I’m participating in Sharon Salzberg’s 28-Day Real Happiness Meditation Challenge again this year, and my plan for this blog series is to write a poem or reflection on each day’s practice. You can find all the responses on the landing page.
Meditating on Migration I sit meditating, eyes a little open, spacious gaze, panoramic gaze, taking it in and taking nothing in, unfocused, not managing the moment but noticing you without wanting to through the window, wondering now why you’re here, where you belong, how your gaze looks to you, what you gaze upon. Can you see me seeing you? I wonder where you fly. A nest or roost among tight branches, held in a tree’s hollow when you can, hidden in the prairie or the jungle’s moist leaves? I wonder while not watching you, while gazing panoramically, how you slot yourself through sky, air under and above, that felicitous vibe, the trace memory of wings before you, passenger pigeons, dodos, pteradactyls haunting your breeze, calling your name, holding you in their vanished and eternal dreams. How does it feel above the oceans, wetlands, highways, cities, all so lost and distant and small now, the feeling of being nightheld, star-led, moon-mad, aware without being aware of constellations marking space, the pull of the poles, heavy weather insistent like clouds traipsing your skymind, shadowing your protean trajectory. How does it feel, crossing paths with all the others flapping and soaring across the roaming planet, all of you dropping down and rising up when you need to, when you have a mind to, when what you’re waiting to hear vibrates every one of your muscled feathers as you cast headlong into the quickening mist. Half of my mind, most of my body, feels you catching currents, never knowing, always watching, ever wary, the map in your mind unfolding moment by moment as you adjust, pinion, swerve, flying blind, flying half-asleep, brain both here and there, and how do you know when you’ve found it, the moment’s deathless rest, the landing a thousand miles deep, water, earth, rooftop, anything but air, anything but endless spacious air? © MMW 26 Feb 2023
