Word of the Year: Meditation: Qigong

More than 20 years ago, the local parks and recreation department offered a class in tai chi. I was the only student who enrolled. The instructor, Brandon, would have had every right to cancel the class, but he didn't. Brandon and I met once a week for six weeks and he introduced me to both qigong and tai chi. 

Brandon used qigong as the prelude to the tai chi, and I interpreted qigong as a warmup. 

Below is a video with a morning set of qigong movements.  I like this video because there's no chatter other than the intrusive sound of the ocean waves, which I turned off.

 

 Credit: Qigong Meditation

I always like the story of one of my favorite movements. It goes something like this: 

• The sun comes up
• You push open the window for a better view
• You spread the curtains wide
• You reach down and gather the sunlight
• Toss it up into the sky
• Pull what falls to your abdomen and rest your palms there

In my emerging meditation practices, the qigong movements help me focus on my physical being in its parts and its whole, pulling me out of my brain's incessant talk talk talk.

 

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: Coloring

 

Adult coloring books aren't anything new, of course. Coloring can get us into a flow, allow us to relax. There is also the idea of coloring to practice mindfulness and meditation.

There are legions of mandalas out there to color, but that's not where my interest lies. I like birds. And I like drawings I can color to completion in less than half an hour. 

Both Thriftbooks and BetterWorldBooks have Audubon Bird Coloring Books for sale. 

There are also coloring books that self-brand as "mindfulness coloring books." A mindfulness coloring book by Emma Farrarons drew me in right away with the cover's smple and soothing waves that would suit me well: 

Book creator: Emma Farrarons. Publisher: The Experiment Publishing

What coloring tools work well for this mindful coloring? 

Art Therapy Coloring recommends what we should and shouldn't use for adult coloring books. The following is among the shoulds: 

• Colored pencils
• Colored pens
• Gel pens
• Fine tip markers
• Watercolor pencils

There are online coloring apps for touchscreen devices. I've looked at a few, but I want to spend less time on electronic devices, not more. So for now, I will let that option rest. 

Word of the Year: Meditation: Beads and Seeds

 

Mala beads from lotus seeds. Attribution: SecretLondon on wikicommons.

 

 

As I explored how meditation / mindfulness could flow into my daily life, I remembered my maternal grandmother, who prayed with her rosary. 

In its explanation of how to pray the rosary, the US Conference of Catholic Bishops includes this: 

The repetition in the Rosary is meant to lead one into restful and contemplative prayer related to each Mystery. The gentle repetition of the words helps us to enter into the silence of our hearts, where Christ's spirit dwells. The Rosary can be said privately or with a group.

I'm agnostic, but the value of "entering into the silence of our hearts" resonates.

 

While on this mental journey, my road journey put me alongside two women who create jewelry with beads. One woman I already knew; the second was a woman I met in an Alaskan airbnb. The former was a colleague from my time in Caucasus Georgia - following our tenure there, she traveled to Ghana to learn about beads in jewelry-making. The latter has created jewelry with trade beads for decades.  

Thus the natural turn of study onto the use of beads in a meditation practice.

I paused my draft of this post to poke through my cache of broken jewelry pieces for beads that I might fashion into a circle for meditation. I discovered I do have the beginnings of something. I am enthusiastic about what I will create.

 

Candlemas Day. Artist: Marianne Stokes, Tate Britain Collection. Public Domain.

 

 

So far on 2025's word of the year

January 2025:  Word of the Year

February 2025: Meditation

March 2025: Into Action

April 2025: May You Be

May 2025:

 

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: Walking Meditation

 

Plank trail, Deer Isle, Maine. Credit: Mzuriana

 

I've known folks who have created a walking labyrinth, and I've walked a handful. Of course, we don't need a labyrinth for a walking meditation. 

I walk each day, but for one of my walks to be a walking meditation, I must take that walk naked, in a sense. In other words, no music or podcasts in my ears. No rewriting history. No constructing a future. No problem-solving. No conversations with people who aren't walking with me. 

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote The Long Road Turns to Joy, his book on walking meditations. An excerpt here, shared by mindfulnessandwellbeing: 

Walking in mindfulness brings us peace and joy, and makes our life real. Why rush? Our
final destination will only be the graveyard. Why not walk in the direction of life, enjoying
peace in each moment with every step? There is no need to struggle. Enjoy each step. We
have already arrived.

Here's a plainspoken instructional for how to walk in meditation, even in a small space.

