Minding Mindfulness - or Ignore This Post

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Perhaps the most common complaint I hear voiced against contemporary culture it is that it is so hard to ignore. And yes, I meant to end the sentence there. It is so hard to ignore just about everything. Our phones “push” messages to us. Colleagues can compell us to consider events by placing an “invite” on our “e-calendars.” Our computers encourage us to “submit a review” of that book we thought we were reading all by ourselves. It is all just so hard to ignore.  It is hardly surprising then, that we seem to be actively seeking better ways to do just that - ignore, to quiet the rush of life in the 21st century, to find a peaceful place in the midst of our pushy, “technologized” existence.  Let me offer the following ritual - part of which I have shared before - and which does, ha, ha, require - or can benefit from - some technology.

You need to begin by thinking about some peaceful place you would like to find. This is important because  part of the ritual asks you to create that scene in your mind in some detail. So it is helpful if it is a real place, but it need not be. Sometimes I enjoy crafting rather detailed mental animations that have nothing to do with reality. But they seem somehow to be more difficult to maintain.  Either way your “scene" does need to be a place that manifests the tranquility you desire.

My usual scene is the front porch of the house in which I was mostly raised, back in Springfield, Ohio. The specific details are largely irrelevant because you build the scene in your head. For example, I don’t really think the floor of the porch was really painted barn red, but for some reason I make it so.  It was a modest concrete slab - open in the winter, but screened in during the summer months, and the summer months were the magic months. There was a wicker table with  lamp. The lamp cast a golden haze, floating out into the summer night. Bits would break off and flutter past the sheltering evergreens on the backs of obliging fireflies. Murmurs of indistinct conversations rustled on the night breezes. When a sultry summer storm swept past, it was my deck upon a stormy sea - I have written to you about it before:

The porch

Of the house

Where I was mostly raised

Is rather small.

Drive-bys, real and virtual

Confirm this fact.

Yet in my memory

It was quite large.

A world apart

Screened by shrubbery.

At night in particular,

It was a magic place

Bathed in the warm glow

Of those yellow "bug lights"

Now largely gone,

Replaced with harsh

Fluorescent spirals,

Sacrificed, like smoke-tinged autumn,

To keep the planet safe

And sterile.

But in memory

The porch floated serene

On their golden halo.

Serene and apart as rain

Drummed down all round.

I believe,

But cannot be certain,

That it is the porch

Of my current meditation

Backed by a gentle track

Called "Soft Forest Rain:"

I stand on guard,

A lad of maybe six,

Dressed in imaginative pajamas.

The particulars shift.

But always armed with

The proverbial new broom.

Cantankerous colleagues

Divisive kin

Old Regrets

Long-departed

Lovers and antagonists

Charge up the front steps

Like animated tennis balls

Demanding satisfaction.

"Get off! Get off my porch!"

I command,

And swing my mighty broom.

My aim is true

And the invading irritants

Carom back down the stairs,

Now a roaring cascade,

And are swept out

Along the sidewalk

To the street

To the gutters, and away.

Their carping accusations

Fade and blend

With the chirping of crickets

Leaving me alone,

Safe once more with the drumming

Of the rain.

And building such a scene is your first step. The “mind-clearing” step. The important part is that you create a mental environment where you can swing your mighty broom, or tennis racket, or golf club, cricket bat, or Hogwarts wand - whatever.  My guess is that it is best to draw the inspiration for this environment from a real-world place in which you felt truly and deeply safe and happy. Life being what it is, it may now only exist in memory. Lucky for us memory lives right next door to meditation and the two chat regularly over the backyard fence.

So lie down - or sit I suppose, my back much prefers lying down - and build the “broom swinging environment” in your head. My choice is to do this phase to music - noise canceling headphones if you are in an “auditorially challenged” environment: someone near and dear to you is snoring, someone far less dear is watching mindless TV or listening to what they choose to call music. Got the scene?  OK.  Now you begin to swat the irritants. But remember this is not WWE Raw, the intention is not to mindlessly pummel your opponent - Foster Harmony, remember? Rather the intent is to gracefully launch the irritant off into another universe where their discord may meet a harmonic counterpoint.

An important objective in this phase is to create a gentle dance in your head where your mighty broom doesn’t so much strike your irritant, as sweep them away as mentioned above. You create a mental dance that becomes graceful, gentle, calming, soporific. And falling asleep is a perfectly acceptable option. But I would encourage you to explore another choice - mental painting. Move into the Enable Beauty phase. You now create the animation that accompanies the music. The utterly wonderful thing about painting in your head is that you never have to actually have to draw, there is no learning curve, no software to master - simply thinking creates the painting. For me this animation usually takes one of two forms - one is the creation of a very complex Disney/Pixar/Norman Rockwell/Andrew Wyeth world. That one I can pretty much guarantee is going to stay dancing around in my head.

