The Wind on my Face

So. This is Day Seven of the Regimen. It is also Day Four of the Vow of June, which is to sit down to meditate every day for the rest of June, even if I only sit for thirty seconds. I haven’t sat in a half lotus for ages, and I have some stretching to do before that’s easy again. So this is just to get things started, get my phone timer set up, all the mechanics. Oy. I do want to just open up and have a heart to heart with God, whoever that may be: the One or the Substrate or Old Nobodaddy or my Anima or some figment of my dwindling imagination. Sitting shamata won’t get me there, but at least it reminds me of what I want. Coming to greater propositional certainty about God would be convenient for building churches and enforcing the obedience of novices, but I can’t see that it would actually deliver anything I want. I wouldn’t want a neatly labelled and packaged universe, convenient for putting away in a storage unit, even if I thought I was likely to get it. I just want the wind on my face before I die. I may not be brave enough to live and die in the open air, but could I not just jam a window a little bit ajar and take some deep breaths?

Though I suspect that like most “all I’m asking for is a little…” requests, it’s actually asking for the monstrously impossible. That I don’t actually begin to understand how much I’m demanding.

Still, if this life has taught me anything, it’s this: that if you don’t ask you don’t get.

—-

So. Shopping for lentil soup today. A walk with Tori at noon. One or two more Spanish sessions, and shamatha. That all seems doable.

—-

I suspect that the answer to “what does God want me to do?” although it is perfectly unintelligible, and probably a ridiculous question, actually has quite accessible answers that I already know, if I stop half a second to write them out. She wants me to be good, insofar as I can and insofar as I understand it (which is not actually, for me, the deep mysterious problem it seems to be for philosophers: I know damn well what being good entails. The hard part isn’t discovering what I should do: it’s doing it). And she wants me to turn to face her, she wants me to unfurl and to flourish, like the candyflower growing from the cracks in the driveway. Not enough soil? Grow anyway. Blossom exuberantly. What God wants of me is, in fact, blindingly obvious.