The Pond: Preface

Some day I will sit under a tree and become enlightened.

I will cross my legs in the full lotus position and touch my thumbs to my pointer fingers and refuse to move until I have achieved total serenity and understanding, complete equanimity. I will stay under the tree like a little statue of Buddha until I sense the subtle vibrations of my body's innumerable chemical reactions, until the pain and the pleasure are that of another, until the ego has dissolved into pure waves of light. Under the tree, until my monkey mind stops leaping and chattering and throwing feces, until the inner laws of my own nature illuminate and resonate the outer laws of the tree, until immanence is transcendence and the self is other.

In the mean time, I sit in the living room of my Chicago apartment, equidistant from a McDonalds and a 7-11, staring at a lap top and catching fragments of my room mate's conversation with her boyfriend. "At present I am a sojourner in civilized life once more."

A sojourner, a pilgrim even, he returned to the workaday world poor and twenty pounds underweight, with only his diaries, only his words. Did the transcendentalist transcend? Who knows. But he wrote. And that was enough.

I, sojourner no less, return from a shorter stay, a ten-day meditation retreat held on Fish Hatchery Road in Pecatonica, Illinois. My own words rebound with fragments of Pahli, the language of Buddha: dhamma, panna, adhitanna, sankara, anitcha, bhavatu sabbu mangalum...law of nature, pureness of mind, strong determination, reaction, change, may all beings be happy.

How to tell it all? I went to be master of my own mind, and yet again it dodges me, slippery little bastard, imp of the perverse. I will try another meditation: blogging the ineffable experience, the hic et nunc of my own head and sensations, interwoven with the ancient mantras and the time I spent twenty minutes staring at a grasshopper digging a hole on the walking path, the instant coffee with soy milk in the morning, the interminable afternoons, frantic little power walks, jumping jacks in the loft, hand-washed laundry on the line, tickling sensations on my upper lip, power outage at 4.30am, lampposts along the edge of the cornfield that penetrated the mist and lit the steps of shawled and silent women walking to the meditation hall, elf maidens abandoning Middle Earth.

And most of all, the pond, a sunny and scum-covered pool by the parking lot. It became a week-long extended metaphor for my own troubled unconscious.

Plumb the depths of the pond. Know thyself, the foundation of every faith, which is to say the only truth.

Well, in that case, to be honest I'd rather to be up in the branches of the tree than on the ground when I become enlightened.