linnéa

Attention is difficult to keep; it skips like a stone skimming water. Few of us have the gravity and stillness needed to halt our dizzy spin over the surface of things. Speed, you see, is an idol of our age. It is one of the chief deities in our self-made pantheon of false gods; we are dazzled by it, convinced by its hoodwink results that efficiency and progress share definitions. So, for the cause of speed and the reward of efficiency we make lavish sacrifices that would excite the envy of even Baal, who’s alter was perpetually wet with the blood-red treasure of every civilization over which he cast his dreadful shadow. Perhaps we moderns are essentially the same as those greedy, supplicants, whose aim was to manipulate blessing on their fields and flocks by their bloody bribery. Perhaps we, as a culture, also sacrifice a valuable treasure to the god of efficiency; all too hastily we trade the slowly blooming wealth of meditation, of a reasonable pace and considered life, in order to reap the cash crop of progress. Meditation, then, is a kind of disciplined rebellion against one of the most enthralling gods of our age. Meditation is apostasy to our culture’s results-driven religion that reigns with almost unchallenged impudence. Yet it is powerful knowledge to realize that we are each capable of nurturing within ourselves an insurrection waged with the unlikely weapon of stillness.

Stillness is synonym to attention, a kind of attention that sustains like the whirr of a cricket’s chorus, throbbing an entire summer’s night, saturating both its open and small spaces with sound. It is a patient and unflagging song, each note, more then stereo. To truly study something requires similar multitudes of patience and faithfulness, as well as a submission to the object beheld, allowing someone or something to creep into all pockets of the mind. Stand before the thing you wish to know and humble yourself to it…. Even the most lowly thing: a word, the palm of one’s hand, a spider’s croquet web, a lemon secretly ripe or a claustrophobic chrysalis, torn by thrashing insect birth. Fixing on these meek things, dinking in their attributes, noting their minutia and larger meanings, these are energetic pursuits. Training one’s attention on something is exactly that: training. Arresting ourselves, encountering and quieting our over-caffienated, self-absorbed thoughts as they riquochette round our mind. Such thoughts are a chaotic throng that crowds into our consciousness mind, shouting, spilling things and starting fires. Collaring and submitting them, willing them into humbled attention to the object of meditation is no lax or natural enterprise. Small wonder that meditation occupies vast tracts of time, half of it is spent disciplining our own minds to not merely look, but really see.

Some practices and experiences sharpen this skill of seeing; acquainting us with the treasures found and won through the discipline of sustained attention. Drawing, study, writing, prayer, and the experience of love each contain at their center a particular shade of meditation. Drawing, for me, is an especially concrete and intense form of focused meditation. When I trace the outline of a friends face, for instance, I am completely submitted to its contour, to the balance and unique proportions of the person before me, it has become my purpose to notice, to watch with an almost greedy eye the hollow beneath the lower lip, how the mouth curls and tucks or how the cheek sweeps or a nose lifts its bridge of bone between glittering eyes half-hooded in their twin cradles. My own eye slows and the face shows itself to me, no longer obscured by language, presumption, symbol or names -- those linguistic abstractions beneath which the unique arrangement of features now before me is normally categorized and no more noticed. Names often assume understanding and behind the bulk of those assumptions we no longer notice the surprising details all around us etched in the most familiar of places. The most skilled and enviable explorer is the one who discovers the familiar as though it were new and strange, over and over and over again. They may never get marooned or capsize on the high seas, yet they lead a life of open-eyed interest and fresh vigor, discovering new continents daily.

When I draw, unnoticed things begin to emerge through the discipline of patience. I see Jill, Gabriel, Colleen, or Josh differently, freshly… perhaps for the first time. My attention must be as slow, as particular as a pencil’s point, the simplicity and smallness of the tool determines the speed, which cannot exceed the attention of my own eye and mind. The practice of drawing sharpens the art of meditation. It is then that I learn to be quiet enough to let something outside of myself speak to me about its proportion, about its relationship to its surroundings, about its exquisite balance, scale, color, incisions of light and pools of shade. Absorbed, quieted, I bend myself close to the task and catch the whispered language of the world around me, the glossy extroversion of a lemon rind, the accidental grace of poured tar scrawled in sinewy calligraphy on city streets, and the theatrical sky that wears as many moods as there are kinds of weather. Slowing myself enough to actually notice requires surprising effort; yet, when I do, the mute begin to speak to me about themselves, and the world comes astonishingly alive.

Study is also slow and subduing. In order to learn a subject, it is first necessary to enslave yourself to it, to spend watchful hours in the humble service of observation and let its language and concerns—be it cardiology, the migration of moon moths, or the expansive spirit of philosophy- dwarf and alter your own understanding. Study is an exercise in assertive humility, the act of muting our own chatter and half-formed ideas in order to allow the influx of things greater then ourselves to accumulate and smother under their ponderous weight our own thin presumptions. Only from the authority of long humility can we assume to know much of anything at all.

Love on the other hand, is a reflexive form of meditation. It asks no permission takes no prisoners, and displays a brazen disregard for our own selfishness. In the first flush of love… the kind that involves bended knees, stiff tuxedos, and the adorable ring-bearer who, though his task is simple, still nearly wanders from the isle on some mysterious quest all his own … the obvious symptom of this kind of love in its opening stage is an aggressive, unrelenting meditation. There is an impulse to dwell on every aspect of our beloved to the point that everyday life is repeatedly invaded with pleasant distraction. Human and divine loves mirror each other in this, among many other ways. When divine love first floods us, the upheaval is cataclysmic. Mind and spirit are continually caught up in thrilling meditations: dwelling on the lavishness of Christ, his dogged perseverance, astonishing mercy, winsome grace and scandalizing love. It becomes difficult to concentrate, to walk straight, or to keep from grinning like a doped fool. Truly, love like this is helpless meditation, falling in the truest sense of the word. Later, inevitably, the discipline of sustained attention must be implemented once comfort and familiarity have domesticated the unbridled wildness of first love.

Yet it is under the sway of this demanding kind of distraction that we first practice meditation in a way, that, were it mindfully cultivated and sustained, becomes a kind of continual prayer. Whenever another first captivates us, we keep their image near the surface of thought, and, in moving through the world, we are consciously or unconsciously testing it for reminders and resonances of that cherished image. It is as if we tap and knock everything in experience and press our ear against it to find if behind its walls speaks the muffled voice of our beloved… echoes and whisperings leaking through the familiar that remind us of the extraordinary. It is as if we carry this image in our core with such care and attention that we ask the entire world if it too, has seen the beloved. Every object encountered is asked this question above all questions and soon all of creation is rebounding with responsive echoes and reminders of the one occupying our perpetual meditation. Both the ridicules and the sublime, the comic and gorgeous are infused with this image; cartoons and sunsets somehow both call to mind the beloved. Yet these are meager shreds and scraps that we daily collect when we are swept up in human love; how much more all of creation … even the most modest atom, hums with the reverberations of our Divine Beloved, who supports and fills all things. A heart that is filled with his song, finds that the entire world is vibrating with thunderous chords in the same key. His image and song is in our love-sick heart and we look to the world to find the sparkle of his eye on the diamond crested wave of Pacific hue, the timbre of his voice in the tympani’s rolling crescendo, his gentleness in a grandmother’s thoughtful gestures, His intelligence in the functional, intricate thicket of microscopic systems … all the world is stamped with Divine fingerprints. When love for Him crowds our meditations, when we ask the world if it too has seen him, the planets that he set spinning like tops, the galaxies that he set afloat on oceanic space, the bizarrely tailored creatures of the deepest sea and highest mountain all give a resounding ‘Yes!’