Poor sleeping, a tight chest constraining breath, high blood pressure—fear of death.  Yet today I enjoyed a meditation that lifted these burdens greatly.  If only I knew why. Yesterday’s sitting had no such effect and felt frustrated, fruitless.  In fact I can say little about today’s experience, except that it produced a sense of lightness, a lack of boundaries, glimpses of places soaked in light.  My breathing unlocked and deepened.  Fear of death eased too, at times by a great deal.  That faint smile returned to my lips—that smile that might look like smirk or smugness to a passer-by, that smile that I fear is nothing more than a performance of what I have read about Buddha’s smile, yet that rests on my lips without asking and gives comfort.

One or two readings, impressions of them, came and went, and perhaps they had something to do with today’s release from tension.  I recalled the story of a Zen master sitting in meditation as knights and armies arrived to ransack his monastery.  As they burst into the meditation hall he simply turned his head calmly so that his neck would be fully open to the sword.  He was perfectly ready, in his enlightenment, for that moment to bring the end of his life.  The soldiers, dumbstruck, left the monastery.  Second, a line from Ursula LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea that I re-read last night after more than forty years: “For a word to be spoken … there must be silence.  Before, and after.”  I have wondered in the last few days what was taking me back to this brilliant novel, and perhaps it was this line that was awaiting me, waiting for the moment when I could hear it truly and understand it for the first time.

These things came and went once or twice in my meditation, that’s all.  They may or may not have given me today’s generous moments of ease. Things are not that predictable.

19 December, 2023.