Can I Be Still?

In "Meditation isn't for sissies", we are reminded that we're not going to a happy place when we close our eyes, we're not going any place at all.

In all the creative outlets I have available to me, none have proven to be as comforting and easy to run into as "my happy place", as Adam Sandler would say. I can draw a picture if the mood strikes me, I can create an illustration as close to my thought as possible (though they are rarely the same). I can write a good story and describe everything in detail. But even if I sat here and wrote about how fat, loud and strong the rain was, I am the only one getting hit in the face with it, inside the screen. I could tell you about the cool air, the thunder and the flashes of lightning but I'm the only one who can smell the grass and feel the hair on my arm stand.

But imagination is increasingly powerful with practice and when my hands were too tired to draw and my eyes were too tired to read, I could always close my lids and simply imagine.

Sitting in the dentist chair I've concentrated on the same boat picture since 3rd grade. While drills roll inside my head and metal scrapes, I am fishing. I am on the dock having pizza or I am breezing through the ocean in the background.

When I was mad at home, at school or at work, I simply switched off from reality and willed myself into another existence. I wanted something to distract me. I guess most people refer to it as day dreaming. I thought of it as displacement. As I sit here, the thunder cracks and the neighbor roots for the sound. The rain is ruthless against my deck but I am in the jungle somewhere sitting in a tree hut and the darkness of my back yard is really cloaking miles of thick rainforest. When I sit in the shower in my bathroom, it is the same feeling.

I've often wondered if what I were doing all these years was some kind of cliff note to what a sip of meditation would be. These past few weeks I've come to see the difference is ruthlessly far apart. Michael only puts in words what I couldn't when he says this practice is, indeed, the hardest.

The sliding door of this bedroom is open a crack so I can hear the rolling and screaming of the sky. That is the reality of this night and instead of disappearing to another country, I should be taking joy that the beauty is litterally in my back yard.

My mother comes to the door and tells me to switch off the computer. Lightning travelling through the computer is reality too. It happened to us once.

So the moral is that while far off places seem beautiful and peoples faces seem more intricate in other lands, it is a simple case of "the grass is greener on the other side". It is with intent open eyes that we should stop looking past the back yard and appreciate the very wood of the deck we are standing on.

Until I can see the deck as a deck and not a tree house, I'm not sure if I am ready to sit on the deck and just let it be nothing... not even a deck. If I've been substituting things like the deck for tree houses, I must first work backwards and go back to seeing them and appreciating what they are, no matter how simple.

Once the deck is a deck, then I can go a step further and forget the deck exists altogether. Is that when I can be still?