I’ve been getting the same message from different directions all week, especially today. The message is that you create meaning in your life with whatever ephemeral thing you are doing right now, be it ordinary or creative. In the few hours I’ve been awake, this message has creased my bean* 3 times.
On my morning hike, I was already thinking similarly. This is going to sound very prim, but I try to stay in the moment when I’m hiking. I don’t listen to podcasts or music and I try not to start puzzling anything out or making plans. If I find my mind in a rabbit hole, I recall it and tune back in to the woods, my breath, syncopating along the rocky path with two dogs on leash. There’s nothing noble or disciplined about my mindfulness practice in the woods. I just don’t want to miss anything. If I let my mind wander, autopilot takes control and the hike is over too quickly. Presence is a way of lingering. The point of walking into the woods isn’t to walk back out. I’m trying to dawdle.
One of my reveries today was about how my anxieties dissolve in the woods. General existential dread becomes a vapor when I move through this wild functioning ecosystem, where bright green mosses, mushrooms, slimes, and saplings colonize crumbling stumps and fallen logs. Bearing witness to interdependence, infinite connectedness on display in nature is like inhabiting the awareness of the wave that returns to the ocean. In the woods, you can’t see death without seeing life. Again, when exactly does an in-breath become and out-breath. Everything is perpetually unfolding and one thing is always rooted in something else. (Indeed, I get the irony of trying to be present in the woods and then tripping off into a mental fugue state about how awesome it is to be present in the woods.)
On my way back home, I listened to a podcast interview with a writer who pointed out that if you’re writing with the goal of making it to the top of the NYT best seller list — or engaging in any endeavor with a view toward the prize waiting for you in an imaginary future — it’s going to be a grasping, joyless process; it can never be enough.
And then, I picked up the internet and read this quote from Alan Watts: “If the universe is meaningless, so is the statement that it is so… The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”
It reminds me of how my great old friend, Phil, sends postcards to people without including a return address. I received postcards from him for a year before I realized they were from him, because he didn’t write anything on them but my address. They were installments of a cosmic adventure comic he’d drawn, printed on card stock. He doesn’t know if his postcards are being received and doesn’t expect a reply. Sometimes, he’s not sure if he has the correct address for old friends. Still, he carefully matches the card to the recipient, or prints up photos he’s taken or artwork he’s created on card stock roughly postcard size, and (now) pens a message about what’s going on at the moment. His postcard habit just makes me giddy. I mean, how so authentically Phil and how goddamn delightful! Maybe this is also ironic, but I have a file in my cabinet where I save those meant for me of the little creations he sends far and wide. I use a couple for book marks.
* In Krazy Kat, Ignatz mouse is always maliciously throwing bricks at Krazy’s head, while Krazy, who is in love with Ignatz, chooses to interpret these bricks to the head as tokens of love and esteem. In Krazy’s dimension of Coconino County, being brained by a brick is at times referred to as having one’s bean creased. I don’t know why that phrase popped into my head as I wrote, but I just went with it.
Ilse Thompson 