I wonder what it will be that saves me this time. Here I am not flailing helplessly, aimlessly, hopelessly in my own desperation, here it is not even so dramatic as that. Here, I find that I am afraid of a blank, stunning mediocrity: I am afraid of standing still. I let loose my capricious, my wildness, and it led me here, but now that I have landed, I find myself afraid of rooting. What if I can’t get going again? What if I can’t even hold myself up here, what if winter comes in grey steel sky and I buckle, what if I don’t, and the silence takes me? No crashing thunder, no finger of god, just the aching lack of color where color should be. I am dim enough as it is, so afraid of fading further. I focus small, peer carefully at the fallen leaves and the wisping of incense smoke up up along the ceiling, try so hard to just breathe, just breathe, just let myself be. Imperfect. Fallen. Okay.
There is comfort in the seasons, in the food I take from the earth and taste. I try not to allow all the usual food worries to cloud my eating – calories, fat, god forbid carbs. I try to make sure I’m getting enough protein and after that just let my body guide me. If I want a big giant salad with carrots and radishes and pecans, avocado, pear, cabbage, raisins, and anything and everything else I can think to throw in, then so much the better. If I want a big giant double handful of chocolate chips and marshmallows, well then by god that’s going to be okay, too. No matter what, a big giant bowl of oatmeal in the morning, though these days also loaded up – walnuts, raisins, peanut butter, honey, wheat germ, sesame seeds, a big thick gooey mess of goodness. And a cup of tea.
Ah, yes, the tea.
It may be the tea that does it, this time. For I find myself needing not so much a reason to get out of bed as a reason to keep moving, something to keep me focused and, again, again, to remind me I’m alive. Tea is much, much safer than sex, and immeasurably safer than love. It demands nothing of me, gives freely of its warmth and scent, asking only that I appreciate its gifts. It is a perfect meditation, when I remember to do it right.
Pure water, or as close as Brita can get me, my teapot shiny and bulbous, a cheerful thing on its own. I tend to light the stove and wander away until the ululation of the boiling water calls me back. Ah, yes. I am here, now, here I am. Oftentimes, I find myself thanking the teapot at this point, thanking it for bringing me back to myself. Into the mug, small white and simple, ginseng mint or ginger or earl grey, sometimes ginger peach black or chamomile. Chamomile when I am particularly in need of salvation, when the sky is too low or the buzzing in my head too loud. When I am nursing a bruised ego or a newly shattered dream. When the insurance bill comes. When he doesn’t call.
I hold myself in small moments, in the feel of sunshine on my skin. There is a bracelet on my left wrist with a little blue bead: the bead is to remind me to breathe.
He laughed when I told him that: to remind me to breathe. No, I don’t forget and find myself suffocating, I forget and find myself two years down the road, blinking in confusion, alone. I forget and find myself in the shower with the water gone cold, find myself miserable and melodramatic and clinging to oatmeal as to life. So I see the bead, and I breathe, and I know as I am breathing that I am here, now, that I am alive and the world hasn’t ended. It is worth a smile, at least.
I like the meditations that are about more than just sitting still: walking meditation, trying to feel the earth with each step, drinking the tea, watching birds across the sky. “I keep my eyes open because I wish through stillness to enter the world, not escape from it,” as Scott Russell Sanders says it in his beautiful essay Stillness. I want to immerse myself in the minute detail of every golden moment, and I want to be able to find beauty in the smallest of things. It is a practice, the way yoga is a practice, something to be done daily and with intention.
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