To tether yourself to one place, to one singular reality, seems like a tall order to me. When I forget to tie myself to safety, there's screaming. It's there anyway, but muted and all foreign, like songs sprawling out of bodegas on summer nights. Like foreign holidays. Flimsy, and not belonging to self in meaningful ways.
When the bow remains undone, the screaming gets louder. Until it's the only thing I'm able to focus on.
When I'm feeling untethered, I look at the sky. It's pleasant, but fails to help as I'd wish it. Truth is, the longer I remain in this state of disorder, the more the sky starts seeming like a fantasy. I see it glitch. Twice yesterday, making me wish tomorrow cloudy. So I don't have to worry about the sky falling out of order, too.
Watching the blue is nice, but it's not enough to tether me. Massaging a wooden leg. We say. Who say? I'm no longer the person words belong to, and that, to me, is the only tethering there is.
I have, like all of us, things I do to foster mindfulness. Growth and living and slow delights.
Like watch the skies and sing, as opposed to listening. When you listen, you're thrown about in the wind, but when you sing, you teach yourself flying. I sing a lot, almost as much as a small child. I sing outdoors, where strangers look at me funny, and within, where I can grin as I pass myself in the hall, snagging my skirt on a false note.
But these are secondary levels.
At ground zero, all I can do to be mindful is write.
It's not, in itself, a mindful practice. If anything, it's polar opposite or perhaps polar bears. Writing frees me to gallop far from the father castle and across strange plains. Writing is getting as far away as you possibly can from the present moment.
When I stop writing, I always need to set aside a handful of time for my feet to reach soil again. Find the reality I'm playing hooky from this time.
And yet, it works. Because if I do that. Allow myself to temporarily elude my own present moment, I can enjoy them later, as they come. When I'm not writing, nothing works. Bowls shatter. Realities that are not my own start to scrape their way inside. The more I don't write, the less able I am to keep them out.
To lose yourself, you must first lose sight of the post you normally tether yourself to. For me, that post is the keyboard. Waterlogged, buried under heaps of words from outside my head. Need to go without to stay in the present moment.
Writing isn't mindfulness. It's layering the floor on which I can later sing and meditate and look at clouds. And be. It reminds me what a privilege it is to sit cross-legged for twenty minutes and breathe. When I'm not here, nasty things with too many legs dart across my eyelids. Clocks malfunction. Walls shake.
When I'm not tethered, there's no present moment to be mindful of. It's all garbled and terrifying.
So I write.
In truth, this was inspired by the #mindfulmonday initiative running this week in The MINIMALIST. Except I realized, finishing it, that though it is about mindfulness, it's not about minimalism. If anything, there's an abundance of frightful things rolling around the woodwork now. So it's here, not there..
