god bless maurice, he is ten characters in one, but having an old clothes dryer with no exhaust tubing installed in this apartment is hilarious and stinky.
the humidity in here is already 200%, and the more his clothes dry, the more it smells like an anxious gymnasium from where i sit.
but where am i sitting? this is the real story.
it’s a sunday and i have no scheduled activities. this is the first sunday with no scheduled activities in five months, almost the entirety of my time in taiwan. after so many days of waking up early after no sleep, i threw in the towel and gave myself the grace of no alarm this morning.
beyond that, i was going to do the upgraded version of my meditation, the round that includes stretching, breathing, the meditation itself, and 10 minutes of corpse pose afterward. however, my plan is slightly foiled. a round takes something of a still environment. and the dryer is a jet engine. a jet engine with rocks in it. and the smell is incomprehensible.
cindy said that whenever you do the meditation outside of best practices, you are effectively doing personal research. so i scrapped the idea of the round, but decided i wanted to see if i could do a solid 20 minute meditation with this roaring sensory soup. what will happen? i am asking myself? will i be able to drop in? will i be able to hear the silent mantra? will i be so distracted that the minutes won’t have value? let’s try it out.
thirty seconds after i turned the stopwatch on and closed my eyes, i am already thoroughly meditative. i can hear the dryer and smell the damp cotton, but i am not bothered. not even a little. the sounds and smell are neither distracting nor not-distracting. this is much the point of all this meditation business, so even in a few weeks of practicing, i feel like i’m learning the lesson. vedic meditation, once you get it, once it clicks, is 99% effortless and 1% mantra. i believe for me this ratio will be years down the road, but i understand it theoretically, half-intuitively.
so far it usually takes around until minute 12 or 13 for me to drop in effectively. i know this because every once in a while i’ll let my eyes flutter when i feel my chest sink and it’s typically around there. then i ride the roller coaster until the 20 minute mark and let the brain bubbles bubble.
even with the demonic appliance 5 meters away from my perch, the meditation went on like it was supposed to. if anything, there was a little extra depth at the end. i got caught up in one interesting false assumption of mine that has been self-correcting this past week. i assumed that dropping in is a separate state, because some of my earliest were – they were full alternatives to sensory input. but this past week, the bliss state, the Being state, has been an overlay, even with some scattered thoughts on top. it’s a little hard to explain. but the book i’m reading that talks about, after you’ve established Being well enough, the rest of life can’t make last impressions that override it. it’s something for me to come back and think more about the further i head down this academic and experiential wander.
this was today, but yesterday deserves an honorable mention here as well.
the day of the dragon boat training. maurice asked me if i wanted to go dragon boat training. i try to say yes to everything, especially to people i trust. he seemed surprised. it’s early, he said. i’m in, i said. he said we wake up at 5:45 to get on the train by 6. i’m in, i said.
i am roasted drunk getting in to the apartment early saturday morning, 2 am. i change my clothes into what i’ll be wearing the next morning so i don’t have to think when i get up. the alarm rings and i hear maurice get up. he has staged an oar and a life vest by the door. i am still drunk, we are on the train and 6:03am, headed to the furthest stop away on either the blue or green line – i can’t remember now.
we meet his team a 10 minute walk off the train. there’s a beautiful river below us, below what looks and feels like gym bleachers, and boats, and dozens of absurdly fit men and women chattering. some in uniforms. some doing pushups and jumping jacks. it’s 7am with clear skies. i haven’t slept effectively for longer than a month now. this is fascinating.
someone brought me an extra oar and lifejacket. my paddle is brown wood, everyone else has sleek black with cartoon characters etched on them in neon colors. everything is in chinese, but folks switch to english every once in a while if something is crucial.
we are in the boat with shoes off, and mosquitoes instantly bite my bright pink feet, and red scars pop up like inflatable bicycle tires.
they row, i row, we row together, synchronous gears, and it’s a unique feeling, however this timelessness lasts. for a few moments at least, i understand completely why people do this. there is no ego but the splash of oars, no direction but the direction of everyone and everything, no separation between the silent stretches and pulls of aligned torsos. i feel lucky, i think, that i can have dual experiences in such instances. i am rowing, of course, but i’m also existing outside the event as a writer taking notes, a wandering poet, a wandering warrior poet if i can get the rest of my body in order one of these days, and immerse in pleasant dissociation, not the kind where you hide from danger, but where you can experience the essence of duality from a single perspective. i have practiced it much. i assume the recent meditations have made it more efficient for me to grasp and mold these lovely moments.
dreams within dreams.
