Lonely Hearts Chapel

I’m the Tree of Life

I sit down to meditate for the first time, and I’m overcome with anxiety and guilt. Everything around me feels so urgent, and I feel lazy by consequence. I close my eyes to become a statue, and the darkness whispers everything else I think I should be doing: answering messages, checking on my mom, reading, writing, exercising, making lists I might never use; my hand twitches to reach for my phone, but my body remains surprisingly resolute. Maybe I really am exercising something: something I can’t see, like a belief in my ability to do this or anything. I don’t even know if I’m breathing or sitting correctly. Someone once told me “there’s no wrong way to meditate,” but there must be a wrong way to do everything. All I see is blackness and I’ve never felt more aware of my lonely smallness. The last time I ventured this deeply into myself, something inside me crushed my Self like the dark Deep Sea crushes unprepared divers. But maybe, the last time, I wasn’t really diving into myself at all; maybe I was diving into the blackness of desperation and doubt that’d been funneled into me by money and businesses and churches and advertisements and electronics and countries and other things men have created but cannot completely control. I recognize this thought, and I exhale its fear from my mind; but I still doubt that I’m breathing properly, and I’m reminded of how breathless I get whenever I walk to work or class or home and I feel a pressure to match my breathing to everyone I pass. I open my eyes and I stand, as if from a warm and relaxing pool, but I don’t feel enlightened; I’m still the heavens and earth disconnected.

Meditation has become daily routine, but some sessions prove more immediately rewarding than others; the habit has replaced less healthy ones, though, and my anxiety has reduced overall because of it. I sit down to journey into myself again, and a wave of pale baby-blue eventually overcomes the darkness inside my eyes. It reminds me of the transgender* Bunny from Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions, who meditated until she saw the scars from her father’s abuse and neglect float away as blue silken scarves; my own father’s actions become a scarf, and I let it go. My mind begins to dance with other thoughts that I recognize then release from my sanctuary: my mother will die someday, and so will I and everyone else I love; the blue scarves float away and smile in the light, but where is this light coming from? This light, that lets me see these things, that lets me see myself growing beyond emptiness. I stare blindly into the source, and I see the silhouette of a tree; I recognize it as the Tree of Life that grew from the shell of the World Turtle in Native American creationism, its roots and branches connecting Heaven and Earth. I feel connected to the land upon which I sit: the land that once provided life for the First Americans before the White Devils killed and exploited because they held no peace within and so failed of It without. I understand the World Turtle’s journey now, and I begin to feel the Tree sprouting from my own back; it’s heavy with the lightness of being. I open my eyes to find I’m smiling.

I meditate no longer out of need or habit; I sit and breathe this way because I’m grateful: grateful to be alive and to be connected, connected to the living and the lived, the lived and the will-live. My smiles have become less accidental, or maybe they’ve become more accidental; regardless, they’ve become more meaningful. I’m reminded of a school of meditation in India wherein smiling is intrinsic to The Experience, and I wonder why so many people in the world refuse to meditate but don’t hesitate to kill. But I can only know why I meditate and why I smile, because I’ve discovered a Transcendental Triad in my Self: I’m the heavens and the earth, I’m the world-bearing wanderer, and I’m the Tree of Life connected to and connecting It All.

This is a narrative stream-of-consciousness poem I wrote after my first few months of practicing meditation. (Full disclosure: Many of my friends suggested I try meditation for almost a year before I started meditating. An episode of Good Morning America inspired me to finally try it; I watched it because the cast of Pretty Little Liars was going to be interviewed, and the episode included a segment with meditation advocate Deepak Chopra. You might think I should be ashamed to admit that, but I’m not–because I know inspiration is everywhere.)

*In Breakfast of Champions, Bunny is portrayed as an effeminate male; I interpret the character as transgender because, as a boy, he told his father he wanted to be a woman, and his father responded by banishing him to military school and never allowing the subject to be discussed again.

Love always,

your Mister