Word of the Year: Meditation: A Writing Meditation Practice

Terrace at Seven Olives. Lalibela. February 2011. Credit: Mzuriana.

 

Many years ago, I did a summer study in Ecuador. It was a collaborative program between Oregon State University and a university in Quito. The most memorable classroom experience from that six-week trip was this: 

The professor said to us - "us" being university students from the US - and I'm paraphrasing him from memory: 

Americans and Latin Americans have a different view on life. Americans take the view that as long as there are pressing problems in the world, we can't (shouldn't) fully enjoy life. Latin Americans, on the other hand, take the view that we appreciate and actively enjoy all the riches that life has to offer AND we work on the pressing problems. 

As a member of two 12-step groups, there's also the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous, page 127: 

We have been speaking to you of serious, sometimes tragic things. ... But we aren't a glum lot. If newcomers could see no joy or fun in our existence, they wouldn't want it. We absolutely insist on enjoying life.

A reason that meditation is the word for 2025 is that there is just so much distress swirling about us. It is a struggle for me to attain and sustain a serenity, to be mindful of each moment, a string of moments, in which there is beauty for any one of my senses, and to know this moment will not recur, so I need to breathe it in, soak in it, while it's there. 

A writing meditation practice is a tool I'm employing to live in the moment I have now, to observe, for example, as I type on my laptop keyboard, the movement of my fingers, thumbs, the joints, my wrists, to acknowledge again how that 8th grade typing class I took so many years ago has stood me in such good stead for my life ever after that. I observe the muscle memory my fingers hold of the QWERTY topography, see a flashback of my mother, decades ago, on a black Underwood typewriter on the dining room table, tapping out The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over the Lazy Dog to check the health of every alpha key. 

In the midst of drafting this post, I conducted a writing meditation, noting the physical movement of my fingers, the tension in my forearm, then remembering a Tumblewords session in which the leader of the week prompted us with an example of corporeal writing. A writing meditation is all about our corporeal mindfulness, as our brains work in concert with our fingers and hands to spin thoughts, memories, insights, tears, fears, and the softening of our hearts perhaps. 

In my current, neonatal practice of writing meditation:

1. I set my timer for five minutes.
2. Using a pen on paper, I write whatever comes to mind. Perhaps better said: I write whatever comes out of my mind.
3. I notice how my physical body engages in the act of writing.
4. I don't censor anything that I'm writing.
5. When the timer goes off, I stop writing.
6. The end.
   

 

Maybe profound insights will result; maybe not. My focus is on the process, not on any outcomes. It's the process, the routine, the ritual itself that is the ... not-purpose.

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: May You Be ...

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." 

 

Word of the Year: Meditation: Into Action

 

 

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.

Word of the Year 2025: Meditation

 

 

Dwan Light Sanctuary. Near Las Vegas, New Mexico. October 2007. Credit: Mzuriana.

In July 2023, I wrote: 

I do not have a daily practice of meditation, although I do have two books that - when I read them - create a meditative experience for me: Wherever You Go, There You Are (Jon Kabatt-Zinn) and Fear: Essential Wisdom For Getting Through the Storm (Thich Nhat Hanh). 

 

In fall 2024, I still didn't have a daily practice of meditation, and I set out to change that. 

So why did I want to? 

Because it goes back to my sturdy little boat, my "higher power:" 

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.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

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. 

 

Word of the Year 2025

 

 

Shirt on a fence. Mobile, Alabama. August 2023. Credit: Mzuriana.

Below is what I wrote last year at this time about the word of the year thing. I'm still on the fence about it, but here I am again, nevertheless.

Some years back, I instituted a Word of the Year thing. 

Not sure I will continue. 

Maybe I'm just over it. Maybe it feels is too contrived. Maybe it was just a way to add content in a lazy-ass way, albeit with sincerity.

