I am gratefully a good sleeper, but now and then comes a night when things are out of whack. This time, I blame it on choosing Bonnie and Clyde, the 1967 Faye Dunaway version, for the Sunday night movie.
For me, for many, this was the best era of movies, between 1967 and 1976. I hadn’t seen this one in a long time, and just gazing at Dunaway alone is worth the price of admission. I forgot how gruesome the end of the movie was though, and the energy of the mayhem woke me up from dreams. I am pretty diligent about what goes into my brain, violence-wise, for just this reason.
It is a little embarrassing to say that a classic movie like this could affect me so much, like I should be tougher or something. There is a passage in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World that always stuck with me, about the inuring of people to war through entertainment. The more used to it we get in fiction, the more acceptable it becomes in our daily lives. Reading that book sparked this awareness in me, that it was important to be critical of what is delivered to my brain cells. Then, as my meditation practice developed, I was able to witness clearly the affect negative stuff had on my system.
In recent years, studying energy medicine and the way unseen waves and forces of our reality shapes our experience of it, I become more and more aware of the subtle energies that influence us.
This is a long way of saying that the fact that I woke up at 2AM, wide awake from a nightmare, was my own dumb fault. I laid in the dark for about 40 minutes, trying a trick I had read. You should make a list of random things in your mind, and this will help you to fall asleep. Grapes. Rabbits. Whitewall tires. Clouds. Figs. Banjo. Light bulb. Aspirin. Tea.
It didn’t work. So Henry and I got up and came into the living room and snuggled up on the couch. I turned on the Christmas lights, since I’ve decided, like most people, that there is no reason to end any celebration as you can find it these days, so the holiday lights stay up.
My mind was still unsettled from the nightmare energy. It occurred to me to find something filled with light to watch, so I found a meditation from Thich Nhat Hanh. Whenever I encounter him, I spend some time marveling at his amazing accomplishments in life. It is remarkable and inspiring to consider doing so much good in the world. I thought, I’m awake! Thich Nhat Hanh would probably use this time to write a book! Or organize the salvation of hundreds of people. As I gazed at photos of him and words he had written, I spent some time telling myself all of the ways I had failed my potential in this life.
To get rid of this pointless train of thought, I turned to a meditation in which he was talking about mindfulness of breath. It was a reminder to use the breath to connect us to our moments, one by one. I spent some time listening and meditating in this way, informally, lying in the fairy lit living room, in breath, out breath. Thoughts would rise, fantasies about finding a monastery in which to live, giving up this existence in order to be of service, to write, to devote myself to the divine.
Finally, I let all that go, and became neutral to being Clem again. My mind was like clear light, and Thich Nhat Hanh’s words dropped through the light, in breath, out breath, as the sound of the sleeping pug and the hum of the refrigerator and the tinnitus in my ears rose and fell into and out of consciousness.
We think that meditation has to be so formal. There is something important about sitting with intention, but at no time are we separate from this marvelous tool of our breath, that brings us right here. We can do this all day long, this awareness of breath.
When we focus this way, we discover that somehow, in most of our moments, all is well. I loved a metaphor that one of my teachers gave, of finding a town crier walking the streets of our interior, calling out, All is Well, All is Well. When we arrive in our moments, we realize there is a part that is well, no matter what else is going on.
Even through the trauma and sorrow, even through the pain and worry, there is this part of ourselves calling out. We can listen deeply by following our breath in to this place. Even the fact that our breath, in this moment, is working, signals that all is indeed well. Our blood is flowing. Our heart is beating. Molecules rearranging. Our mind is allowing the thoughts to rise and beneath all this conception of bad and good is that hum of knowing. All is well.
How would it be to expand this out, to the world? It has become so normal to just say, everything is crap. Inequity, people in misery, illness and war and death and countless problems that seem to signal the end of something. It doesn’t feel right to even consider that there could be another way of viewing things. To see things as ‘okay’ makes us feel as if we are ignoring problems, glossing over suffering, putting our heads in the sand.
