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Afternoon Meditation
My eyes had been closed for a few minutes when an old world rematerialized, like coral lifted from the bottom of a lake.
I had been meditating with a friend. We were sat on a black stone slab under a small banyan cove curated for some such purpose by people before us. It was a cloudy afternoon in Singapore.
I started by counting my breaths.
Breath in
Breathe out
Breathe in
Breathe out
Breathe in
Brea — the rambutan is a fruit with a tough red exterior sprouting tens of thin green spindles. The treacherous hide in no way resembles the still, translucent flesh inside. My consciousness is just such a fruit. Usually, my awareness stumbles on the rocky outer terrain of stimulus and thought. Even in meditation, I will often be thinking for minutes when I realize what I had set out to do was simply breathing — breathing in.
And breathing out.
Breathing in.
Breathing out.
Breathing in.
Breathing in I feel this might be one of the rarer times — when my rambutan consciousness actually penetrates the surface of thought, when it can rest in depth, unhurried. Breathing out, I am enveloped by the blackness under my closed eyelids. My remembrance of the cove around us peels away.
It is the sound of insects that returns to me first. I am fooled into thinking I’m somewhere I have been before. The same insects seem to appear everywhere where there is enough water and sunlight and trees and undergrowth. The birds follow. That is why most trees around the tropics sound the same.
Of course, the day itself is conspiring to deceive me. My eyes had closed on a cloudy afternoon, but now, it is sunny again. The Sun is hot throughout the year in these parts of the world. Still, if you are still and under the shade of large trees, the tickling breeze and the water in the soil steal the heat away from the edge of your skin. So, though it is never quite pleasant, the weather alternates between uncomfortable and refreshing. Or perhaps it is your mind that alternates — between encumbered and enlightened.
