I'd like to start out with a meditation...on meditation. There is a certain openness that is required of you if you really want to meditate. You can't really dictate what will happen, even though it is all happening within you, to you. Rather it's as if you are preparing yourself to be a spectator to your own self, of what's going on inside your mind or, to venture further, what's occurring within your soul. To meditate you must become to some extent a student of your own being and, when it comes to telling you what fruits may be expected from the practice of meditation, the best advice may be to have no expectations at all. For how do you describe to someone what inner silence is? All ways fall short and similes could actually hinder a genuine experience. Better perhaps to say "It'll be worth it. Trust me."
So anyway, this meditation thing. You know how when you're having a great conversation with someone, and you'll be talking about one thing and that one thing will just naturally lead to another thing and on it goes, until at the end of the conversation you're at this topic that is so far removed from what you originally started talking about it's almost impossible to see how the transition could be made so seamlessly? I think this is sort of what happens in meditation. You might be thinking about something that really moves you or has made you "stop" and think, and at the end of this "stopping" you could walk away with a new perspective. That new way of looking at things may not even be related--on the surface--to whatever it was that made you stop. And the thing that made you stop could be anything, really. If you consider what art is, you could say that all of art is presented by the artist with this very purpose at its core. I don't think it's a stretch to say that to appreciate art beyond the superficial, you have to meditate on it. And beyond art there is all of nature, science, language, and everything that humankind does well and does poorly, all of it, down to the tiniest or most seemingly inconsequential of things, has the potential to be the spark that leads to enlightenment.
That said, in this blog I'd like to present a few of these "sparks" that I've encountered for your consideration.
How about this? Consider the dictionary. Is it really just a reference manual for our language, doomed to spend most of its life gathering dust in an unused corner of your bookshelf? No, I say! There is much adventure to be had in the scouring of its pages! For though we might use a lot of words endlessly in our day-to-day, it pays to look into the meanings of words we don't use quite so often. We might find more depth than we expected and, who knows, a short meditation on a word and its meanings here and there might find you suddenly brimming with poetic metaphors! Here are just a couple to ponder, you dormant poet, you:
Quicken (some highlights)
- to vivify
- to revive or resuscitate, as from death...
- (Shipbuilding) To shorten the radius of (a curve); to make (a curve) sharper; as, to quicken the sheer, that is, to make its curve more pronounced.
Enthusiasm (brought to light for me by a good man, good priest at a funeral service)
- the original meaning was to refer to someone possessed by the gods
These two words have been in my head lately and they hold enough importance to me that I was compelled to share them here. I like to consider the power of naming events as they occur in ones life - that out of the day to day apparent repetitions of life we can identify moments of something remarkable, literally. Ideally I think if we could see reality clearly, clear as in the lifting of the so-called veil, then there would be no moment that was not remarkable. Back to the power of naming...this is where quickening comes in for me, because it has become the perfect word to describe those moments when an uplifting results from pretty much anything that happens at the right time when I am there to behold it; words spoken by another from the heart, a sublime scent, a memory recalled in new light...like I say, anything really - its more about the perceiver and the secret alchemical ingredient of awareness. It pretty much always catches me off guard. Its not a recipe I've learned yet. I had never heard of the term being used for shipbuilding, but the connection between the more common usage and the sharpening of a curve is quite apt, and poetry in itself.
To consider the way enthusiasm was originally used, it must have been a word filled with metaphor. To liken that inspired light in an enthused person to possession, and not just any random spirit but "the gods", speaks to me of the intuition belonging to a less distracted time (some time in the 1500's is apparently when this word was being born). That could just be my ignorance of the time mind you--perhaps in a way there was as much distraction then as there is now, in different ways, but regardless--I love to know that original connotation. It reminds me to be a little more grateful when moments of enthusiasm come, and my admiration for those special people who seem to have an endless supply increases.
Citations
quickening. Dictionary.com. Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary. MICRA, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/quickening (accessed: May 17, 2008).
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