Mindfulness

 Can you believe June is already gone? They say times flies when you’re having fun, but I sure didn’t know that I was having that much fun this month. Nonetheless, it’s gone. When we’re not paying attention, living in the moment, time does fly.

You hear a lot about mindfulness these days. Basically it’s the process of focusing on the present moment and experiencing it fully. A monk said that if you’re washing dishes and looking ahead to your cup of tea, you are missing the experience of washing the dishes. So when you get the tea, you’re thinking about your next chore and not fully experience drinking the tea. Makes sense to me, because my mind is always three steps ahead of where I am.

I’ve known forever that I live life too fast, so that it passes me by without me experiencing the best of it. I need to slow down and savor the moment. You can accomplish that through meditation.

My brother asked me if I ever meditated, because he believes I can envision my ankle healing. Truth is I pray but I don’t meditate, and I see the two as similar. So today I’ve been working on envisioning my ankle healing and talking to the Lord about it—seems the best of both worlds do me.

Jacob is back from the ranch, full of tales of the copperhead they saw—his cousin jumped on his back—and a visit to a neighboring ranch where they have an owl that the foreman has trained to follow him. He found it as a baby in a puddle, nursed it to health. Jacob said the ranch kids were really kind to him, but they shot and gutted a rabbit for the owl to eat. And Jacob was turned off by that. I told him we’d send him to the ranch more often so that he could toughen up. But he was so tired today, and has a baseball game until ten tonight.

My Tomball kids are mostly “hanging out” this summer, and I hope to take Jacob down there for a week—he needs to “hang out” and be a kid.

Listen to the silence

This year, the theme of Advent services at my church is “Be still.” It means we must clear our minds and be fully prepared to accept the meaning of Christmas: hope, joy, peace and love. Somehow today that message, read a few days ago in our church newsletter, spoke to me particularly today.

I am one who loves people around me. Although I value my days at home alone at work, I really long to be in the world. That’s the reason I have lunch and dinner with friends so often. I feed on people. And as you may have gathered, even though I live alone, my house is often like Grand Central Station. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Today Jordan was here (Jacob was propped up in my bed with the iPad) and three good friends, people I truly treasure, came for happy hour. One had a special reason to celebrate—a new job—and the other two were working through grief over loss of a family member and frantically (well, she was, not he) trying to catch up with holiday chores and plans. They will all be together Christmas Eve while I am with my family.

But today, as is often the case, they were loud in conversation. I turned my hearing aids down a notch but still didn’t hear all of it—and if I wanted to talk to the girls, the guys were talking over me. Suddenly, they all left for dinner appointments and other plans, and there I still sat in my living room. Savoring the silence. Sophie came to be petted, and we sat together for a long time.

Mindfulness is a catch phrase these days, and yet tonight I realized that staying home alone—as I will much of this weekend—is not enough. It takes mindful stillness to prepare us for the gift of Advent, the gift of God’s love for us. In the next few days I plan to practice mindful stillness, preparing myself, appreciating God’s glory to us.

I pray for each of you to experience moments of silence, stillness that draw you beyond yourself.

Mindfulness on an ordinary day--or not

Today was an ordinary day, the kind when nothing big happens except a trip to Central Market. The kind of day I enjoy, but also the kind that makes me think I have time to be self-aware, to meditate, to, as some would say it, get in touch with myself. There are lots of huge questions lurking in my mind, from what do I really want out of life to how will I plot that next novel but I, like most of us, get so involved in the daily-ness of life that I push those questions to the back of my mind.

My brother recently told me that he read that mindfulness, that state of living in the present moment, observing your thoughts and actions as though from a distance without judging them good or bad, inhibits creativity. Oops! There goes that. I need my creativity, the right side of my brain. I’d have thought just the opposite—that mindfulness would enhance creativity.

A certain sense of distance is also one of the signs of anxiety—or at least it is to me. If I'm anxious I can feel as though I’m watching myself drive to the store, walk through the vegetable section, choose my dinner from the fish counter, joke with the guy at the checkout register.

So who are we to believe? Is it better to be in the present moment or experiencing it as an outsider? I guess to my mind it’s better to be actively engaged in the present moment—as a writer, I can store actions, events, feelings away for use later on.

On another but perhaps related note, I’m reading a wonderful book titled God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine by Victoria Sweet. Dr. Sweet worked for years at Laguna Honda, the San Francisco hospital for indigent, incurable patients—the last almshouse in the nation. To help her understand her patients, she studied the works of Hildegard, the 16^th Century nun who ministered to the poor. Hildegard’s medicine was based on observation and the four humors—if an ill person was too dry, he or she needed moisture; too wet, dryness was needed. That’s a simplification of what was really a complicated set of medical beliefs. But wrapped up in that—and in Sweet’s medical philosophy—is the concept of holistic medicine: treat the soul as well as the body. Much of the Laguna Honda philosophy and practice speaks clearly against modern medicine which divides the patient into physical parts. Sweet saw few cures but some were remarkable; more, she saw—and treated—the spirit of her patients. She saw them as people, not simply as patients.

I’m trying in my mind to link the Laguna Honda philosophy to the concept of mindfulness, and I guess what I keep coming back to is the concept of distance. Why should we distance ourselves from our lives—be it sickness, health, joy, sadness. I think we need to live in the moment, experiencing it as fully as we can. And that in itself is an art.

Rambling thoughts on a Saturday night when I’ve had an exceptionally good dinner and a nice glass of wine….