Day Thirty-one

Ah, the stone is a monster, cold and heartless, drawing me in and away from life.
The stone is laughing at my foolish distraction towards it.
The stone is nothing, just a stone, upon which I waste my attention and forget my duties.
The stone is unreachable for concentration, it is too vague, offers no place to be.

The stone is here, and I am pulled into a river of thought.
The stone offers one place to be.
The stone offers one unadorned moment.

Day Thirty

I have developed the habit of sitting down and allowing my body to relax. As soon as I touch the stone, I feel the tension in my jaw in particular, begin to soften and smooth. I go there it seems, because I've found things to be consonant with the touching of the stone, that whatever is going on need not be held tightly. My jaw is a simple place to let go of.

After that I ask what practice is for myself. It feels different from a year ago, not so striving, not so foreign. It's as if I'm on the one hand not so concerned with being anywhere else, and on the other hand very clear about how to foster healthy relationships to things, including my own thoughts and feelings.

Day Twenty-nine

Relating to the stone in concentration seems for the most part to be another set of thoughts that make another world, one off from reality. "I am" is a phrase that rattles around the inside of my head, like Oz behind a screen. And yet, I can see that; and return to concentration more simply. I see the struggle to hold on to an imagined control. I have none. Outer and inner noise take on another quality. A dull headache becomes a sword to cut down a curtain.

Day Twenty-eight

I watch how one thought follows another; a similar subject or group of items... sometimes it works in the way I learned, by associating objects with one another to identify them. So they are files, and I notice the tendency to sift through files, to keep the mind busy.

Today, my underlying desires to thought are more broad, a self-identity and an identity of self in the world. So my thoughts spin out of a deeper wheel that is propelled by pairs of opposites, like OK/Not OK or Have/Not have. For a while I notice that and let go of these. Still my mind moves at light speed. I have some success at letting it go, and it still goes fast, but feels energized by looking. The sense of the overwhelming speed of life may simply be holding on, as may be its opposite, boredom. As long as I'm going so fast, why not allow looking to take place with each thing. It has no trouble keeping up, I notice, unless I wrap around something with my mind and take it to be singular, separate, permanent. My worst habit.

Day Twenty-seven

I am beset by tiredness and dreaminess today in meditation. Several of those 'fall forward' sleepy moments. Full of thoughts with a tendency to follow them. Is it an insight to see that I have so little today? I try not to struggle with it.

Day Twenty-six

I reflect after meditation: My son is leaving for college today. I will be sad. How will my meditation serve me?

Not to be anywhere else
To feel the sunlit and stormy turns in the road of our history
To wish him well with all my heart, ah that is sadness without struggle
To just touch him; to know he will touch others

Day Twenty-five

All the stuff of the day in my head feels best gently bid its way through attention to the body. Attention to the stone allows for a base to see where my body is 'buzzing' from its mental and physical business. Shortly, there is just the stone and my attention.

I recognize touch through the mind most of the time. I name 'touching'. I try to let that go and use naming only shortly, to bring me back to touching. Asking 'pleasant, unpleasant or neutral?' also brings me back to touching only.

I come to touching and notice the tendency of the mind to label. I use labeling and the mind panics when letting it go. I keep looking and notice that all the labeling, even 'pleasant' etc is somehow an incorrect subjective view of time and space. In other words, even though I 'feel' with the body alone, this is in a constant flux, and 'pleasant' or 'hard' or 'cool' live momentarily along a vast spectrum of feeling. When considering this spectrum using the mind, the body remains in only one fractional place.

Looking and looking, there arises in the body-only a sense of some more rapidly changing feeling, a pulse of liberation from anything subjective at all except for opening wider, 'pleasant' is still there in some way, but there is also bare and miraculous contact; flesh and stone in a creative meeting that has no name or requirement for result.