Sunrise Free-for-All

In the morning as the sun comes up on the other side of the house, all I see is the sky lightening bit by bit until the top of the mountain about five miles from here glows. Over the next hour, the glow slides down the mountain and moves across the pond below the window, and the world here finally becomes bright.

As the sun takes its time, I settle into a rocking chair, feeling a coffee mug in my palms, warming my face with it once it cools a bit. I cover up if it’s cold and turn on the electric fireplace next to me. It hums along like my little friend—we have been together for years. I don’t think about all this detail until I am writing now, but to do that I must have been absorbing and feeling it then.

I just sit. My body is mostly still except for the coffee sipping, which comes less and less often as the mug goes from medium hot to warm. Sometimes I watch designs and vibration patterns form on the surface skim as my heart beats through my hands. Finally, forgive me, I cross one leg over the other, switch them now and then.

The idea is to be what the whole of my mind is when it is not disturbed, trying to be something else, or even just disciplined. To be just the mind deep in its own processes, of which I am sometimes aware and sometimes not. I hope, having had this time to wander as it will, that when I sit more formally, my mind will be willing to take some discipline. I hope it will be bouncy and able to focus on what a different practice like zazen or sitting meditation requires.  Of course, ,I have to be careful that the one practice doesn’t slip into the other, either way. But both are necessary, I think. And yes, I think of this as a practice.

Often two hours pass. Eventually, some clock goes off somewhere in my head and I know I’m done. That’s when I check my watch.

I am not saying this is a time of just trash thinking. It isn’t. In those quiet hours I imagine my mind as like a horse in a pasture with a fence around it that we both value. That fence runs along other brambly fields of anger and a sense of wrong. We don’t go there. But it’s not so hard to keep away from all of that dark, intense, and self-consuming stuff in the peaceful circumstances we are fortunate to be able to create before. My mind is sick of the negative anyway, I think. It seems that it wants to wander around in “what else is true,” what other thoughts and awareness it has that are usually overshadowed by my anger, the old stories of bad things done to me or by me, my plans and anxieties. The fence is protection, not limitation. So what else is true?

Today I noticed that even though my mind is apparently wandering, there is pattern to the process. I guess it’s like complexity theory—how could it be otherwise, since the world is all the same processes endlessly repeating? In complexity, random events form patterns at the larger scale of event after event. After two years of doing this nearly every day in some form (though sometimes abbreviated), and for a decade more intermittently, the data is coming in.

Usually the mind begins its morning walk where I spend most of my waking hours, in thinking. It meanders through thoughts about what I read yesterday, or some notes I made on running the Heart Sutra up against Neil Theise’s Notes on Complexity. It wonders why humans don’t realize that they privilege the most primitive part of their minds (the intellect, I think), or if they do. Whether humans are perhaps devolving rather than evolving, and if the birds might be smarter than we. Maybe it tries to retrieve some great insight I had as I woke up that is already forgotten.

After a while sometimes, my mind may decide to test some ideas empirically. We (after all, I am mind as well) try to see some of the ideas about what is real and the relative and absolute by looking around the room or listening. Then the mind will have my eyes look about and imagine how the living room should look if it is all constantly forming and emptying, moving between things and energy. Is there some part of the mind that can ascertain this? The masters say there is.The exploration and musing remind me of someone in a stranger’s living room looking at the photos on the mantle, the books on the tables, the wall art.

I look at the rug, the wind blowing hard against the trees in the gray of the lightening sky. I sit and try to let the furniture come to me as it is—atoms, molecules dancing in patterns, arising and decaying, arising and decaying. I try to sense this in my body—my breathing being the example I try to follow. Then the mind reminds me that there is no me or I, just the breathing of the moment and the moment of the sofa. I am no different from the sofa at the most fundamental level—we are both the same moment, not different things. “What??” How does that work? We keep looking. Sometimes, the air seems to dance and the world floating. Just your eyes tiring, you say. Maybe not, I say. See what you think. To be continued…