I have spoken to many people during the pandemic who have made the best of the situation, and who feel guilty about the fact they are doing ‘okay.’ Our society has become a place in which to say that all is well makes us feel ignorant or guilty. I think it is important for us to recognize what is working and what is peaceful. There must be an energy that is in the center, a moderating well-being that is here between the poles of terrible and ignorant. By cultivating this feeling of ‘okay-ness,’ it expands. Feeling good is a generative energy. Our perception can change our experience, and our actions.
We might realize this same field of the night watchman exists in our greater reality. Is there a kind of hum beneath the surface, a kind of steady rhythm of breath in, breath out, that the whole of the planet experiences at all times, no matter what the dire situation being experienced? Beneath all the chaos, is all well?
As I write that, I imagine that we can most clearly find peace in nature. Maybe the plants and trees and flowers are a reminder of this still and peaceful thriving, this neutrality. The sky is movement of wind and water, and the ground, cradle and vitality. When we merge our awareness with sky and earth we find stillness, this soft peal of the lamplighter’s bell. In the city, the small weed grows between the cracks of our awareness, and we zoom in through the chaos and see the flower. In the earth of the battlefield, teeming growth thrives in the soil below.
As I breathe in and out there is no need for striving or yearning. The image of the monastery rises again, and of Thict Naht Han’s tireless efforts. May I be the lamplighter who calls his hourly notice. We are well.
We can let go of all the ways we believe that we are separate from the underlying grace at the top and bottom of each breath. We can choose to see this as our fundamental experience, and all else between as challenges or lessons.
Last weekend, I moderated the Guitar Cloud Symposium, two days of intense guitar instruction. I get a lot out of these workshops, even though playing the guitar to this day eludes me. In one of the marvelous lessons, I heard an instructor speak of the importance of landing on the downbeat when coming out of a fast run of notes. This is my experience as a drummer as well. When playing a complicated drum fill, the execution of the pattern is second in importance to the note I land on coming out of it. If I don’t hit that ending note in time, then the run or the fill fails. We get taken out the song, rather than carried away. An early drum mentor of mine told me, “it doesn’t matter what happens between the beginning and end of a drum roll. As long as you land on that ‘One’ coming out of the fill, everything else will seem intentional.”
As I lie breathing, I realize that between the top and the bottom of each breath, my mind tries to pull me away, tries to carry me into a tangle of thought and emotion. Between my awareness of the top of the in breath, and my arrival to the end of the out breath, there is a whole world of struggle. As long as I stay with the awareness of these two points of focus, what happens between, all the thoughts and judgments, matters not.
This way of being changes my perception of my moments. Rather than getting caught up in all the information between, I land here. And here. And here. I land and when I do, all is well. I am breathing and present for what is here. Maybe the next breath out will bring me to a place where struggle lies. When that happens, we’ll see how I handle it. Maybe I will see it as a challenge, as something rising and passing through experience. Maybe from this place of neutral awareness, all solutions will be seen and discovered.
I wonder how much the struggles of our time offer the possibility of a new way of perception. All things are not only possible, but solutions are already present. It takes one breath to choose to see differently. There is no effort, no force needed, no working through or struggling with or leaving behind necessary. It is just a turn of the corner, a decision, an option. At all times, we have the ability to choose what and how we see.
As I was writing those words, these words from William Blake were delivered to me from the blog Brain Pickings. I saw the little notification rise on my screen, and my delight in the synchronicity was like remembering how, if we choose to see it, we are given everything we truly need. It’s all right there, in the next breath.
I feel that a man may be happy in this world. And I know that this world is a world of imagination and vision. I see every thing I paint in this world, but everybody does not see alike. To the eyes of a miser a guinea is far more beautiful than the Sun, and a bag worn with the use of money has more beautiful proportions than a vine filled with grapes. The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity, and by these I shall not regulate my proportions; and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself. As a man is, so he sees.
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