A Symphony of Mindfulness

adagio
Slow driving . . . the weight of the weather somehow requires it as the clouds hang low with the weight of themselves . . . the flutes and violins pick up their tempo just a bit on the radio. . .  I glance to my right and am dumbstruck by the simple scene seen so many times before . . . the cattle roaming, chewing, staring from the field . . . it is a freeze-frame moment of beauty and awe and I am brought into mindfulness . . . the state of being that takes each sense and calls for attention . . . where I am going, from whence I have come all fade into this moment, this now . . . it is what I imagine stepping into a painting might be like, but more, oh so much, much more . . . and I am awakened . . . slowly . . .

cesura
Taking my time over the mountain I usually glide past at hyperspeed, I drift down into Monterey where the clouds have risen a bit . . . there on the left – the first house . . . the black cat sits haunched in the grass . . . eyes keen on the thing before it . . . mole?  Or just a blade of grass?  Who can say?  The moment frozen . . . time suspended . . . in that just-before-launch millisecond of feline pondering . . . the cat symphony will reach its crescendo without me as I drift on . . .

forte piano
The wind pours itself into the apartment moving the vertical blinds in a rhythm only it can name . . . sitting in silence, we two hear the infrequent traffic ebbing and flowing, underscoring in the gaping quiet the distant sound of child voices . . . perpendicular to the wind I sit . . . half of my face feels its caress, the other mindless of what it misses . . . strong then quiet . . . strong then quiet . . . feeling more than hearing . . . I am mindful that God’s lungs breathe in and breathe out a world and barely a sound is heard . . .

Water, Water, Everywhere*

Jack & Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water . . . 

The itsy, bitsy spider went up the water spout . . . 

Over the water and over the sea . . . 

Little drops of water . . . 

There’s water in the rain barrel . . . 

Dark brown is the river . . . 

Row, row, row your boat gently down the stream . . . 

Down by the old (not the new but the old) mill stream . . . 

March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers 

Nursery rhymes and songs I learned as a child echo in my mind as the rains come and come and come.  Water is much with us, and a good thing.  But this week, I have been mindful of water in a way I haven’t been since spending time in Iraq, where the water is often unfit for human consumption, and being a desert clime, incredibly scarce.

Illustration of The Ryme of the Ancient
Mariner.  Illustrator:  Paul Gustave Doré

For while the rains come here in a poor imitation of the monsoons of Asia, the water in the ground, coming as it does in my small village, through a water treatment plant instead of a spring or well, is unfit to drink.

They’ve found E-coli in our drinking supply.  Thus we are to boil all our drinking water.  No problem, I thought.  I’ve done this before.  So I boiled a good supply of drinking water, and in anticipation of the water being shut off to find the source of the problem, filled the bathtub with water for cleaning and flushing.  I washed the dishes and then rinsed them with Clorox.  And I remembered to keep my mouth shut in the shower (not as easily done as you might think).

No problem, I told myself – I’m an old hat at this.

But I forgot one thing: I brushed my teeth with the water from the sink.

Oops.

And then I remembered that you can’t forget anything.

And what I forgot is the most important thing of all: mindfulness.  Mindfulness of everything you do is called for when the drinking water isn’t safe and water itself is in short supply.  Bathing becomes a luxury instead of a daily routine.  Securing drinking water is part of the daily routine; there is, there can be, no forgetting.

I’m lucky – this is only a temporary situation for me.  I will not have to hand carry water from a distance.  I will not have to keep bleaching my dishwater.  I will not have to remember to boil any water that could go into my mouth.

No one that I know who does have to do these daily chores necessary to sustain life complains.  It’s simply the way things are.  It was my own attitude as well when I was there.  But I am here now, and in the land of plenty, with so very much for which to be grateful, I must continually remind myself to the task of gratitude.  I wonder why that is?  I wonder why we with so much are so often the least grateful?  I am sorry for the interruption of our steady supply of good water and its impact on others less able than I to cope.  But I am also grateful – for the reminding call to be grateful, if nothing else.

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*From The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

Day after day, day after day,

We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship

Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

Earthquake?

I admit it.

I am unsettled.

