Finding the Center

I realized yesterday, when I couldn’t possibly find time to sit, that it’s not a matter of not having the time, it’s a matter of choosing to not have the time. Ten minutes. That’s it. I can find 10 minutes to dig through my yarn stash to start a new pair of fingerless gloves, or to look up recipes for the women’s dinner Saturday, or to re-read my winemaking instructions, or to rearrange my patio lights. But sitting still? Nah-uh.

So today, I shifted my attitude. Before I went to the cushion, I had a little talk with myself. Self, I said, it’s such a gift to give yourself these few minutes apart, to be fully and completely in your breath. And it worked. By the time I sat, I was already incredibly grateful, and when the timer beeped, I shut it off and stayed a while longer.

Part of my struggle is prairie pragmatism. Prairie folk have stuff to do, darnit. We don’t idle. So my inner pep talk includes a reminder that meditation is active, not passive; it’s inner work, not laziness; it’s tending to the foundation, so it can hold up the house.

I offer a poem today about getting back to the center: “Mandala.” The painting is also called “Mandala,” done by Yankton, SD artist David Kahle as part of a collaborative poet/visual artist show last year (check out David’s other work at http://davidjkahle.com). I wrote the poem long before Shambhala, before I knew that I knew I needed to go…

MANDALA

                                   

Mandala, yantra,

map of the hidden world,

chart of the heart’s constellation,

we are born at your center

and with our first breath scrabble out

to the edges where we navigate emptiness,

pillage and expose to the sweltering sun

the nothing out here, our skin flaking like mica.

We have nowhere to go but in.

Sometimes muscle memory or despair

pulls and we creep back to you, grope

along vine-covered walls on hands and knees,

blood and bone wired together

with coaxial cable and speaker cords,

our pulse digital, our eyes a matrix

of dimming pixels. Again, we  get it wrong,

drag with us the din of signals sent or received,

echolocation of fear, manufactured fog

against our own reflection. Somnambular,

paralytic, hollowed-out, we ride shockwaves,

drift away from ourselves away

from the heart's deep metronome away

from the center's pinpoint stillness away

from Love's dark labyrinth away

from the only divine number, One.

Mandala, tantric lens through which

we could finally glimpse ourselves,

we’ve never had anywhere to go but in.

Light the way to your radiant center,

light the way to your angular private rooms

washed in cobalt, saffron, magenta,

light the way to your bed of roses

where, if God is anywhere, It is here.

                        ©2009 Marcella Remund