FOCUSING
With so many things in nature going
on right now, my mind tends toward diffusion. For example, my thoughts are
snared by the fluty song of the Orchard Oriole, and then come reflections on
how this bird has just arrived from tropical America, and then I remember all the
habitat destruction there and here, and then the question arises as to who will
eat the bugs who eat the plants around me now, if not the Orchard Oriole, and
what that will mean for these forests and fields... And there are dozens of
such birdsongs and other things snaring the mind all the time, hundreds of
meditations and questions associated with each, and thousands of potential
scenarios...
Something tells me it's not good to
let the mind think diffusedly all the time, or even most of the time, so regularly
I yank my mind out of that mode, and do focusing exercises.
For example, this morning with my
binoculars I walked around focusing my lenses on individual things, just
looking at them for a long time, as if I were standing before a piece of art on
a museum wall, and I kept looking until I was satisfied that it had seen
something important there.
I focused on a certain freshly
emerged green oak leaf with sunlight rampaging through it. I don't believe
there has ever been a design in all of Paris
more expressive and perfect than the curl of that leaf just as it was during
that particular moment of sunlit perfection. I focused on a feather with dew on
it. I can't recall any painted picture in any museum anywhere evoking such
pathos as that wrecked, wet feather. For long moments I beheld a yellow oxalis
blossom all surrounded by green grass, and I saw -- really saw, saw as well as
my mind could see at that time -- the grain in a weathered fence plank, and a
cluster of pebbles in the sand at the creek's edge.
*****
THE FOUR NOBLE TRUTHS
This week's cicada nostalgia also
reminded me of how I discovered some of the heretical thought patterns and
belief systems that now make me who I am. Many of those ideas were accidentally
smuggled to me in the form of discarded paperbacks of the world's classic
literature. These were brought to me by my mother when each day she returned
from working long hours in the book-selling drugstore of the next town. Usually
the paperbacks had their covers ripped off because when a book was damaged the
clerk could do with it what she wanted and no one was charged...
Somewhere among those classics I
was introduced to the Four Noble Truths discovered by the Buddha around 500 BC.
They are: