FUNK

 I woke this Monday morning in a horrible blue funk, dreaming of fire lines approaching a city with a mayor who could or would do nothing, and images of a patio covered with fresh dog shit that no one had picked up. Sound familiar? The profound depression in my mind was matched by a body in pain everywhere, mostly (age-related!) aches in every joint, and muscles that felt depleted of all physical strength. 

Not a good way to wake up!

Meditation was a challenge, with words darting everywhere in my head--words trying to describe what it was I was feeling as I sat. Well, "writing." It's my mind's way of dealing with what's troubling it. Namely...

... a country in chaos, with one political party mindlessly obstructing every effort of the other to reach out and help the millions of Americans who are out of work, hungry and, too many of them, sick and dying; with a leader coming in from the golf course to issue senseless and unhelpful executive orders in an attempt to project the impression of powerful action; a leader who so badly needs adulation that he calls in dozens of his hundreds-of-dollar annual fee golf club members to applaud him loudly at a "press conference..."

... a country riven by discord, mutual hatred and mistrust, one-third of them fed on a day-by-day, hour-by-hour diet of misinformation and outright lies, and driven by a hateful fear of the invented specter of "liberals" and "socialism..."

... and a personal sense of dislocation and disorientation: what am I even doing here, in this, my adopted country, that now feels so alien? Where do I belong...? 

I breathe in, I breathe out. That's one saving grace. The other is more mundane: it is that I have enough "English" left in me to get up from my chair and head off to the kitchen to brew up the solace of a morning cup of tea.

MIND

I found myself contemplating the mind in my morning meditation.  I have a metaphor I've used in the past, imagining the brain as the engine of a car traveling through the landscape...  and thought this morning that I could revise and refine that metaphor if I thought of the brain, instead, as the onboard computer, connecting to and controlling all the moving--and multiple non-moving--parts.  The engine, then, would be the heart; it was the heartbeat I was feeling as I contemplated all this, because I saw the heart as the driving force...

Mind, then, would be not only the whole machine, but the road ahead and the road behind.  It would be the changing landscape, and the cityscape behind.  But it would also reach to every horizon and beyond; up to the sky and beyond the sky, to the ends of the universe.  As I imagine it, mind has to be that big.

And then, surprising me as I thought about all this in retrospect, after meditation, my mother's voice returned to me from childhood: never mind, she would say.  Never mind.  She meant, of course, "don't let it worry you"; or, sometimes, "don't cry, the hurt will go away."  Never mind covered every adverse circumstance, every accident of boyhood, the scraped knee, the fall from a bicycle, the hurt feelings...  Never mind.  Using the word as in "I don't mind if I do."  Or "do you mind if I…"  Or "Mind your Ps and Qs."  Very polite, very English!

My mother's intention was a good one: to soothe, to wipe away the pain.  But of course it's always mind.  It's "all in the mind."  As I was saying, mind is everything I can imagine, and then much, much more.  It's infinite.  That big.