It is common in today’s counsel about meditation that one should not focus on any of the ideas or feelings that surface during the session but rather to allow them all to simply pass through the mind. And when the meditator clings to one thought or emotion, that lapse is sometimes called “monkey mind,” a mind that jumps from one image to another, foiling the whole purpose of the meditation.
In the exuberance of middle summer, however, a meditator might take a different course. Certainly the world in any month or location is a vast source for inner peace. But instead of abandoning that source, allowing it to float away down the fluid promise of enlightenment, a person could pay attention and even count and hoard the richness that defines the surrounding time and place.
In such a practice, a meditator might actually search out sensation after sensation, common sensations like pink and white and violet Rose Of Sharon and phlox, and like prickly milkweed pods and sleek thistledown blowing all across the pastures, and the long green pods of catalpa beans swaying in the summer storms.
This is a meditation in which the monkey is not only foiled but fed and fed with color and sight and sound and taste, overwhelming it with the exuberance of July, and then exhausting it with ordinary things, and so you wash and wash your emptiness, inviting the most sacred middle summer to enter your heart, cleansing and renewing, protecting with its footsteps.
This is Bill Felker with Poor Will’s Almanack. I’ll be back again next week with notes for the fourth week of middle summer. In the meantime, let your monkey go wild. Feed it with the world around you.
