Finding Contemplative Time In Modern Life

           “Joy is being willing for things to be as they are.”
― Charlotte Joko Beck, Nothing Special

I would also say that joy is seeing and delighting in things as they are, which can be an elusive concept when your life gets caught up in a construction project. Construction projects by definition require making things different. Better. Fixed up. Everything is most definitely not ok as it is, otherwise why are you going to all this debt and trouble?

As I approach the move-in date for my new studio I’ve become aware that for much of the past five months I’ve been completely not-here, now, at all. My tattered meditation practice has consisted of five minutes of thinking about not-thinking and then making elaborate to-do lists. During this time I have been living in a liminal zipcode where nothing will every really be fixed up: it’s its nature to be a little bit broken. Gentrification will never reach the upper pastures of Aurora, aka Highway 99, or the streetwalkers negotiating with men in hoodies on vegetable crates at the back of the Rite-Aid or the lake that time left behind, Bitter Lake. The geese will be there forever and nobody is going to shoo them or shoot them or make it nice for picnicking. Instead it will be a place where at 7 AM a thin man drinks beer, a very pale and large boy thumbs a bible, shredding its corners into the lilies, and five women in white headscarves sit on the bleachers in silence, watching dirt where grass used to be. The swallows dive above a miss-matched collection of ducks, and distracted pet owners text-message while their dogs forlornly do their business without witness. This is a park only in the most grudging sense. Signs warn you not to swim. It takes effort to notice that the trees are trees just the same, and cast lush shadows just as langorous and gratuitously beautiful as those of an Olmstead preserve. It takes less effort not to look at all.

Three days ago my back went out, and I have had to completely stop. Sit. Suffer, get quiet. Here is the gift of contemplative time, handed to me by my body, with a grimace. I have taken several slow walks on Linden Street, as walking is one of the only forms of relief. At my new geriatric pace I fit right in with the retired gangsters in their wheelchairs and gold chains and the elderly folk taking a smoke or glacially wheeling grocery carts back and forth from the Safeway a mile up the road. Every walk brings a surprise. A perfect symmetry of ducks cutting an arc across the not-so-bitter lake. The lemon scent of crushed geranium. A woman sitting on a couch in the middle of the Interurban Trail eating a bowl of cereal in her pajamas. A truck:

Before I was living in this neighborhood and taking it for granted, when its dereliction seemed exotic, I used to wander around in the vacant lots in the afternoons and take pictures. I stumbled onto a mountain of abandoned belongings, among which I scavenged panels of old wallpaper. They were so absurdly happy, the yellow flowers peeling from the stained and stapled wood. They became the image at the beginning of this post, collaged with a chair from twenty years earlier glimpsed on a street at evening. There is nothing like a chair to inspire contemplation. To beg you to recollect, muse, dream, remember to forget. A chair without arms is humbling. It’s not a throne, and you have to put your hands in your lap. It’s an unanchored state, a kingdom without borders, and at the same time it is completely restful and civilized.

When people ask “where do you find time for contemplation?” I no longer say a word about having a regular meditation practice. I just say I keep my eyes out for a state of mind– a place where the mind can sit. Grab it where I can. Parking lots, edges, mistakes, miss-steps. The ugly, the random, the broken, the beautiful, the healed.