’re just meditations that happen on the page. I don’t find poetry particularly fun to write, and even a small one takes a lot out of me.

So it would be good to build a habit of contemplation this season—good for my spirit and good for my writing. But some days the best I can do is accept what falls into my hand—to take those blocks and build a vehicle, something weird and fanciful that can carry me and my son to some other place, right here on the floor, together.

A Writer's Spirit: Fir gives way to forsythia

I took my Christmas tree down Thursday. And yes, by “Thursday,” I mean three days ago—March 2, second day of Lent.

I had briefly considered replacing the Christmas ornaments with Easter eggs. I grew up in a place where people decorate the trees in their yard with eggs for the Easter holiday—a practice I understand to be somewhat regional and maybe a little odd to people from the outside. But let’s be honest; the Valentine tree never materialized, and the twin impulses that led me to keep the tree up (laziness and busyness) kept me from cutting out hearts, pasting them to paper doilies, and re-decking the tree.

If there’s time to re-deck, there’s time to de-deck.

I’m a little torn as I analyze my tardy removal of the artificial tree. Is this a marker of mental health, or might it be a symbol or metaphor? Like everything we have a hand in, it’s probably both.

Truth is, I have all of the usual associations with the Christmas holiday. It represents family and childhood and promise. The tree sparkles. It’s lit. That wrapped gift could be the thing I’ve been waiting for. The few minutes we spend tearing into boxes could become my child’s favorite memory. It could happen.

And in fact it can happen. I think of that lovely monologue by Bill Murray as Frank Cross at the end of the movie Scrooged:

It can happen every day, you've just got to want that feeling. And if you like it and you want it, you'll get greedy for it! You'll want it every day of your life and it can happen to you. I believe in it now! I believe it's going to happen to me now! I'm ready for it! And it's great! It's a good feeling, it's really better than I've felt in a long time. I'm ready.

I guess I wanted that feeling. My friends know my situation; I don’t really have a regular workplace, and I’m a little isolated in the city where I live. I turn a lot of my attention toward home and family—well, toward family anyway. I’m always forced to take a triage approach to life, and housework consistently falls at the end of my list, as the Christmas tree probably hinted at.

Initially, the tree was beautiful. The cat liked to climb it. I liked to sit in the grace of its gentle colors at night when the rest of the room was dark. It served its actual purpose, which, I guess, is draping its bulk protectively over our gifts like a piny mother hen.

Even after Christmas—even a month or two months after Christmas—I enjoyed it, a fact which makes it far less depressing. I liked turning on those lights and sitting near it to read or write. I liked the rustle of the ginger tabby hidden inside. I even looked being able to throw a little clutter behind it when there was an unexpected knock at the door.

I would be perfectly happy to have a lighted tree in my house all the time, were it not for those sad Santa ornaments everywhere—the arboreal equivalent of green fuzz in the fridge, announcing its own outdatedness.

And I am prone to mild depression, which is lucky—I’ve had the serious kind, too, and I’ll take a case of the bluey-blues any day over the bedbound anguish of deeper sadness. It’s a more pleasing symbol of my inner state than a sweaty, rumpled bed.

But I’ve thought about it, and I don’t think it’s sadness that kept my tree up. I think I wanted the same thing that was desired by the first person to pull a fir tree into the house and append some candles to it.

Winter can be hard. Not even the sun can stick it out—and so there we are, a sweater not enough to keep out the cold, a lamp no substitute for the afternoon sun. A mild winter, the sort we just had where I live, is not much better; it lacks the grace of snow to cover our errors and muffle our noise. All it offers is the dark and chill.

But there are buds on the lilac bush outside my window, and a few daffodils have popped up in the lawn. A few days of fine weather—sunny weather, shorts weather—have broken through the gray scrim. They’ve made me brave. Forsythia is happening, and even when I’m in my home, it casts its own remembered light.

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Spirit Sunday: Culling beauty from hateful words

Meditation takes a lot of forms, and for me, it often takes place with pen in hand.

When I’m writing, I tend to go deep and make discoveries about who I am at the core. And I renew my connection with what I regard as the source of all knowing, while also gaining reassurance and stillness. It’s what I try to achieve with seated meditation, but writing gets me there more reliably and meaningfully.

To get to where I want to go, I just lay down some words—sometimes I’ve thought of them a bit before starting, and sometimes, when I’m feeling a little dry, I just move my pen or fingers. A kind of energy seems to flow, as if the words on the page are sparking, pulling toward one another. That’s where the discoveries happen.

Yesterday, the first full day of a new president’s administration, I started a brand new writing meditation, and I’m interested to see where it goes.

What I plan to do is look for words from the new president each day. I don’t doubt that his words will be belligerent or spiteful or self-serving; he’s not a person who is prone to generous speech acts or writing.

I honestly can’t stand the bellicose, hateful posturing of this person, and his words are repugnant to me, and yet I like to stay on top of the news—it’s the duty of every citizen to do so, after all. That leaves me in a pickle; how will I take in vitriol from this terrible person, every single day?

I plan to take the worst words from this person who claims to know all the best words, and I’m going to sit with them in front of me. I plan to see how they move—what a loving perspective can do with these raw materials. And I’m going to shift them from hate toward love. I’m going to move and manipulate his words so that they represent everything our president does not—love, compassion, intelligence, and humor.