The other actually makes its way out into the real world. The tennis balls become blobs of color and their trajectories become clean black lines on a crisp white sheet of paper - and the image lingers long enough to be reborn on paper.  It is not that the exact image that skipped across the synapses comes to life when I sit down to draw. Rather the Sharpie - black, ultra fine - begins to dance across the paper. No real notion of where it is going, it just traces the trajectories that present themselves. This also happens to music. Most often I fill the whole page without lifting the point from the paper, but if I do - no big deal. The next step is to let boxes grow within boxes, or triangles within triangles - or appear wherever they seem to choose.

The result is a black and white template begging for color. And I, of course, oblige by pulling out the whole collection of colored Sharpies - to my knowledge second only to my sister Margaret’s. Yes, maybe there is something genetic going on. You may also be interested to learn that the relationship between any individual Sharpie’s cap and the color that flows from the tip borders on the arbitrary - even two Sharpies with the same color top! That is not necessarily a bad thing as it actually increases your available palette. But you need to know that going in.  But I digress, again. Anyhow, certain colors volunteer to participate and I help them fill in the spaces they prefer.  Knowing when to stop is the hardest part. I will tell you how to do that when I discover it myself.

I call the images that grow out of this process Fiddlesticks. There is no “meaning.” The objective is to elicit a smile. Here is the first one:

Fiddlesticks then led to a more studied application of the same processes. Those images I call Monograms - largely because that is what they are.  Here is mine.

Sometimes people ask “How long does it take you to do one of these?”  To which I reply “Get off my porch!"

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Topping Off Harmony

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Ansel Adams called the Monterey Peninsula a "Place, with a capital P." He felt that the peninsula's intersection of sea and sky and cliff conjured a mystical world, powerful, almost magic. He'll hear no contradictions from me. And part of the magic is how Adams's photographs capture the Place so brilliantly that they merge with, augment, maybe even replace, our own less focused, memories of that enchanted stretch of coastline.

I spent a couple of hours today wandering around the J A Ralston Arboretum here in Raleigh. As a place it may not warrant the peninsula's capital P, yet a number of characteristics argue for it being a place best defined by something other than lower case.  I haven't spent much time here in the last few years.  Oh, we have had some faculty retreats in the Education Building, but after spending several hours doing "business meeting behavior" the inclination to remain longer in the neighborhood fades. Today's meander reminded me that I need to return more often to this "place with a greater than lower case p," for it is the kind of place that Fosters Harmony.

Fostering Harmony is to a great extend modeling, demonstrating harmonious options in thought and behavior. In this way, demonstrated Harmony flows from ones own Harmony, an internal emotional storehouse from which one draws, and from there, out into the world in which we live. But you cannot go to the well of Harmony over and over again without depleting, to some extent, the supply. At least I cannot. People like Nelson Mandela seem to somehow possess an inexhaustible supply of personal Harmony, that enables them to make endless withdrawals while existing in horrible conditions.  Most of us deplete our personal harmonic reserves far more swiftly; a realization that brings me back to a consideration of the value of places like my arboretum, "places" with something other than a lower case p.

The arboretum certainly cannot claim the breath-taking beauty of Monterey, but then few places in the world can.  A fairer comparison can be found with the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. and the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago. I have visited both many times over the years, and they both boast more acres and a broader variety of plants than our local version.  They also possess, in my mind, a fatal flaw - people.  Lots and lots of people. Many of the young and unsupervised variety, barely beyond ankle-biters.  Harmony serves as a shield against the inevitable friction that is generated when urban assumptions confront agrarian environments, but only with conscious effort.

On the other hand, I spent most of my time at the JA strolling in pleasant solitude, recalling earlier visits that never failed to replenish my inner stores of Harmony. I remembered anew that I used to come here to grade papers, back when they were actually papers, handed to me in manageable clusters of 20 or 30.  I used to bring books, again made of actual paper, here and read them on benches secluded in bowers of extraordinary leaves and flowers. I would read, and doze, and write.

Today, as I stroll and gaze, I realize that Fall has found its way again to the South, and the arboretum reflects the changes.  The deep greens and multi-hued blooms of summer have largely given way to cross-stitched hedges of straw-colored stalks still interrupted by an iris or late blooming rose; blooms that seem to have distilled the hues of an entire bush or bed into one last, outrageous, burst of color. Squirrels troll the leafy understory, plowing in search of the varied seed pods that will add spice to the leavings of winter's well-intentioned visitors who will ignore the signs and scatter nuts and popcorn along the pathways.

I rest my walking stick against an arbor and take a seat on a rustic bench whose plaque informs me that it was donated by a son in loving memory of his parents. I say a silent thanks to all three as I turn my face into the late afternoon sun, close my eyes, and let the ambient Harmony top off my own Winter stores.

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