Catch & Release
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My Head and My Heart are Here
I’m driving upstate to a meditation retreat with Will Duncan and my car is doing a weird lurching thing, I stop in the Bronx and ask a mechanic what I should do - He says “is the car driving?“ yes, I say. “Then keep going” he says. I guess he means til it breaks down completely?
The van sputters into Chatham and another garage. My stomach hurts. I’ve decided this is a bad idea. But I’ve been looking forward to this for months - my first retreat ever as a student! The first night is hard-am I getting sick? On the first morning, I say to my friend “i need to go home”….. but I have no car yet, so I try and settle in and settle down. I eat Kefir, I drink fennel tea, I call my friend Camilla -“I’m going to come home first thing tomorrow morning’ I tell her. “i think you should tough it out’ says Camilla, ‘You can do this”. What was this desperate need I had to get home?
A little way into day two, I began asking this question : What familiar place am I trying to reach? And in meditation I began to see ‘home’ as this more abstract thing - the cozy nest of familiar thoughts and fears - the strange allure of agitation and distraction. During a practice session fixing my gaze out into the trees, Will coaches us; “there’s no place to get to’ When you catch yourself trying to do something, Just release it. Just relax.” Will said something else hat has changed the way I meditate forever:
Locking into a narrative is a way of avoiding intimacy.
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"So let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build altars.
Let us listen to the sound of breath in our bodies.
Let us listen to the sound of our own voices, of our own names of our own fears.
Let’s claw ourselves out from the graves we’ve dug.
Let’s lick the earth from our fingers.
Let us look up and out and around.
The world is big and wide and wild and wonderful and wicked.
And our live are murky, magnificent, malleable, and full of meaning.
Oremus
Let us pray."
-Padraig o’Tuama
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