Kayak Meditation

Not ten minutes ago, I was on the water, sometimes paddling, sometimes drifting in the grey of a rainy morning; sometimes with eyes open and sometimes with eyes closed. With eyes closed, it feels like you're floating. Because you are, I suppose. But floating feels like transcending.

I tried to shut off the noise in my head, but that's hard. I tried to shut off the music, but that's kind of impossible. Still, with one's eyes closed, drifting forward and being held up by the bosom of a wide pond and cooled by a rainy breeze, the sense of peace works its way in to lubricate the mechanics of thought. It's an oil change for a brain like mine. Yours, too?

Mare's Pond, sans me, as it was before
and will be, after I go. 

Last night, I walked a long road lined with scrub pines and looked out upon by the occasional quiet house. The silence was dotted with the click of my dog's paws on asphalt which turned into gravel and then faded into a dirt path. But it was dusk, and the dirt path ran into a wildlife conservation of some seventy acres. Neither my dog nor I had the guts to go into it with night falling and facing the chance of meeting up with disgruntled coyotes (coyotes that are active at night and who, according to local Cape Cod science, are getting to be wolf-sized).

We walked back in the falling darkness. Most houses we saw were quiet. Some buzzed happily with families celebrating each other near fire pits or on horseshoe pitches. Some waved. Some looked vaguely suspicious of this visitor and his big, white dog.


Coming back to the house in which we are staying, I heard the voices of my family (louder than any other in the area) and I laughed a little to myself.

This idyllic place with its profound silences...would it remain profound if I lived here? -- or are occasional stretches of transcendence better, lest we transcend so much, we need to learn to transcend transcendence with visits to reality?