Mind Population
Elbow Room
These days my mind is less populated elbow room fresh air stillness
It’s not just a pleasant and desirable side effect of meditation, it is a goal, it is a lovely result of sitting, of meditation — this more headroom, literally — I guess cranium space would be another good word.
My mind is no longer overpopulated these days, not like a sardine can, packed to the gills with all these rebellious and never-sitting-still always-wriggling-and-trying-to-break-loose mind-things (images, hopes, memories, disappointments, things I should have said but didn’t, things I’ve said but shouldn’t have, this urge and that, this succumbing to them, this resisting them — small victories, faces, smells, insistent little snippets of music looping over and over and over and over until I finally find a handle and grab it and pull hard: enough, wondering how Marie might be getting on these days — she is a year older than I and didn’t I hear that she had had a heart attack at some point, and about grandma Olga: was she disappointed when she, most probably, didn’t get to meet Jesus when she died, and money, and frugality, and penny-pinching, and adapting to a world that would make even the Buddha wail in despair, little hungers, green tea, different green teas, coffee, the price of coffee, rice and lentils, credit cards, credit scores, and rolling out the blue — he insisted on blue — carpet for Elvis stepping off a Learjet, cutting fingernails, some nails grow faster than others, cutting toenails half as often as fingernails — due to distance from the heart Google tells me…) all these things and their many brothers and sisters and cousins and in-laws and children and other not-quite-as-close relatives; well, they have started to leave, one by one — greener pastures perhaps, or just simply evaporating (would probably be a better guess).
They are a lot fewer, these mind-things, and easier to keep track of and tell to sit down and chill or shut up or there’s the door. There are moments, and they are blessed moments, when the last mind-thing present is gone and nothing, not a single thing remains. I don’t know why that lovely emptiness always insists on smiling, but it does as if joy is its natural condition, just like clarity is space’s natural condition.
And when that last mind-thing has left, and before I can acknowledge that (and so put something back — the acknowledgement, if nothing else), the emptiness is, as they saying goes, to die for.
And I think that that, too should be taken literally.
© Wolfstuff
