My friend said her friend didn’t meditate. What she did instead was take to her chaise lounge in the middle of her back yard and watch the stars come out. She would stay until the sky was black and filled with lights.
You could do worse—all the apparatus of bowing and chanting and counting breaths, of talks about not knowing and ordinary life is the way, all of it set aside and instead there is the night, with stars impossibly far.
Blankets to your nose on the cold winter nights, warm nights rich with sounds in the trees. And maybe sometimes it’s raining and you’re wet—or you’re so wet you go inside and that’s it for that night.
A sky so much bigger than you, the lights so far they come from before the pharaohs, before the oceans and land, and you are very small and young.
Some people go into the mountains, where the trees stretch down the valleys and nothing stops the eye in all those miles. I have looked down and out at the ocean and seen it go on out of sight.
Mountains are said to heal, and oceans too. Anything can heal, I think, that lets us put down our burden—we are not the maker and sender of the world. We are a small part. It is us, all of us. But we are not so big.
Sometimes when it is all too much I think of the civilizations that have risen and passed. There are still Mayans—farmers and families, though not in their great cities. Our nation will pass too, sooner or much later.
It can get depressing: this too shall pass. But remembering my smallness helps. I think it was Atlas who carried the world on his back. Too big a burden for a man, even a god-man. Better to let oneself be small.
—Sarah Webb
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