It takes a membrane

From The Lives of a Cell

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dead as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of the bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the great drifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a very long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart on their crustal plates, held afloat by the fire beneath. It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling the sun.

It takes a membrane to make sense out of disorder in biology. You have to be able to catch energy and hold it, storing precisely the needed amount and releasing it in measured shares. A cell does this, and so do the organelles inside. Each assemblage is poised in the flow of solar energy, tapping off energy from the metabolic surrogates of the sun. To stay alive, you have to be able to hold out against equilibrium, maintain imbalance, bank against entropy, and you can only transact this business with membranes in our kind of world.

--Lewis Thomas

My daughter said"I've been feeling kind of weird lately. Not in my tummy," she said, looking at me, anticipating my concern, "but in my mind. I have all these questions in my head . . . what would it be like to not exist, or to not have a friend? I mean, how can my body even hear, or taste?" Wowza. I remember having those thoughts too. If I had to guess I was a little older though, maybe third grade instead of first. "Who IS Martha?" Yes indeedy. The big questions resonate from a young age I think. What to make of them? There you are, in your body, going through each day sleeping, eating, walking and talking, and then one day for the first time your mind expands into a silent endlessness for a moment or two.

What is the world, really? How is it possible to understand what it is from a different place than inside my mind?

One thing I am loving about meditation is feeling eager to return to those questions--like a roomful of friends, all gently jostling elbows and waiting, getting to know each other. I have renewed belief that the questions, the possibility of answers, and the thinking process itself matters.

But I haven't been making time this past week. Feeling a bit tired and like the dark morning comes too soon. Part of me wants to mark the days I meditate on the calendar with a yellow circle but I am resisting, I guess because I want the emphasis to be on whenever and however I make it happen it will make itself felt, and I don't need the left brain recordkeeper to put its stamp of approval on the process.

Anyway if I were marking the calendar the last week and a half would be blank until this morning. I keep thinking that I can get to a place where I've built up some reserve, banked against entropy, where the daily facts of not being able to work through to the end of a thought without being interrupted or where children bickering will not pierce the softness, acceptance, and deep calm I've cultivated for the past month. HA!

I'd like for this process to allow me to put permanent distance between myself and the defensive, truculent aspect of myself that has seemed more and more to replace the flexible, empathetic person I thought I was. But it's all in response to life being out of my control. I can't stop life and the reality is that it will be the daily practice of making time for yoga and meditation that will repair the membrane that filters my experience.

I think it is allowing me to laugh and be happy with small things more. I have noticed on at least three occasions in the last month that I have laughed in a true, deep, involuntary way, that I thought something was so perfectly turned on its head as to be funny, that I wasn't making the motion of a laugh with a shadow of judgment across it. Now that is a feeling I want to remember. Slightly hysterical, but with a connectedness, a freshness, a center that held. It didn't cost me anything. I felt bouyed up by it.

Last week we learned about loving-kindness meditation in class. One of the class members described practicing this towards George W. during his presidency, and how difficult it was. The man sitting next to her, whom we were all so glad to see because he has been dealing with extreme pain and does not always make it to class, said "As long as you didn't vote for him!" He said it with such a warm, smiling tone that we all understood--and it was so TRUE. It was so funny. Many class members had interesting and thoughtful things to say about their good experiences or challenges with loving-kindness meditation. I listened. I tried to understand what I understood about it, if anything.

I had started with directing the mantra towards my daughter, who is so easy to love so much of the time. And then I had fallen forward into a big pool of blackness, sleepy yet riding a wave of breathing energy. In the end what came to mind is I felt like Pooh. My classmates were discussing some deep and lively points, and I felt that I was sitting by their river of thoughts, not really getting it, dabbling my toes in the water and humming, trying out some tentative rhymes . . . this thought made me laugh too, in a helpless, uninhibited way, and cover my face with a need to show humility to myself. Going in circles, looking bravely for a woozle! I really don't understand. I hope that's okay and I hope to someday. One of the yoga greats, Sri K. Patabhi Jois, who just died in May, would say "Practice and all is coming." Alrighty then.