Apprentice to a Mountain: Chapter 2, Section 1
Slate
It was out of the dynamic of cosmic celebration that we were created in the first place. We are to become celebration and generosity, burst into self-awareness. What is the human? The human is a space, an opening, where the universe celebrates its existence.
― Brian Swimme, The Universe Is a Green Dragon
the hours feel like a childhood summer
open ended, blurry days, bored and entranced
wandering from one room to the next, inside to outside
a distant memory to this middle aged body
I hear myself ask, how do you want to die
and I respond with calm awareness
of the few precious moments
that came just before
everything and nothing is possible now
suspended in these quarantine days
six million people on an unemployment vacation
nowhere to be, every moment without an end
like the open days of a childhood summer
with death perched in the old apple tree
I am meditating a lot in these first weeks of pandemic life, since work has stopped for now. When I sit in meditation I feel like a mountain. Sometimes I meditate lying down, slouched on the couch, or walking in the woods. But when I sit on my zafu, I feel like a mountain.
Each orientation of the body is important when becoming a mountain. The open hips of my crossed legs, opening my pelvic bowl. My right hand cradled in my left, perched lightly in my lap. My spine straight, finding a certain point of alignment over my sits bones, as I rock on the pillow. My shoulders relaxed. My head nodded toward my chest, in reverie to my heart. And my eyes softly closed, with light dancing on the lids.
I am surprised, as I scan my body, how important each of these gestures is to create my mind state. If my head is looking straight forward, I feel disconnected from my physical form, not perceiving the gravity of being a body. If my shoulders are rounded forward, my heart is not leading. And sometimes my legs timber in tension, rather than opening.
In the moments where I can hold a relaxed and receptive form, I have the sensation of being cradled by gravity while simultaneously being lifted to the heavens through the crown of my head. Of radiating a central energy from deep in my lower abdomen. My head listening to my heart.
The mountain form metaphor for meditation has centuries behind it. A stupa, a human-made mountain-like rock structure in the Buddhist tradition, symbolically represents the enlightened meditative body of the Buddha. The shape of the stupa represents the Buddha, crowned and sitting in meditation posture on a lion throne. His crown is the top of the spire; his head is the square at the spire's base; his body is the vase shape; his legs are the four steps of the lower terrace; and the base is his throne.
We give so much attention to the peak of a mountain, the goal, the enlightenment. The mountaineer headed with deathly determination straight to the top. But in the meditation pose, in the stupa, and in my mountain paintings, I keep my attention on the lower center, the inside of the mountain and the mountain slopes, heaven and earth combined.
Taoism teaches that this low gravitational center is called the lower dantian, located around our belly button area, the storehouse of our vital energy, Jing. Our energy center is also referred to as ‘the elixir field’. Attention to the lower dantian centers awareness on universal energy. Reconnecting us to an inherent and open state of unity with the whole.
In world religions, the Axis Mundi is a symbol representing the center of the world where heaven connects with the earth. Mountains, trees, smoke pillars, totem poles, and spires are all examples of this form. A common shamanic concept, and a universally told story, is that of the healer traversing the Axis Mundi to bring back knowledge from the other world.
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