Giving Heart. Borderlinks, Tucson, Arizona, September 2019. Artist unknown. Photo credit: Mzuriana.
I listened to a podcast on love the other day. The narrator reintroduced me to metta, the Pali word embodying goodwill, friendliness, and loving-kindness toward others in the Buddhist tradition.
The idea of a metta meditation is to conjure up a person in one's mind and send benevolent intentions to them. There seems to be a similar array of three or four intentions in a metta mantra.
For example, to each of the recipients I mentally picture, I say aloud:
May you be safe.
May you be healthy.
May you be happy.
May you be at peace.
The trick is to include among our list of recipients, not just folks we love, like, or even feel neutral about, but ...also individuals who we resent, fear, or loathe. This last aligns with a common 12-step suggestion: For 30 days, wish for that person to receive all of the good things in life that we would like to receive for ourselves. Doing so can soften us, again to our benefit, expressing, if you will, the pus that infects our minds and bodies.
Fortunately, there is no goal for us to bring such a person into our literal or figurative embrace. We don't have to be friends with such a person, even if they are a family member. It may not be healthy or safe for us to do so. The metta meditation is a door we can open to free us be safe, healthy, happy, and at peace.
I hold the assumption that if a person is happy and at peace, their actions toward others will be benevolent rather than malicious. That makes it possible for me to wish them safety, health, happiness, and peace.
It's interesting to me that the word metta is from the Pali word referenced above. Pala is the name Aldous Huxley gave to utopian culture in his book, Island. Where the myna birds remind the humans, "here and now, here and now."
A few years ago, I listened to a family member, let's call her Kiki,
explain why she had not yet used the Onstar program in her new car. ....
"Because it could take me into a dangerous area and I could end up DEAD!"
At the time, I thought two things:
Paper maps could do the same thing; and
Hoo boy.
But I kept my mouth shut.
It wasn't too long after that when Kiki was prevailed upon to try out her Onstar and she loved it!
Part 2:
So here it is March 2015, and I've got a smart phone now. On a fine
weekend afternoon, I was fixing to drive from my new digs (oh, I haven't
told you where I'm living now, have I?) to the village of Henderson which hugs a levee along the Atchafalaya River. I looked at about three route options on my map application, and selected one.
It was a pleasant day and my map app took me on a wind-y road, which was
just fine with me. Then it wanted me to go over a bridge that wasn't
there anymore, so I did a few circular maneuvers, asked a gentleman on
the side of the road for some guidance, and he directed me to a way
around that gone bridge, and then I was taken deeper and deeper into
what reminded me of an old Stephen King story
of the woman whose mission was to find the fastest way from Point A to
Point B in Maine and her quest took her into a parellel universe where
time got bend-y.
Until finally my map app carried me to what seemed to be an end of the
road, on the other side of a wood-plank bridge with a PRIVATE PROPERTY
sign posted, with my map app voice instructing me to go up the levee.
Say what??
Near Henderson, Louisiana. March, 2015.
And it was at this moment that I thought of Kiki's dire predictions of
murder and mayhem should she surrender herself to her Onstar.
Looking to my left, across the other bank of the bridge, I saw a group of men doing something along the river.
Having now read all of the Dave Robicheaux books (and having read Winter's Bone
and watched the movie, based in the hinterlands of my own Missouri ),
what might they be doing? Running drugs for a South American cartel?
Dispensing with a troublesome comrade? Or just fishing? Where's the ice
chest to tell me all is as it should be?
I crossed the wood-plank bridge with some trepidation and then asked one of the men, "I'm trying to get to Henderson from here ... but I'm confused about what I'm supposed to do now." One of the men said, "Well, you can turn on around here and go back the way you came ..... [insert my mental nervous swallow here] ... or you can go right and it'll take you 10 to 15 minutes to get there."
Because I am genetically programmed to not backtrack,
I took a few moments to decide if "turn right" really meant "turn
right" or did it mean "go up onto the levee and turn right?" Did the
PRIVATE PROPERTY sign refer to the flat road to my right or the levee
road up and to the right on the levee?