While I think about whether to continue the pattern, below are past words of the year: 

2018: Courage

• January 2018: Courage 1: Malala
  
• February 2018: Courage 2: Audre Lorde

2019: Action

• January: Action
• February: Action: Legal Observers
• March: Action: Penpal
• July: Action: Escaping Despair
• August: Action: Lipstick and Salvation
• September: Action: A Refugee Shelter

 2020: Build

1. Build 1: After the Floods
2. Build 2: Fronterista
3. Build 3: "House"
4. Build 4: Chosens
5. Build 5: It Takes a Village
6. Build 6: Elevation
7. Build 7: Trail Building
8. Build 8: Money
9. Build 9: Health 
10. Build 10: Service and Activism
11. Build 11: Relationships
12. Build 12: Creative Life
13. Lagniappe 13: My Rootless Goals
    

2021: Joy

• November 2020: Reserving My Word for 2021: Joy
  
• Joy 1: Word of the Year: Joy
  
• Joy 2: Music
• Joy 3: Surprise Vista
  
• Joy 4: Happy, Joyous, and Free
  
• Joy 5: The Science of Joy, Interrupted
  
• Joy 6: Color
• Joy 7: Birdsong
• Joy 8: Here and Now, Boys
  
• Joy 9: A Tomato and Onion Sandwich
• Joy 10: Let in Light
  
• Joy 11: Scentsuality
• Joy 12: Remembrances

2022: Disciplines

• January: Introduction
• February: Showers
• June: Daily Walks
• July: A Work Schedule
• August: Gone Dark

 2023: Fear

• January: Looking Into the Abyss Without Falling In
• February: Fuck Everything And Run
• March: Forgetting Everything's All Right
• April: "Take More Risks"
• May: Feelings Expressed Allow Relief
• June: Face Everything And ... Rise
• July: Frustration, Ego, Anxiety, Resentment
• August: Face Everything And Recover
• September: Freedom and Imprisonment

2024: Migration

• February: Migration
• March: The Devil's Highway
• April: The Warmth of Other Suns

 

Word of the Year: Migration: Vietnam

 

Vietnamese refugees on boat, circa 1985. Credit: US Navy via wikipedia.

 

I'm visiting Hanoi in November. I'll be there for a month.

Both boats and Vietnam are on my mind in recent days.

As an agnostic member of a couple of 12-step programs, I've had to fashion a higher power that works for me.

Many years ago, before I walked into the 12-step life, a quote by Thich Nhat Hanh spoke to me:

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.

Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

 

I envision my higher power as a sturdy little boat. (I aspire to being calm, lucid, and capable.) My sturdy little boat can't prevent, lessen the strength, or shorten the duration of inevitable storms, but its sturdiness imparts calm, confidence, and courage to me - as long as I trust in its seaworthiness. 

For much of my life I looked to birds as inspiration - and even now, their song, beauty of flight, nest-building skills, and yes, their "bird's eye view" of things - speak to me. 

But it's in the sturdy little boat where I can find calm and courage as family members, country, and the world convulse in painful spasms of confusion, helplessness, mistrust, horror, fear, loss, and grief.

I do not reduce Vietnam to static tropes of "boat people," the Vietnam War (aka the American War, as viewed by Vietnamese), or pho.  

No, it's the juxtaposition of my series on migration this year, and my distress (and on some days, despair) over the shameful lashes of verbal and mental abuse on the backs of women, men, and children who are only doing what rational, courageous people do to rescue themselves from untenable circumstances in their homes. 

Mere days ago, folks in the path of Hurricane Helene left their homes, household items held dear, neighborhoods, schools, houses of worship, vegetable gardens - not because of any frivolous reasons - but because they felt they had to leave. For their security. They were/are migrants themselves, even if only for a short time. If they are among the fortunate.

Word of the Year: Migration: The Warmth of Other Suns

 

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, The New York Public Library. "A negro family just arrived in Chicago from the rural South." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1922. 

 

The post I wrote back in 2011 fits perfectly in this year's word of the year series. I haven't yet read Ms. Wilkerson's newer book, Caste, but it rests beside me as I type.

 

Saturday, May 28, 2011

Rootless Lit: The Warmth of Other Suns

"Rootless lit" - Literature that speaks to travel, migration, displacement, exploration, discovery, transience, divesting of stuff, or portability. 

Rootless lit book review: The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson.

Summary from Publisher's Weekly: "... Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Wilkerson's ... study of the     "great migration," the exodus of six million black Southerners out of the terror of Jim Crow to an "uncertain existence" in the North and Midwest."

Credit: Amazon

I thought I "knew" what it was like to be black in the American South before institutionalized segregation ended. I "knew" it was bad.

But as I moved through the book, I realized:

• Even though I had never articulated it to myself, I must have held the untested belief that black Americans had somehow acclimated to the reality of Jim Crow repression in the South.   
• As much as I thought I "knew" of atrocities such as lynching, mortal beatings, and being dragged behind vehicles til dead, there were even worse monstrosities.
• I knew nothing about the aggressive actions southern states took to keep black Americans from leaving.

