Meditation

I have just spent two hours cleaning my house. I scrubbed my shower like I haven't done in months, with a hard brush and a lot of sweat. Cleaning, as I have often mentioned in the past, is an extraordinarily cathartic activity for me. It keeps my body busy enough that I can't brood, but not so busy I can't ruminate on things. There's a difference. It got me thinking today about meditation. About how I have never been capable of achieving that sublime quiet of the mind by just imagining it becoming empty. Emptying my brain is a lot like giving it an oil change. It's not a passive activity. I can't achieve it through purposeful breathing.

I found myself thinking a lot about the people I used to be. Yes, I said people. Plural. I found myself thinking about how I never thought I was going to live past seventeen years. When I passed seventeen and had an enormous epiphany at eighteen, in spite of progress I still didn't see myself growing old. I had a very hard time believing I was going to live to turn thirty. I wasn't even suicidal anymore, I just figured that people like me burn up early. I lived like a person who didn't believe she was going to be here for the long haul. I drank about fifteen cups of coffee a day, I chain smoked cigarrettes, there was almost non-stop insomnia, and a lot of noodle-roni.

When I look back I still feel surprised I survived myself. I am surprised that I came out the other end of hell with so much enthusiasm, hope, and love. What got me through? What helped me evolve in such a healthy way? You'd almost think there was no way I could have done it without meditation. I was thinking about that today. Not for the first time I looked back on the one steady thread holding me together from the time I was ten until today. Writing is the reason I'm alive. Writing has been my meditation since I first started doing it religiously as a kid. I have filled hundreds of notebooks, diaries, binders, typing papers, and journals. Literally hundreds. About ninety nine percent of what I've written would, if revealed to others, make me want to shrivel up like a dried shitake mushroom and compost myself immediately.

It doesn't matter. I was lucky I found it so young. I dread the existance of all those words. I would like to burn them. (Ironically, they did get burnt in our house fire, but my husband brought them home from the restoration clean-up people.) All the words are still there. That's where everything I emptied out of my brain went. Writing feels like a physical and literal cleaning out of the brain. When I'm done writing I feel cleaner. I feel relief. I go to my paper, my computer, or my typwriter compulively. Whenever I need to clear out my head. Whenever I feel my head getting in the way of living in the moment, I write. Keeping this blog, trying to write one post every day is like housekeeping for my body.

Cleaning my house is another meditation. I get to a place where I am so involved in the motion, in the music I'm playing, that my thoughts-though there near the surface-must receed enough to let me breathe. The grime in my shower was a reflection of the grime that's been collecting in my head during all these months of building our life, our business, and jumping off the cliff we jumped off of. As I scrubbed the black mildew collecting in the grout it felt like I was scouring all the negative thoughts I've let in, let slide, let fester. It brings me to a place that feels immediate. Contradictions co-exist here in the moment without friction. I am all at once elated like a child let loose at the park and also so calm I am almost not breathing at all. Perspective is crisp.

I'm interested to know what kind of meditations others turn to. Do you do yoga? Do you write, as I do? Do you garden? Do you cook? Do you sit in the lotus position and breath deeply? What helps you get back to living in the moment?