IN MEDITATION

VOICES 2025

In meditation it’s not that the buzzing fly goes right through me, or falls into an open chute of me, burning up in my fire to a new birth somewhere else, but the fly does stop bothering me. It may be there's no one home to give it what it wants, or it may be that it stops seeing me as a place to land, whatever it is, the fly goes off where its needs can be met, out there, riding with the wind.

My mind is active, curious, incessant by its nature, awake or asleep, driven by cravings of thirst, hunger and importance, drinking in its own wonder and thoughts until it's wasted, Monkey me, the truth is gone, but not where I think it went. I have a feeling that if I go searching for the truth, I won’t find it, so I sit, I breathe in and out, checking how each breath comes in, how each one goes out, listening to the sound each breath makes, watching my thinking, how it flies around riding on the wind, looking for a place to land, looking a whole lot different now from when it first took off.

A window shatters, shutting down the counting, the comparing, the measuring that’s happening in one room of me, while in another, the artist looks up from piecing together mazes and mandalas.