How far do you have to go?

It’s 5 a.m.

When I left the house for the cabin I kept the yard light on. It’s been so long since I walked out in the dark that I felt I needed it I guess. I tested first for stars but it’s cloudy. If I’d been able to see the stars I would have left the light off.

On the walk to the cabin I got a full 30 seconds of quiet – which seems like a miracle. I could actually hear the yard pond gurgling. I’m still getting six or seven seconds of quiet at a time with an early bird thrown in. And it’s cool. Blessedly cool. The air feels fresh after two weeks of humid heat, one day breaking a heat-index record. I’d walk out the door and my glasses would steam up.

I guess I’m just awash in the appreciation that comes from absence.

I’ve been going a little crazy with the noise of living by the freeway lately. It started with this one video I did when the cottonwood trees were shedding. The cotton was drifting into the yard so heavily that I went and got my camera. It was such a cool visual – drifty and dreamy. But when I played it back, the sound was so loud – just on an ordinary afternoon in the middle of the yard. I wasn’t even as near the freeway fence as I usually am. I became aware.

Then construction started on the bridge over the freeway that’s about a block away and adjoins the edge of the woods. Jack hammering for two weeks and a lane closed since as work continues up the line. The traffic slows and trucks shift.

The final “awareness” hit me when I looked at two of the videos I did last summer from my new computer. I realized that my old computer had such poor sound that the full extent of the noise of the freeway was hidden from me. Suddenly it blared – a background noise that took over.

I’ve started thinking about moving but I probably won’t. The market is bad and people can be real particular. Who’d want to buy a house with this kind of noise level?

Maybe I’m one of those people who need the extremes before appreciation sets in. I don’t know if I’d ever feel this elation over quiet if it wasn’t rare. I think I would…now…but I could have needed this onslought of noise before I’d feel it.

Appreciation is so sweet. I close my eyes and feel the breeze coming through the window and my whole body drinks it in.

It brings forward all those things hidden in plain view. Like thoughts, and how when you see them they become a background noise that blares. And how there can seem to be as little choice about them as there is about staying in a house next to the freeway.

Once thoughts of leaving the noise behind enter, you start to wonder how far away you’d have to go to escape.

On my walks, I realize how a block would make a difference. Can’t hardly hear the freeway most days when I’ve trecked off to the park – even before I get there it’s lessened. But in my mind, on the noisy days, I think I need a spot at least an hour outside of the city.

The need to go far, far away.

It’s 5:30 now, the time I usually get up, and the blessed dark is lifting. Only a half hour separates me from a spot of quiet in the dark.

Little weasel mind's subtle ways

The simple ecstasy of not counting time.

It was my first morning out in the cabin before sunrise in a while – and the first one of doing my whole morning routine from here, which I did thanks to the bigger rug finally getting washed. It’s been a wet and muddy early summer and I hadn’t wanted to exercise on the floor of the cabin with or without the rug.

Now Sam’s lying there, which probably means I won’t want my face in it tomorrow, but that’s okay. There’s four sides when it’s folded. I’ll turn it when Sam gets up and put it away until tomorrow. It has become, as of today, my meditation and yoga mat. I know this, but I’m somewhat bugged that I do. It’s hard to explain.

When I got up to go in the house, Sam and the cats were all lying near the door – peaceful – like they’d been enjoying it as much as me. They followed me into the house. I fed them, got some tea, and then – there it was. The clock.

Once I looked at the clock, I thought, ‘okay – that was about an hour start to finish.’ I kind of nodded to myself. ‘Good, this is good.’

A minute later it hit me that I’d noticed the time that way; that I had to congratulate myself, as if I’d made it through a grueling task or done something I ‘ought’ to do. I don’t know how to convey this, but I was noticing another track of my thoughts…a track that seemed like nothing. Simple. Harmless. Just a little fact to tuck away. “That took an hour.”

All I’d really done differently was move my morning stretching exercises and meditation out to the cabin instead of doing them in the house. I already had a pretty good idea of how much time I spent with my new practice of qigong. The ‘hour’ was simply noticing how much time passed when I put the two together.

But I felt that what the ‘thought’ did was try to convince me that it mattered in a way that it didn’t.

The thought was like something I’d think if I started out walking to fulfill doctor’s orders. ‘Okay. I got in my 5,000 steps, that took me a half hour. I can quit now.” I knew it wasn’t like that. But there was some little weasel voice in me that was treating it that way, reducing it, and that part was not me. That part was old, old, old. An old track from an old record. A remnant from another time.

The moving of the rug that allowed me to bring it all together, being there at the time of day I love best, the animals all acting peaceful (instead of clamoring at the door in the house to go out), it all just happened. I wasn’t thinking ‘I should do this’ or, as soon as I found myself held by it, that ‘I should have done this before,’ or ‘this is the way to do it.’ I knew I’d found my way without thinking it. I guess you could say I was fully in the experience … until I looked at the clock and little weasel mind came back.

I guess the weasel may always be there, but catching it – well, all I can say after the sublime experience of my morning was that it was one of the clearest “not me” thoughts I’ve ever had. Simple and subtle – none of that flagrant bashing myself with a brick that I sometimes do, and in it’s own way, more deadly for its subtlety. Let’s just suck all of the life out of a thing!

There are times we need to make big deals out of our insights or experience. I really believe that. There’s times you need to because you have to declare yourself, or times you need to galvanize your passion into a creative force through action, or that you need to make a big deal out of your experience because, if you don’t, if you don’t hold it to yourself and let yourself see that it was a “call” or a message or a way-showing moment, you’ll file it away like last year’s taxes and not let it affect you.

But there are also times you don’t even want to notice what you’re doing because as soon as you notice you’ve brought your awareness a step away from your experience.

When you are the experience, even for an hour, all the thinking about it stuff becomes clear. It doesn’t feel particularly valuable that you see it either, even when you see that you don’t want it, because you get the feeling that, having seen it might make it harder to be the experience again. Oh shit, tomorrow I’ll be trying to be the experience. Damn.

So…I’m going to let it go as best as I can now. I just thought I’d share the insight because hey, I hadn’t seen it before in quite this way, and maybe there’s another person out there with the same weasel mind who will begin to see the subtle along with the flagrant, and to let it go.


PS: I'm writing more frequently now at this address:
http://blog.acourseoflove.com