Two Tuesdays
A Short Journal on Meditating in the Rain
Last Tuesday
The sound of raindrops on a tin roof might be the nearest one can get to perfect enlightenment. The patter of nature against the clatter of manmade resistance.
I realized it today while meditating under my back veranda during a demure early afternoon shower, the kind we get in these parts that you can set your tropical clocks by. I was only taking twenty minutes on my cushion to reset mine: some quiet internal machine-works that seem infernally sprung lately.
In short, my life is a mess. I don’t have a car anymore because my transmission gave up the ghost. I can’t keep up with simple tasks and responsibilities as they create new veins and rabbit holes of tasks and responsibilities. I’m broke and getting broker. Business is slow in these parts during the summertime, the season of heat, of suffocating humidity and desperate isolation, the season of retreat, of solitude, of ennui. The season of hurricanes and the wind blowing through the spaces between your dreams and your memories.
The logistical tangle of a proper functioning life has been a ubiquitous snare lately, tightening around each of my precarious steps. Even the act of composing that last sentence was a puzzle and a trap. It contains fallacy and delusion, and yet stands in for an unavoidable truth — this whole blessed thing seems to be falling apart.
This Tuesday
Raining again. Pattering on the tin roof of my little back porch. The impact of each drop hitting metal sounds a little like a typewriter. Every raindrop is a lone syllable in a longer story. This downpour is composing a masterpiece at a thousand words per minute.
Wet brick, garden glistening,
a waft of petrichor.
The leaves of a palm branch
bobbing to an invisible rhythm
as the arbitrary caper of falling drops
dive in for the embrace.
There is a tattered veneer of fallen leaves and debris, a testimonial from the recent hurricane that passed through a little north of here. Prickly twigs and the seed pods from crepe myrtle trees strewn across the yard in hard, tight little berry clusters that sting and bite my bare feet. I should probably take a rake to it.
Not today though. It’s raining again, though the air is calm and still. Blue sky summer storms, that’s how they come and go in these parts.
I lay a folded wool blanket down as a makeshift zabuton. I lay it on the damp detritus-strewn brick, a soft oasis, protection from the raw element of unbalanced ground. A fortress without walls. It has a native style, shades of brown and indigenous geometry. I believe I picked it up some years ago in Taos.
I situate myself under the sloping tin roof of the veranda so as not to get wet, but I am not very far from the edge, from open exposure to the downpour. Anyway, the faint drizzle and mist of the falling rain splashing against my skin is pleasant. Flesh awakening, reminding me that I am here. On top of the blanket, I place my zafu, a kidney-shaped meditation cushion. It helps to elevate my pelvis, makes it possible for me to sit in half-lotus. It also allows me to keep my spine from collapsing.
Because everything does. Everything will fall down. It is the expectation of the collapse that keeps me moving in a straight direction. But it will all come down eventually. Some days, it is the meaningless decoration of unimportant things, like money, and automobiles, and petty emotions, and self-pity. Other times, it is simply the rain.
It’s the rain composing another chapter, tapping out poetic missives on the tin roof, memos for a change of plans, a prose history of chaos, a chronicle of my folly and expectation, a rhyming couplet imploring me to listen, to be present. A short note reminding me to breathe.
— New Orleans, Sept. 2024
