Locomotoring

It’s all perfectly clear now. Or maybe this clarity will only last the rest of the day. Fact is, my glass is full again. Fact is, I am just back from exploring the inner passage of south east Alaska. I continue to be filled with a sense of awe, I am feeling humbled, and privileged to be alive on this incredibly beautiful planet. Fact is, natural beauty heals me, fills my glass with clear cool sweet tasting water. Fact is, as time goes on, my glass will start to empty again, a little by little each day. Is there a way I can top up the glass, maybe enough to slow down the pace at which it empties? The clarity today makes me think that maybe I can.

Do you know Gordon, the audio ecologist who went searching for one square inch of silence in the Hoh forest? For the last several months, I have been meeting with him and a few other like minded individuals. All of us in our own ways, are searching for a one square inch of silence closer to where we live, in vertical and horizontal human sprawls. At the last meeting, which had happened before the Alaska trip, one of our team members, Tim, suggested that we take a moment of silence and visualize our quiet place. The meeting had happened at the end of a long day, I was tired from the general chaos of life, and I was hangry. But I knew that a minute wasn’t too much of an ask, and so, I decided to give it my best, and conjured up my quiet place. I remember noticing the transformation then. After that minute, I had felt a lot less tired, a little healed.

Today, with my glass full, it is clear that the one minute had filled my glass a little. What if I were to conjure up my quiet place more often? Perhaps a little healing here and little healing there will be just enough to keep my glass of water going until I can go back out there to a place like Alaska?

So, where does one find quiet amidst human cacophony? You can imagine that living in Bay Area, I don’t have access to a naturally quiet place. Even my weekly hikes in nearby forests are surrounded by human generated noise, friends catching up, companion dogs barking, sneezing, walking, children being curious, flights overhead and a whole lot more. I also suffer from tinnitus, some days it is very loud. My doctor suggests that I will habituate but I don’t. So I have been searching for an internal quiet for quite some time. My yoga practice has helped immensely in the search – my teachers often ask me to visualize the inner quiet while I go through the moving meditation.

Now I do have such a place that I visit when I need quiet. It is imaginary and it took me a while to find it. When I had first started the search many years ago, I had searched in my happy places. One was a ride on top of an elephant walking through a magical forest. In that happy place, my elephant is playful and my mind, instead of becoming quiet, starts wandering like a child. Then I started imagining myself sitting in a redwood forest. In this happy place, the tall redwoods come alive for me, they develop flexible branches and they start to dance. I then thought of dark caves, where one can enjoy true dark and hear the stalactites sing, but they also made me imagine proto-humans long dead. I then tried thinking of my favorite music, Armenian Duduk, but it makes me rather pensive. After a long series of trial and error, my quiet place has turned out to be an imaginary place, where I stand facing the Pacific Ocean, not unlike the lost coast of California. I am in tree pose, my hands reach up as my standing leg takes root. Sometimes I let my body sway to the breeze. I hear the waves loud and clear. There is at least one beautiful gnarly cypress close to me, more at a distance. Sometimes a raptor is resting on the tree closeby or flying by. There are various shades of blues and grey on the horizon. It is not bright, like I am looking through a neutral density filter. Sometimes I add to the imagery, like a floating fog.

In my quiet place, I am always alone, but the place is not lonely.