Today, I woke at 5:24 a.m. to meditate.

I’ve been meditating for 30 years—when I feel called to do so—and this morning I sat on my bed in the predawn—legs crossed, earplugs in—and made an event out of breathing.

The last few weeks of 2019 into 2020 have been wild. Sometimes I think events ignite the tinder within you—the personalized points of insecurity; the places of archetypal inner gnawing—until you find yourself balancing upon a blade amid the painful (yet predictable) eruptions. And of course stuff happens that call to those feelings, usually again and again as if Time is force feeding the bitter roots of a fallow bed, making us mindlessly flee. Racing thoughts and other ineffectuals attempting to salve wounds best left to courage and an eternity of breath.

And typically in the random selection of thoughts/visions (often maddeningly offered) that meet me in meditation is the sense of the blade—the events, the eruptions, the causes of my purposeful endeavor at finding calm. But not this morning.

This morning in my minds eye was a bird which right in front of my face, hovered in the delight of its capabilities before jetting away, wings dramatically tilting as if it was showing off. And I giggled.

The sun was due to come up in Salt Lake City at 7:52 a.m. so at 7:30, I made tea and parked myself in the chair overlooking our backyard bird feeder. The first bird appeared at 8:06—its friends arriving soon after—and as my cat offered her little cackle (a mix of outrage and derangement), I realized that the funny thing about events making eruptions is that the same themes will occur again and again, year upon year—shaking our combustibles—but then one day, one year—somehow—we’ll have changed. As if the tinder had actually been tiptoeing around flipping lights on an, patiently waiting for the sun to rise within ourselves. And Time—compelling us to giggle—rose each day solely with the goal to come meet its better self.

And so as the birds stayed aloft—daring gravity to protest— reverberations of self replayed in muscles that just a short time before had giggled from joy, and in the simplicity of quiet, I watched animals not bound to earth flirt with the air as if in deference to a shift in perception. (1/5/20)