Still Life

The road was deserted, the beach empty, and the air mild and motionless. It was Sunday, with all of Sunday’s special kind of slow, and I rode my bicycle with lazy legs and wondered where everyone had gone. Monarch butterflies darted about -- quick flickers of bright wings -- and cows grazed peaceably alongside new-to-the-world calves, some of which ventured from their mothers’ sides and peered at me with curiosity.

In my other life, November was a time of chill and gray, but now I stopped to remove my sweater and stuff it into my pack, already hot without having yet begun to pedal up a hill. Only the yellowed leaves of sycamore and cottonwood hinted of fall, and that certain diffusion of angled sunlight, and the prevailing sense of vacancy -- I had the feeling of having slipped into some in-between zone, either too early or too late for the main event. I was riding into a still life.

At Bullito I turned left and crossed the railroad tracks to look at the beach. It was messy and kelp-strewn, and the sea was nothing but streaks of glimmer and shine. I decided to dismount from my trusty two-wheeled steed and find a shady spot along the bluff within the sound of the surf to try my hand (or rather my head) at the meditation thing. I attempted first to empty my mind, then tried to picture a limitless sky beyond the ego-eye of that needle through which I view everything. I failed abysmally.

Here's how it went: I was distracted by a shift in the temperature, a vague need to pee, the buzz of some passing insect...you get the picture. Rather than conjuring up peace and light, I succeeded only in unleashing a list of things I needed to do when I got back home and an assortment of my most current worries, most of them insoluble. After five minutes of this I concluded that I would do better at meditation if I were sitting in a chair in my own living room, and I told myself that I would try that later. Adding this little fib to my portable roster of shaky resolutions, I set out on the bicycle again.

Sometimes I think that riding my bike is meditation for me, and I suppose to a certain extent that is true, but really, I need to sit still. My friend Dan, who for many reasons is a credible source, tells me that for him, getting meditation "right" meant letting go of the need to “get it right”, which I suspect is the case with a lot of things.

I evaluate myself way too often (and boy, am I stingy with the As!) and instead of losing myself in the process, I tend to look at wishful goals and outcomes.

It's too soon to concede defeat, though. I haven’t put much time and effort into this yet, and I need to be consistent, but I shouldn’t over-think it, which is what I am doing right now. Sometimes, Dan says, it’s simply a matter of sitting in a chair, or being aware of what one is doing while doing it.There it is again – that business of sitting still. I so seldom do that.

But after I got home and put away my bicycle, I didn’t just bolt upstairs and move on to the next agenda item. I lingered outside, looking and listening, being still. The scent of lavender and sage mingled with that of the fledgling paper-whites along the driveway, and I was startled by a hummingbird, and I noticed that the world was shining.

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