a keener love of simplicity
Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around. Traveling lightly, we feel airborne. We move into a keener love of simplicity.
There is a story by Mark Twain about someone who dies and goes to “heaven” and gets a pair of wings and a harp. At first, they used the wings as a way of moving around the new place, and plucked on the strings of the harp trying to get some divine tunes out of it.
They soon realize, though, that in this place you don’t need wings to go anywhere and simply by desiring to hear divine tunes, celestial musicians (their house band, I suppose) show up and play.
After dropping the wings and the harp, they found a profound fulfillment in simply being.
We all just want to be happy and feel at home in our own lives, but, as the song goes, we are looking in all the wrong places.
We burden ourselves with unnecessary wings or harps thinking that happiness is all about having certain things or acting in a special way. Many of the voices we listen to lead us on a long walk on the hedonic treadmill Buddhists call samsara.
But one day we have this marvelous insight: we already have what we need.
This meditation is a radical act of self-discovery. We uncover the treasure of our very own being. We lose interest in listening to the voices shouting at us about our deficiencies.
One of my teachers Sharon Salzberg says:
We learn not to get caught in trying to reach after things we never really needed to begin with.
Along these lines, the poet Rumi asks:
How long will we fill our pockets
Rumi, translated by Andrew Harvey
Like children with dirt and stones?
Let the world go. Holding it
We never know ourselves, never are air-born.
Meditation helps us put down the baggage we carry around so we can be airborne and travel lightly. We move into a keener love of simplicity — of lifestyle, speech, and even how to do the dishes and arrange our sitting space.
We get less caught up in what others say about us, or imagine they say.
The grip on our likes and dislikes softens.
We eventually get how much nicer it is to relax into our natural, free and easy being-ness that is already right here, right now, than it is to struggle with having things be other than they are how they are.
But if we haven’t tasted this free-and-easy being-ness, it can be a hard sell to the psyche.
You’ll know the sweet taste of being-ness by accidentally stumbling upon it in your practice.
You can’t make this happen on purpose.
You just need to develop a daily meditation habit and put the time in. As the late Indian author and speaker Jiddu Krishnamurti remarked:
Enlightenment is an accident. Meditation makes you accident prone.
Then, each moment is fine. Each moment is enough.
Each moment, no matter how mundane or annoying, is profound and meaningful.
We practice, as the poet Wendell Berry tells us in this his poem The Wild Geese:
… not for new earth or heaven, but to be quiet in heart, and in eye, clear. What we need is here.
Be well, dear reader.