Around 1.52 EST, sitting in my office in the house at the computer, I felt the house move in a way I hadn’t experienced before.  My son and I met each other in the hallway and went outside into the beauty of a very early fall sort of day and stood there just looking at the house.  Nothing seemed amiss and about the same time, we looked at each other and said with questioning voices, “Earthquake?”

Back into the house we went.  Ben beat me to FB from his newer computer and shouted out that it was an earthquake, a big one somewhere between Richmond and Charlottesville, which suddenly seem much closer to us in these western mountains of Virginia.

I went to the church FB and checked that folks were ok and then turned on the news to hear reports, see pictures of evacuations and digest this latest evidence that my security simply cannot rest on the assumption that today will always be much as yesterday was.

Without working cell phones in these hills, I’m so glad for the technology that lets us reach out to those we love near and far so quickly.

But it is television that reminds me more than any other medium of communication both how very connected and how very disconnected we are from each other.  All thoughts of Libya and Syria fled from the national consciousness in the U. S. as reports came in about the quake, while in Libya and Syria, undoubtedly nobody was giving much thought to what was happening beneath the earth’s crust an ocean away.

And reports continue to come in about how far away tremors were felt – as far as Detroit, roughly 400 miles from the center of the quake in Virginia.

We are literally connected, each to the other.  The very earth itself is connected and thus are we.  How often do I need to relearn this lesson?  What happens in Virginia affects people living in Detroit and beyond.  Provincial, concerned only with my immediate environ, is a luxury adjective I cannot afford.

It is my job, as a human being, to be mindful of others, even, and perhaps especially, when they shake me up.

As I said, I am unsettled.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

Mindfulness

I am not a vegetarian, but I did grow up a town girl, so the processes of producing the meat I eat were generally at a far remove from my awareness.  Save for the time I saw my cousin Mike kill his first chicken (which made a lasting impression), I haven’t even been witness to how meat comes to my table.

Of course, I intellectually know about how such things happen.  But I haven’t been mindful of much else, simply because I haven’t had to be.

Thursday, that changed, albeit at a remove.

Throughout the day in the village where I live, I could hear the sound of gunshots.  It’s unusual this time of year, as there is no hunting season just now.  And generally, even in the country where I live, I don’t much hear gunfire.  The sound is a jarring one.

I wondered what it could be, but did nothing to investigate other than to speculate: maybe somebody’s target shooting, I thought.  But they shouldn’t be doing that so close in to ‘town’ (referring to the area where I live with roughly 75 other souls).  Or maybe they’re sighting their guns.

Later, at a church gathering, somebody suggested it was a local family slaughtering their cattle.  They shoot them? I asked.  The one who suggested this alternative looked at me a bit funny, as if to say, How long have you lived here?  Translation: Of course they shoot them; how else did you think farmers slaughter their beef cows?

I never thought about it before.  I know larger farms take their cattle to the slaughterhouse.  I never thought about how smaller farms slaughter on site.  Chickens, at least on my uncle’s farm, got the axe.  I guess I thought, if I ever thought at all, that cows got similar treatment.  But a cow is a very different animal than a chicken and killing a cow has to be much more challenging in all its practicalities.  An animal is hardly likely to stand still while it’s throat is being cut.

All these musings swirled around in my head and the word ‘mindfulness’ emerged.  I have not been mindful of how cows exit this world in order that I might eat beef.  Mindfulness is the process, the effort, of staying aware; of being in touch with things in each present moment.

Of what shall I be mindful in the slaughter of cattle that I might eat beef?  Perhaps there is no better place to begin than in thankfulness.

Native American spirituality has the hunter prepare for the hunt by offering up a prayer of thanks and apology for the life of the animal taken that the hunter and his family might live.  It is said that the act of taking an animal’s life is a sacred act, in the understanding that all life is interconnected and the sacrifice of one for another that the other might live must never be taken lightly.

In other words, we must be mindful, not only of our own needs and their fulfillment, but also of the cost of the meeting of those needs.


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Source for Native American practices:  Mitakuye Oyasin: We are all related, by Fr. David Gallus, OSC, at http://www.crosier.org/default.cfm?PID=1.48&inq_key=20320&action=detail&LibID=859