Ms. Wilkerson tells the story of the Great Migration through the voices of three people who migrated north in three separate decades. Reading their stories, it really hit home that one never gets acclimated to daily humiliations, whether petty or grand. There is anger, bitterness, frustration, fear, despair - most of which could not be expressed during the Jim Crow years because the consequences of doing so might mean terrorism, brutalization, or death, for even the slightest infraction of the "rules."

I like how Ms. Wilkerson framed the Great Migration in the context of other migrations, such as the Eastern Europeans to the U.S. She made a good case for identifying the South as the Old Country and the North as the New World, noting differences in speech, customs, food, education, etc.

The author made the matter-of-fact and consistent choice of the word "escape" to describe what motivated, in full or in part, the immigrants' journey from the South. This kept the profundity of the Great Migration in front of me throughout the book.

She also used the phrase "caste system" to describe the realities in the South (and the North, as well). I found this helpful, too, because it made the point that even though the Great Migration was a story about black Americans, it wasn't "just" about race. The Great Migration was a universal story of people who fled from oppression and caste assignment and who sought better lives for themselves and their children.

I liked, too, that Ms. Wilkerson didn't sanctify or otherwise glamorize the three people she chose to tell their stories. They were ordinary, flawed individuals.

The Great Migration ended circa 1970. That is only yesterday, sociologically, and its effects continue to unfold.

Word of the Year: Migration

The Long Walk, by C Ortiz. Bosque Redondo Memorial, Fort Sumner, New Mexico

 

So, yes, it came to me that I do have a word for this year: Migration. 

There is a massive human migration on our planet today. 

Millions of women, men, and children are leaving their homes, their families, their friends and neighbors, their rose gardens, their languages, their neighborhood sounds and smells, their food, their favorite shops, their local houses of worship - all that they know, moving toward a future they hope is worthy of this outrageous price they pay. Knowing, too, that the people at the endpoint of their journeys may greet them, not with welcoming arms, but stony resentment. 

Columbus - Puerto Palomas port of entry, New Mexico. April 2013. Credit: Mzuriana.

Some migration is forced, in the sense that oppressors intentionally push people out, escorting them out, even, with arms or threat of arms. 

• The Alhambra Decree of 1492, which expelled all Jews from Spain unless they denounced their faith, for example. 
• The 18th century Acadian Expulsion in Canada, for example. 
• The 19th century forced removal of American indigenous to reservations, for example. 
• The Long Walk, for example. 
• The 1940s concentration camps, mostly but not exclusively for Jewish people, in 15+ European countries, for example. 
• The 1940s concentration camps ("relocation centers") in the United States for Japanese-Americans, for example. 
• The "Negro Removal" in St. Louis in the 1950s (and since), for example. 
• The Israeli threats to Gaza residents to abandon their homes or suffer the consequences for imminent Israeli military attacks, for example. 
• Rwanda. Burundi. Bosnia. Brazil. Guatemala. The list seems endless. 

Since mass migration is, if one looks at history, inevitable, it would seem wise if nations through which the tides of humans passed: 

• Recognized such movement as an inevitability - as inevitable as the seasons that come and go - and did not treat each migration as a crime to be quashed or a one-off disaster that ends in forgetfulness until the next one-off disaster that ends in forgetfulness until the next one-off disaster ... 
• Built flexible systems that expand and contract as the forces ebb and flow, like the rise and fall and rise of seasonal floods, to work with the migration instead of constructing river channels that may control a stream in typical seasons, albeit with constant vigilance for cracks in the walls, but which will collapse like a child's little pile of stones when the inevitable 50-year or 100-year or 300-year flood comes. 
• Accepted that the mighty weight of human desperation to rescue ourselves and our children from the drowning waters rushing behind us will break through walls of wire, steel, stone, concrete; of desert heat, and killing thirst.

There is migration within our country today, a domestic demographic rearrangement as the pandemic and lack of affordable housing and "trauma tax" pushes or pulls Americans away or toward new home bases. 

The pandemic and the resulting bloom of remote work has expanded the choices of where to live, possibly breathing fresh life into small cities and towns in areas that are/were moribund as a consequence of decades-long brain drain to larger urban areas.

There is migration occurring in my internal map, as well. Will I redefine rootlessness for myself? Or en-root myself again?

 This is the year of migration, both literal and figurative. Both macro and micro.

La Virgen of El Paso and Juarez, mural in Segundo Barrio. October 2016. Photo credit: Mzuriana.