In the book, “Illusions” by Richard Bach, a character is told to look at the sky.
When he does, he’s asked, “is it a perfect sky?”
To which he replies, it's always a perfect sky.
So then he’s asked, “…even though it's changing every second, the sky is always… perfect…?”
The answer, of course, is yes.
Likewise, your ever changing thoughts, right now, within the swiftly altering sky of your mind, are also perfect.
They don’t *feel* “perfect,” do they? We know.
The weather in your mind-sky, at this moment, is not… yellow sunshine and blue mist and gently rolling, cotton-tail-bunny-rabbit clouds.
No, your interior atmosphere, in the present, is, as Winnie-the-Pooh might say, “blustery,” replete with lightning strikes of panic, and gale-force winds of worries.
You are, currently, battered… by a hurricane of hurt.
So be it.
Let. Your hurricane. Be.
Breathe.
Do not try to quiet your tempest. Let it blow.
Take inspiration in this effort from Shakespeare’s King Lear… On the heath… raging against the storm.
Say to your thoughts…
“Blow winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks.
You sulph’rous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers of oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head. And thou, all-shaking thunder,
Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world.”
Huh. Or… something less dramatic.
Breathe.
Facing down the madness of your own mind… requires a bit of courage.
When summoning courage, Maya Angelou advised…
“Sit down. Go inside yourself. Don’t look outside for it. Look what you’ve overcome already… and still you say “good morning”… and still you have courtesy… look what you have come through, the times you were afraid and lived through that.”
Hm. On this earth, we always look for that which is *outside* of us to heal our *inner* wounds. A new love interest, a new medication, a new group that thinks the “right” way.
All these methods have their place on this plane of existence. And they may serve you for a time. But “sit down” and “go inside yourself” is the beginning of all wisdom.
As Jesus said, “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
Look within you now.
Does your storm still rage? At the same intensity as when we began?
By now, it has certainly begun to shift. Losing power over land, as it traverses the ground of your being.
Breathe.
Find the absolute center of your storm… and stand within it, in your mind.
Breathe. And notice…
Here, there are no winds, no rain, just a clear, cloudless, blood orange sky.
The eye… the center of you… it’s peaceful here.
Your thoughts, your fears… they have not gone. They still swirl in gray, violent blasts all around you, but you are apart from it now… you have become an observer, a witness to your thoughts, only.
*In* the drama, but not *of* the drama.
As the author Mabel Collins wrote, “and though thou fightest, be not thou the warrior.”
In this moment, in this hour of your life, in the midst of inner turmoil and tumult, fight, but be not the warrior.
This day and its struggles need not define you.
But this day matters. This hour matters. This moment matters. Each moment is eternal, full of spirit, encompassing all that is.
Dear one, be in this world now. For you *are* in it. But you are not *of* it. Live your day as best you can according your level of unfoldment.
Remember that Emerson said…
“One of the illusions of life is that the present hour is not the critical decisive hour. Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. He is rich who owns the day, and no one owns the day who allows it to be invaded with fret and anxiety. Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities, no doubt crept in. Forget them as soon as you can, tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely, with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense. This new day is too dear, with its hopes and invitations, to waste a moment on the yesterdays.”
Breathe.
Beginning each day with “too high a spirit” may sound daunting. But Emerson’s friend, Whitman, had a word or two to say about the subject, when he declared…
“I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.”
We *began* this meditation with a gentle reminder that you are perfect, no matter what emotional state you are in.
The Cosmos is too grand to concern itself with judgment.
Your racing thoughts make you no less perfect that any other. You are a perfection of imperfection - constantly changing.
To return, briefly, to Richard Bach, “…the sea is always a perfect sea, and it's always changing, too.”
The argument may be a semantic one, for the universe is not a binary choice - perfect or imperfect, right or wrong, life or death. It is far more… wiggly to pin down.
Decades before the atom was split, William Walter Atkinson wrote…
“All my investigations have led me away from the idea of a dead material universe tossed about by various forces, to that of a universe which is absolutely all force, life, soul, thought, or whatever name we choose to call it. Every atom, molecule, plant, animal, or planet, is only an aggregation of organized unit forces held in place by stronger forces, thus holding them for a time latent, though teeming with inconceivable power. All life on our planet is, so to speak, just on the outer fringe of this infinite ocean of force. The universe is not half dead, but all alive.”
Perhaps you’ve gleaned by now… the trick, the simple technique, at the heart of this meditation, to assuage any perception of disorder in your mind today, or tomorrow, or if it should be necessary, for years to come.
But to avoid all confusion, we will state it plainly…
When your thoughts race, and your pulse quickens, and the gusts of an oncoming mind-storm begin to blow…
If you can sit, sit. If you can breathe, breathe.
But if the agitation persists…
Pick up a book written by one of the great minds of the ages. Perhaps an old copy from a used book store - hardcover, worn and weathered, with a hand-written inscription from an aunt to a niece on her birthday fifty years ago.
The options are legion…
The essays of Emerson. The poetry of T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, or Langston Hughes. The narratives of Toni Morrison or Gabriel García Márquez. A spiritual text unknown to you… the Bible or the Quran, the Buddhist Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita, Siddhartha, The Little Prince, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or Winnie-the-Pooh…
For ten minutes, fifteen if you can manage it, read… absent political identity, absent cultural identity, absent any identity at all… just read the words of one soul writing only and specifically for one other soul, you.
Allow the sentences and their syntax to re-order your mind. Allow your spirit to be touched by their spirit. To be healed by it.
It helps… it’s… beneficial… if the work requires you to struggle a bit… to suss out the precise meaning. This effort will command the attention of your will. Your will, when focused, can cut through any storm.
And if you’re very bold… read aloud. Perform a little play, a… dramatic reading for yourself in the mirror.
Let the texts you choose inspire questions about the world you’re in. About the hows and the whys of it all. About the meaning of everything. Let what you read prompt you to shout these questions to the heavens, as Whitman once did, during a moment of profound existential doubt and dread… For just like Whitman, you, too, may receive an answer.
“Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
