Sometimes It’s Like This
Quite a lot of the time when I meditate, it just feels “normal” — I’m sitting and breathing and then daydreaming then I notice that I’m daydreaming and then I go back to just sitting and breathing…and then it all happens again, over and over and over again. But sometimes it’s not like that. Sometimes it’s very, very different.
Exactly how it is…is hard to describe.
So for today’s post, I offer this poem by Jane Hirshfield (a Buddhist practitioner). I don’t know for sure, but it seems clear to me that the poem is about what it feels like, sometimes, when you meditate.
Many-Roofed Building in Moonlight
I found myself
suddenly voluminous,
three-dimensioned,
a many-roofed building in moonlight.
Thought traversed
me as simply as moths might.
Feelings traversed me as fish.
I heard myself thinking,
It isn’t the piano, it isn’t the ears.
Then heard, too soon, the ordinary furnace,
the usual footsteps above me.
Washed my face again with hot water,
as I did when I was a child.