LETTERS FROM HOME: SEEKING ENLIGHTENMENT IN THE GARDEN OF EARTHLY DISTRACTIONS

March 5, 1998

Dear Julie,

My friend Leslie sent a clipping from the Los Angeles Times about a baby girl rescued from a mudslide. Imagine this family's terror. In the middle of the night they hear a noise like a jet makes and the sounds of cracking trees and buckling foundations. The next moment, their house splits apart and their 9-month-old baby is wrenched from her mother's arms and disappears in the blackness, only to be found later by a neighbor, a ball of mud miraculously alive.

Laguna Canyon is a bucolic refuge in the midst of the traffic jam that is Orange County. Developers are hungry to replace the creeks and do-your-own-thing-era houses with swimming pools and mansions or pop-up condos, but nature seems to be resisting. Fires devastated the hills a few years back and now the land is surrendering to engulfing rains.

Just when we think we've engineered a more perfect world, the world shreds the blueprints.

Leslie also sent a booklet about meditation. I'd told her I've been resistant to the experience without knowing why. The writer Anne Lamott says she doesn't meditate because her mind's a bad neighborhood she tries not to go into alone.

Spending time alone with an unoccupied mind can be scary. DC hates the idea of going 20 minutes without actually doing something, but that's no trouble for me. I watch the birds at our feeder or Hank and Lucy tussling over an unstuffed animal without a care for the passing time.

The external world is inherently interesting to the mind. It's the internal landscape that seems chaotic when I close my eyes and begin breathing deeply. Meditators call it "monkey mind," the chatter of worries, wild ideas, opinions, prejudices, complaints, fantasies, regrets and defenses that seem to spring from nowhere and go nowhere.

Meditation says, Allow them and realize they are not you. You are the one who in silence hears the chatter and knows your essence to be something purer.

I know these internal sounds are merely the sharp edges of personality whose rounding deepens the understanding of the soul. To be human is to have faults. Like gold we are refined by subjecting ourselves to the smelting of self-knowledge.

The we we think we are is like the Earth, half always in the dark, regions that when exposed to the light turn out not to be as unacceptable as we fear. The we we truly are is like the sun, flaming, brilliant, glowing with the spark of creation.

Perhaps it would not be so difficult to attain enlightenment if it were not so difficult to seek, and I don't mean finding the right guru or the holiest shrine or spending years in an Indian ashram or a monastery. The seeking place is within ourselves, where the flame is.

The garden of earthly distractions is lush, the urge to make more blueprints for salvation great. The ability simply to listen is easily forgotten. But in silence you discover the world only reflects your state of mind. It's not the other way around.

From time to time, Leslie goes to an Oregon meditation retreat called Cloud Mountain. I haven't seen this place but I have imagined it. It's dawn, and my Cloud Mountain is shrouded by mists that shimmer as the Earth rolls over and is awakened by the sun.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.