Meditation in the Yard of a Stranger

I pull my ankles up to sit cross-legged on a pale yellow cushion in the wrought iron chair with the sea-green tint over grey on the patio.   I know magic because I have been here before.  I have been deep in magic and go there now.  I sit in the warm spring sun and forget about my cup of coffee on the little round green table.   A bee circling below my feet crawls across the cement beneath the chair.  I know it’s there but don’t look.  I sit in the center of the warm cement slabs on the pale yellow cushion in the iron chair with the sea-green tint over grey surrounded by trees and large leafy plants in the yard scattered with white and yellow and pinkish red flowers against the fence.

Time goes away when I close my eyes and listen.  I listen to everything at once.  Not one at a time, all at once taking effort at first.  I listen to the outside, to the many varieties of bird calls, to the dog after a squirrel, to the wind, the traffic, the voices of passerby and neighbors, to a distant siren, to someone saying something inside the house, I listen to this chorus and allow myself to drop into it.  I listen until finally I almost completely stop hearing.  I no longer hear all the different bird calls because now I feel them instead.  Feel them all around me and inside myself, feel them in my being, feel the boundaries of my body melt.  Until one sound begins to stands out.  The sound of one bird’s call vibrating deep within in my system like a drum, this call sounds like a blue light.

I don’t think about my lost friend, don’t think about my lover, don’t think about the tears I cried for an entire year, and the years before, don’t think about writing, about work, about pressure.  I don’t think about them but they are all still here.  I just feel all of them and feel calm with them.  I could stay here much longer in this chair and listen with my whole body.  I let my mind travel somewhere else inside myself.  So far beyond my thoughts and feelings I can no longer move.  My body shuts off, then disappears.  Whatever’s left after, the rest of me absorbs the light and sound and the elements of wind, the pollen.  Whatever’s left feels so in love with this world, all of it.  Whatever’s left accepts everything as is.  Whatever’s left stays forever in this place and doesn’t resist.  The warm spring sun I forget I am sitting in, forget the enjoyment of, swells in the chair I no longer feel.  The warm spring sun that I become.  The warm spring sun.

The sun.