Inversions everywhere

It's no surprise that we bring our baggage with us to paradise. It does seem dissonant to wake up with a terrible feeling to a beautiful day on Maui, though. Luckily we can bring our tools too, and the work goes on. In the evening we had a swim and the pool showed me a trick. The experience of swimming in the daylight is always to go down into blue shadows and to come up into the light. In the night, with the pool lit up from below, you go down into brightness and come up into black. It is a flip that plays with expectations and point of view. My impulse is to go to the light, but I can't stay down under the water--I have to come up and when I breathe I have to welcome the wide, velvety darkness.

In the morning during meditation I had a flip moment in my mind. I was sitting there with the chatter in the foreground as usual, wanting to get past it into calm. Like being in a tub of bubbles with all of them forming and bursting in cacophony. In an instant it became more of an effort to follow the chatter and its crazy, circuslike noise than it was to just be in peace. Of course! I didn't have to manage the bubble melee, I had passed through into a personal bubble, sealed in by a thin curving sheet of soap skin. Once on the other side, stillness, quiet, breathing, so easy, so smooth. Then it left me again. Pop. Flip.