• Tag Archives mindfulness

  • Mindfulness

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                                      Waxing Bloodroot Moon

    We’ve begun the slippery, muddy slide into the growing season, though I understand some of the parking lot snow piles, many well over 8 feet high and some much higher than that, will take a long time to melt.  Maybe months, into the summer.  The snow always pleases me as it falls and as it covers our world, now over 120 days straight with snow cover, but there is a time when it becomes a nuisance.  The snow went beyond nuisance this year and became a definite hazard as it has become impossible around the piled snow at many city intersections.  When driving the Celica out of the garage here, I’ve not been able to see traffic on 153rd since late December.  In that regard I will be not sorry to see the snow melt away.  On balance, though, I get far more pleasure from the snow than I do hassle, so when it’s time again, I’ll be ready.

    Leslie’s mindfulness presentation this morning was wonderful.  We drew mandalas, did a guided meditation and ate a strawberry, a grape, a piece of cheese and a hunk of bread with intention and attention.  We washed it down with water and tea.  Each bite was an adventure.  Made me aware of how unmindful I am when I eat.  Also brought me into the present.  It was a Be. Here. Now. time.  Gotta get back to the meditation, discovered I missed it.

    South America.  A lot to learn in the next six months plus.  In addition to scoping out the ports, already somewhat begun, I’ll read at least one comprehensive history of the continent, an ecological history and a natural history.  I want to find a reasonably priced geography, too.  The ones I have found so far are damned expensive.  One of the values of traveling is its ability to make the distant, close and the abstract, real.  There’s a definite gestalt to lengthy travel in a part of the world unknown.  At some point, a point uncertain, an understanding snaps into place, a combination of prior experience, preparation and that small market in Manta, Ecuador, the smells of Santa Marta, Colombia, the sight of glaciers around Punta Arenas.  Then, like the Velveteen Rabbit, South America will become real for me.

    Often, I take along some literature, too, perhaps some Allenda, Losa, maybe I’ll just take take a Hundred Years of Solitude and read it again.  The phrase book, too.

    Grocery store now.


    📂This entry was posted in Asia Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Travel 📎and tagged

  • Breakfast in Silence

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Imbolc                                  Waning Bridgit Moon

    The monks and individual retreatants like me all eat together in a long, tiled room.  There are six long wooden tables, a blond wood reflecting the era when the Abbey was built.  These tables sit at a slight diagonal to the western wall, mostly below ground level, only narrow windows above letting in light.

    Trays, the blue plastic kind familiar to me from Alexandria Elementary School over 55 years ago, come up first with the silvered racks for tableware above them.  A steam table is next, roughly the size of the one Kam Wong’s Chinese restaurant has for its afternoon crowd in Andover.  Butted up against the steam table is another long wooden table on which sat this morning plastic bags of bread baked here in the monastery.

    I picked up some creamed wheat–makes me think of the bear opening the creamed wheat crates in the Art Institutes American collection–brown bread, spread the bread with a little peanut butter, a tangerine and took my tray to the retreatants table.  After putting some milk in my cereal and getting some tea, all along the southern wall, I returned to the the table, eating my second meal here in silence.

    Monks came in and out, some dressed in black robes, others in jeans and work shirts.

    While eating, I looked up from time to time.  Above my chair was a painted crucifix with the words, God Rules from a Tree.  On the eastern wall, above the steam table, there is a long panel that contains the four symbols of the gospels:  Ox, Eagle, Lion and Angel.  In between each symbol is a graphic and words like:  Happy is he who is hungry.

    We ate, the monks and I, in quiet, the only sounds an occasional chair scuffing the floor or silver ware against plastic.  The mood invited mindfulness so I imagined the field in which the wheat for bread and the cereal had grown.  The fall day on which it was harvested.  A barn full of Holsteins, water vapor steaming off them in the warm barn while they were milked.  The sunny vineyard in California where these grapes had grown fat and full of the water dried from them now.  Maybe a sugar beet field along the Red River or a sugar cane field in Hawai’i for the sugar.  I didn’t get as far as the tangerine and the tea and the peanut butter as my mind drifted, no longer mindful.

    Now I’m warming up for the morning’s work, writing this piece.

    From the Benedictine Monastery, Blue Cloud Abbey, near Marvin, South Dakota.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities Writing 📎and tagged