When you think about it, it’s the ultimate pussygrab. “I can do anything,” the president said in the famous bus video. And I can do anything, too. But my plan is to find the love that is there (surely there must be love?), and I will manufacture the love that is needed.

Words are seeds. And I won’t let the president’s hateful words take root in my garden. That doesn’t mean I can’t let them blossom into something beautiful—and that’s just what I plan to do.

Yesterday’s poem, sort of a nonce American sentence (seventeen syllables, usually presented as just one sentence), was based on the president’s lies about his inauguration crowd, and his accusation that the media was dishonest in reporting about numbers. The president said, in part, “We caught them. And we caught them in a beauty.” All of the words in this poem are from this brief utterance.

Looked out: a million people! Caught them in beauty—

now, that’s not a lie.

My plan is to post a new poem each day in a series I call “Love in His Throat.” I’ll guess I’ll go until I can’t stand it anymore—until the meditation no longer serves me well.

Spirit Sunday: Inauguratio—when we look to the birds for signs

Black Vulture or Carrion Crow, by John James Audubon

This is our week of inauguration in Washington. At home, though, we’ve had an ice storm; the trees wear sequins, and there is a steady drumbeat of melt.

It seems right that I’m looking at my suet feeder as I consider what’s to come. The small songbirds make fearful, surreptitious visits—a flutter, some quick nibbles, but they seem to prefer the regular birdseed I don’t have to offer today. They get their sustenance in a fast flutter, and then they escape as quickly as they can.

It’s not this way with the starlings. They’re larger than the other birds that visit, and they bully the songbirds away. They even bully each other away. They want more—more fat, more seed, more room at the wire mesh suet holder. They act like it’s their due.

I don’t actually begrudge the starlings their sustenance. I just wish they could change their nature—share the resources. Take turns. Understand that here, there is plenty for all. In fact, I have another block of suet ready to go when this one is consumed.

But it is in the nature of the starling to show its dominance—to use its advantages to crowd out the other birds.The starlings make sure they get theirs.

The word “inauguration” relates to the birds, as it turns out. The Online Etymology Dictionary explains that the word comes from the Latin inaugurationem/inauguratio, meaning “consecration,” or originally “installment under good omens.” Specifically, the entry says that it is a “noun of action from the past participle stem of inaugurare ‘take omens from the flight of birds; consecrate or install when omens are favorable.’”

Because words and their origins are endlessly fascinating, the entry goes on to explain (citing William Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities of 1842) inauguratio, a ceremony to obtain “the sanction of the gods to something which had been decreed by man.” Specifically, this is the ceremony by which things or people were consecrated to the gods in ancient times.

During the inauguratio, the priests would observe the actions of the birds, and if these actions appeared to be favorable, the decree would be thought to have godly sanction.

Further investigation (because I can lose whole days to this kind of thing) reveals that one important sign was the direction from which birds called or flew. According to “On Auguries” by M. Horatius Piscinus, at Societas Via Romana, if the action of the birds came from the right, that was a good augury in Greece—but bad in Rome. 

To read the signs, priests would divide the sky into sections that had specific relevance, according to Piscinus; they would observe the section where the birds were most numerous or from which actions or sounds emanated. A flute would be used throughout the augury ceremony, possibly to attract birds. Incidentally, only the actions of certain birds were thought to be relevant—eagles, vultures, storks, osprey, owls, ravens, crows, and chickens among them.

That’s all very different from the ceremony that will happen on Friday here in the United States. Birds have no place in the official proceedings. Instead, the point of the activities is the peaceful transfer of power from one president to the next—a regular event that is the hallmark of our democracy.

I generally watch this important event on TV, but I’m afraid I’m busy on Friday. I have a date with the birds. While the inauguration is going on, I’ll be conducting my own as I walk through a certain meadow that rests alongside a river.

In Missouri in January, I can expect to see any number of birds. The last time I was at this spot, I was lucky enough to see huge kettles of vultures circling, exactly like slow black cyclones. Some might see vultures as a bad augury, but I don’t. When my older son was born, huge group of vultures had settled in the trees—a committee, volt, or venue of them. Vultures are ungainly and unbeautiful on the ground or in branches, but when they take flight, they are majestic; there is no bird more graceful in flight.

Some songbirds I might spot in a Missouri winter field: the downy woodpecker, the Eastern bluebird, the American goldfinch. An upside-down white-breasted nuthatch, hunting for seeds. A black-capped fellow insistent on his name: chickadee-dee-dee. Relevant to the day for me? Pairs of mourning doves—lovers, cooing to one another in their sad syncopation.

I’m of a mind to focus closer to home for a bit. We don’t need birds to tell us that we are entering troubled times as a nation. So I’ll be reading signs here. Who will visit my feeder? What will balance at the very tip of a depleted seedhead in my favorite meadow? And will I be visited by vultures, the useful scavengers that take away sources of stench and decay and then rise up, sublime?

I hope so. Truth be told, I prefer them even to eagles.

Sources consulted:

“Backyard Birds.” Missouri Department of Conservation,

https://mdc.mo.gov/conmag/2013/11/backyard-birds

“inauguration (n.).” Online Etymology Dictionary,

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=inauguration

Piscinus, M. Horatius. “On Auguries.” Societas Via Romana,

http://www.societasviaromana.net/Collegium_Religionis/augury.php