Calming Our internal frenzie
The other day I stepped outside my office onto my little deck covered in squeaky boot trodden snow. My head was full of thought-flies; the buzzing of news feeds from my phone about agencies, institutions closing - people scared, outraged and overwhelmed. The world in tumult and I, feeling both compelled to do something and powerless, in the same breath.
I walked flustered in my head as my body moved automatically through the cold woods. I tried to look up, look out from my over-wrought mind. ‘Notice something Jared’ I said, but nothing came in. I stepped in my old snow tracks and schemed about my day, about the greater troubles of the world - about how to find success, face failure, fix myself, be calm…on and on and on. I felt a flush of shame, self loathing - then parried it with positivism. My brain swirled as my boots punched mindlessly through the snow.
The sky was meh. The trees were meh. I was meh. And my mind was trying to solve it all. A madness of crows in my brain all squawking, offering advice. I made it to my folding camp chair sitting just above the surface of snow at the meadow's edge. I sat down in the little snow hole surrounding my chair, tucked my feet in the little hollow my boots had punched out in the days past. A spray of pines huddled around my shoulders - the meadow opened in front of me. Pulling my old sleeping bag around me, I gazed outward watching my breath hit the crisp air.
I’d hoped this sitting out here in a serene, silent snowy meadow would relieve my mind, but it only seemed to encourage it. The crows got louder, my inability to notice anything got worse. I began my meditations - my tried and true practices - but the world and the madness of my mind would not relent.
So I sat and suffered….I knew enough to stay put.
A friend in college once told me she put her boyfriend in a really hot bath, laid him on the couch covered in warm blankets and made him drink hot tea when his fever was already severely high. She said she was nervous it might make him worse but stayed steady and in just a little while, his fever broke. That is, sweat began to pour out of him and his temperature dropped rapidly. Sitting at my spot in the meadow the other day was this layering on blankets and blankets. My mind-fever soared. Rampant swirling thoughts - thoughts mixed with cynicism, new-age spiritual jargon, positive words…everything. They pounded my brain.
Then, suddenly, a feral sadness rose in my chest, as if it had been waiting for me to slow down, as if it had needed my resolve to stay. My mind broke apart and I wept. My senses reached into that meadow. The forest, the land came online. The cold air filled my lungs. A squirrel-chit sounded to the east. I felt belonging, then joy. The texture of bark on a lodgepole pine made itself known. Stray bars of sunlight became present. I fell into a prayerfulness. Tearful - honest.
When I went to walk home I felt the world opening. The trees were a kindly company and my being was held firmly by the ground. Something that wasn’t possible just minutes before was now available, awake, alive in me.
I didn’t solve a single problem by going out there that day, save one; I cleaned up my own madness - I made myself more available to those closest to me, to the land around me and so to the world. That was in my power, and that was relieving to me. For what good are we to an ailing world if we add our frenzies into the mix? — Jared