#45 Vermont

I DON'T GIVE TWO SITS.   Well, it was 'Three Sit Sunday' at the Vermont Insight Meditation Center 

in Brattleboro, so I sat for all three, from 9-12.   I was warmly welcomed as usual, to zoom in with nine other meditators.  

It was a no-nonsense thing, with a very brief 'focus on your breath or other object' and then sit for forty-five minutes followed by a walking break.  

I loved the little quotes in between the sittings.   I think Jack Kornfield may be to blame, he has a forest of little notes in front of him to quote from, and now everyone does it.   The first was from Rabbi Simcha Bunim: Keep two pieces of paper in your pocket at all times. On one: “I am a speck of dust,” and on the other : “The world was created for me.”  No commentary followed, but I but I put both of them in my pocket.  If I can keep touching the first, then I can touch the second. 

Two quotes from Wittgenstein: I might say: if the place I want to get could only be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now.  Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me.  and

Not how the world is the mystical, but that it is.

What happened during my meditations today?  Oh not much.  I was with my breathing for a while, touched gently by freedom, which always knows me better than I know it,  somewhere in the third hour.  Where do I have to get,?  I wondered, and 'where have I come from?'

My father was the recreation director of Brattleboro many years ago.  He made an ice rink on the common with a hose. My mother grew up in the Fleming Funeral Home.  Her father drank himself to death there.  When my parents retired, my father grew softer.  He volunteered at the drop-in center.  "You know," he said, "sometimes people run in to problems through no fault of their own."   He never would have said that in his forties. 

Brattleboro seemed a fine place to wander to today, and to bloom for a bit, with this breath I have never owned.