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When I come back to this, after a night of uneasy dreaming and a morning of frantic housecleaning, I find that my trepidation has not waned.

I laid in bed for an hour last night, one palm to my heart and the other over my navel, trying to focus on my breathing, trying to let the fear pass through me. Don’t avoid it, don’t deny it, don’t judge it, just say hello and let it pass on by. But it seems intent on hanging around for a while, blocking my view of deeper things. Which means that that’s where I am right now: okay.

So, because I can’t get in there yet, I’m pulling back my focus.

I am a mediator, not a fighter – I’m not very adept at confrontation. I think that has two parts: one, because I’m not confident that my opinion is worth fighting for, or over; and two, I tend to believe that anything someone thinks or believes is valid to some degree or another. I have a very hard time convincing myself that what I want is more important than what somebody else wants, or that my opinion is better or more accurate than any other. There are exceptions – I believe that the legalization of gay marriage is more in line with our professed national values and the Constitution, not to mention the ideal of infinite love, than its prohibition. But put me up against somebody who thinks that homosexuality is a sin, and I’ll say pretty much exactly what I just wrote above. I might venture out to I disagree with you, but you’d be hard pressed to find me saying you are wrong.

I have, in the past, viewed this as a shortcoming. In fact, I began that paragraph with the intention of essentially belittling myself for it: this is one more proof that I don’t think I am worthwhile, and therefore (say the little mind and the ego in absurd unison) one more proof that I am not worthwhile.

But about halfway through, I came to a realization – nonjudgement is a goal, of Zen and of mindfulness and of being a good person, and here I am berating myself for it. Silly girl. I try to make that judgment softly, am trying all around to treat myself more gently. The repetition has lost its edge of punishment: I am not, nor will I ever be, perfect or complete.

Except in those ways in which I already am, have always been, except in the sense of greater truth. Nothing is ever anything but what it is right now, in this very very moment, I am not my projections or plans or regrets, not the refusal to believe in regret, not my learning curve or my dreams, not even my new budding practice or the path to enlightenment. I am sitting on my couch, typing. My back aches a little, I am vaguely hungry, two fingers on my right hand are sore, and my toes are cold. That’s it. If I dig a little deeper, in this moment, I am the worry that I might not write enough today, I am the pressure in my bladder and the desire to take a walk, the annoyance that I have to stay here and write instead. I am still avoiding the idea of sitting with my anger, or with myself at all today. I am resisting my homework, holding tension in my shoulders, my neck and my jaw. I am the sounds of passing cars, water dripping, and Ani DiFranco singing you don’t have to like me for who I am, but we’ll see what you’re made of by what you make of me, and I am the taste of Cheerios and mint tea mingling in my mouth.

But I’m not my plans for this afternoon, though my mind may flit towards them every so often, nor am I my worries about what he might be thinking of me now. I am just sitting and typing, thinking and writing. With less and less thinking as the writing goes on. I wonder if perhaps this is a better meditation for me than sitting still would be: I am able to focus my thoughts, and able to recognize when my interfering little mind is trying to pull me away. I notice what is happening around me without being too drawn into it; I notice what is happening within me, write it out, and move on.

Today the sky has that shade and timbre of light that makes everything seem damp, even though the rain has yet to fall. The pavement looks darker, the cars glisten, the trees with their final leaves give proof to the existence of color. It all seems like a painting, or at least a movie shot: the wind comes up from the East and a shower of golden crimson leaves swirl up from their prosaic piles on the ground to become a dancing spiraling of simple grace, then settle back down.

I feel a lesson itching its way on: Are the leaves changed? They went from solemn still bodies to twisting bright beauty, then back to negligible marginality, just some litter on the side of the road. But those are all my perceptions, and my judgments. The leaves were merely leaves, the wind just wind. Nothing changed, except in that the leaves were rearranged a bit. So what’s the metaphor here?

I am a leaf, it seems, and life just the wind that moves me. From budding to branching to blooming to falling down, to the eventual fade and decay, a leaf is a leaf is a leaf.

Ah, but then the hail comes, sharp pounding balls of ice, and the leaves scatter beneath them, shudder, grow limp and battered. What is the ice? When do the leaves cease to be leaves and become soil instead?

Perhaps I should abandon my metaphor and my over thinking, and just let the leaves be leaves, the hail be hail, and my own self just be me. I’m not a leaf. I’m typing.

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