Week 5

  

      Waterfalls and Mountains in Iceland

  What happens when we contemplate a landscape?  Perhaps, the closer we draw, and the longer our gaze, the more we find ourselves spreading out and upward, sideways and down ways, pouring forth as waters do, stretching and floating like clouds as we sense what it is to be cloud like, or rising up with the strength and stillness mountains embody.  Nature is our home, a "witnessing presence"(line 10) as Denise Levertov writes in the poem "Witness," and we a witnessing presence to nature whenever we remove the "veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue," (line 5) that may keep us from seeing, and being seen.  There is company in nature, good company, the best in so many ways, and nature has the power to soothe and sometimes heal our worldly concerns;  indeed all that we have is nature, beginning with our own biology. Without bodily integrity, physical health (from which the mind/brain is inseparable), living well is more of a challenge.  When, as Li Po writes in "The Birds  Have Vanished,"  a poem that describes a mountain meditation, all ephemera are removed from sight, or cease to cloud awareness, we may find the abiding sense of presence that the mountain in view represents or has come to symbolize.  The poem begins thus:  "The birds have vanished into the sky, /And now the last cloud drains away." (lines 1-2).  We can interpret the natural features of birds and clouds as ephemera in some sense, because they embody movement and change.  Of course everything is in process of change, but the mountain in view now is relatively unmoving, and the witnessing speaker, in the next and last two lines of this short poem, seems to have lost all sense of a separate self.  Witness and mountain "sit together" (line 3) in contemplation, "until only the mountain remains." (line 4). Li Po may be showing the power of visionary imagination, which sees into the heart of things, finds connections and identity with the very elements from which we, and all life on this planet, evolved.  He may be indicating that whatever we love well or contemplate long, that, too, we become identified with. We can enlarge ourselves by our loves an by our ability to observe more closely, to "go lower" as Ann Voskamp writes in the chapter we were reading last class:  

Yet when I stand before immensity that heightens my smallness–I have never felt sadness.  Only burgeoning wonder.  Is it because within each frame of finite flesh lies the likeness of infinite God? In all things large and spectacular, we recognize glimpses of home and the call to our own deeper chemistry.  Do we writhe to peel out of our smallness and into the big life because that fits our inborn God-image?


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   In her meditation practices, author and meditation teacher Tara Brach refers to the process whereby we learn to see clearly (come into presence and maintain presence) by the acronym RAIN:   Recognition of our circumstances or situation, allowance of whatever it is, gentle investigation of it, and nurturing, self-compassionate care for whatever suffering or conflict may arise or appear, whatever the cause. With practice, she says, "Each time you are willing to slow down and recognize, 'Oh, this the trance of unworthiness . . . this is fear . . .this is hurt . . . this is judgment . . . ,' you are poised to de-condition the old habits and limiting self-beliefs that confine your heart."  She has a world of experience and training in psychotherapeutic meditation and a voice that makes staying tuned to her meditations, imo, rewarding.  She established the Insight Meditation Community of Washington D.C. and today we will together listen to one of her guided meditations, "Refuge in Living Presence," to be followed by a freewrite and discussion (for homework points).  I hope you enjoy it!


Homework:  Presentation by Robert Sapolsky on Human Behavior's Biological and Evolutionary Underpinnings:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnSY4L3V8s  Quiz to follow.

Tara Brach:  "Healing Depression with Meditation, Part 1"

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