Day Eleven: Entering the Forest

Sat by myself in the tree this afternoon for twenty minutes.

Moved vaguely through the sense meditation and then began sitting without putting any conscious effort into any type of awareness. I found that my thoughts kept taking over my awareness, marching on and on. I hit a point where I felt like my whole gift of a sit was going to be for naught because I couldn't even name one sensory or spiritual experience I'd had. Despite my brief sense meditation, it seemed as if I'd spent almost the whole sit lost in thought.

So I went through the sense meditation again, just as quickly as before, but far more deliberately, forcing myself to really explore the reaches of each sense: what I could hear in front of me, to my right/left/above/below, etc. When I'd finished, I worked at combining them, and as I did so, I experienced the same sort of kaleidescopic vision that I remember having last summer (wrote about it here in my blog). In this type of vision, all of the pine needles and branches, when viewed with my peripheral vision, seem to fuse and create hundreds of sheets of movement, akin to the way looking through water can play with our visual perception of things.

I found my body become very, very still without my having to work at it, and when neighbors appeared in thier yard, it was the most natural thing in the world for me to tun my head a millimeter at a time. The idea of jerking my head around to see what was happening seemed foreign. It felt that I had become part of the forest, just another tree resting against my white pine, such stillness did I find within myself.