I chose the flatlander road on the right. When I say road, by the way, I'm talking gravel road.
This met with approval from my map app until a few miles down the road
when it really, really wanted me to climb up onto the levee. Finally, I
acquiesced and for some more miles drove on the gravel road up top,
noticing that the flatland road kept on going on right beside me, down
below. Eventually, I overcame the objections of my map app and got back
down onto flat land.
All ended well, of course, but I took a different route home.
I did see this pretty community of beehives on the way to Henderson:
Lake Martin, Louisiana. September 2014. Credit: Mzuriana.
From the library, I borrowed Jon Kabat-Zinn's book, Mindfulness for Beginners (audio version). I was staying with friend Kate, and it was cold and dreary outside. November in Missouri. I was also committed to getting in 10k steps each day, as clocked in my Fitbit.
Kate has a small attached garage. So I walked 'round and 'round and 'round the inside perimeter of her garage, a thousand steps at a time, while listening to Mindfulness for Beginners. No other library patron waited to borrow the audiobook, so for awhile I simply renewed it. Twice, maybe three times. Because once I finished it, I started over from the beginning. It was that good. Listening to the book was the meditation.
As part of my commitment to meditation this year, I have now bought and downloaded my very own copy of the audiobook.
Into action. Remembering my goals: Serenity in the moment. To lay peaceably, like a lilypad, on the surface of a still lagoon.
Returning to South Louisiana for Year Two just two weeks before Mardi
Gras may not have been the best idea. Based on my relocation experiences
in the past - the speed at which I found wonderful permanent shelter,
to be specific - it seemed rational to expect I'd be ensconsed somewhere cozy by the holiday.
But:
The prices for temporary lodging right before a major holiday in these parts go way over my budget.
I've learned that the demand for rental property in the Lafayette catchment area exceeds supply, especially at my price range.
Rental property is generally high around here, so there are significant compromises on condition, size, view, and ambiance
Based on the above realities, anxiety and discomfort have kicked in.
There is a desire to stop this discomfort that has no time-certain end.
This tempts me to retreat into what's comfortable, like staying in
Lafayette in Year Two simply because it's a known entity, or snagging
any place that is minimally acceptable solely to end the home hunt.
However, when I pause for a few minutes and take a breath, really, I've got to appreciate that I have exceptional freedom.
For example, I don't even have to stay in South Louisiana! I could go anywhere!
The Mardi Gras holiday is only a few days - once I get past that
economic hurdle, then prices settle down again and I have way more
breathing space to find the right home. And if need be, I can visit
another region during Mardi Gras. A sunny beach, maybe.
I could buy instead of rent, taking me into an entirely new adventure.
I can open myself up to a much broader range of South Louisiana location possibilities.
Here's what a couple of folks say about living with uncertainty:
In Vietnam, there are many people, called boat people,
who leave the country in small boats. Often the boats are caught in
rough seas or storms, the people may panic, and the boats can sink. But
if even one person aboard can remain calm, lucid, knowing what to do and
what not to do, he or she can help the boat survive.
It is so terribly hard to quiet my mind. My brain wants to churn, churn, churn - to create and then regurgitate, create and regurgitate. I listen to podcasts at night to distract a busy brain that otherwise keeps me wakeful, as it churns through what happened that day, yesterday, or last week or last month or last year or a decade ago, ever striving to rewrite conversations, rewrite entire life story arcs for different outcomes, to turn on my own internal misinformation generator.
And we live in such dystopian times; how do I claim moments of calm, lucidity, and confidence in taking the next right step?
It matters not that my physical location on a given day might be geographically rootless; what matters is that my inner location be constant, rooted with serenity and with confidence that my little boat, which I share with others, is a sturdy one.
So here I am in Missouri for my usual interregnum between annual migrations.
You may have noticed that I haven't yet announced where I'll be living in 2015.
I can announce that my original plan was to move to Oaxaca (city),
Mexico. That was my plan all the way up to, maybe, September, and then I
surprised the hell out of myself and decided instead to
