"Spiritual"

Just for fun, and because I am short on blogging inspiration otherwise, here is another one of my journals for class. The question was what spiritual practices have been important to you and why? And here is what I said.

Have been important? Like ever? I loved communion once. For a long time. I loved it for its tradition, for the way it drew all 20 centuries of us Christians together in one bite of bread and one giant gulp of grape juice, the body and the blood, the remembrance. I still like communion, for different reasons. I like it because it is like we are all family. Maybe that is not so different.

But I don’t really go to church anymore. I don’t really spiritually practice anymore. I don’t sing songs of old glory. I don’t pray. I talk to myself. You know what I want? I want to be one of those witches, or feminists, who makes herself a special altar with candles and draped cloths and pictures of dead mothers and grandmothers and goddesses from Greece and black madonnas and pieces of dirt and earth and flowers. I want to sit and pray at my altar and light a candle for my mother and feel connected to all the women who have ever lived and to our big mother Earth, our mother teeming with life. Hell, I could even sit a plastic Jesus on my altar, I love Jesus, he could be one of my heroes. A pregnant mother Mary in a green gown. Relics from the beautiful moments in my own life, like my pine cones and my seashell. I want them to teach me to see the beauty and the power and the meaning in each and every tiny little thing in this world.

This is what I want, but this is not something I have practiced. Where would I put it? I will do it one day. You know that part in The Secret Life of Bees when Lily opens the jars, but the bees don’t fly out, because they don’t realize the jar is open? And then she says to herself, she says, “Lily Owens, your jar is open.” Well, my friend, Beth, just gave me a jar, because I had made reference to this line before and how it moved me and how I wanted to believe it myself, and so maybe, that jar can be the first piece of my altar.

But oh, do you know what I do practice? I can’t believe I forgot this, I forgot it because it’s not something I do at church or with Christians, and so I hardly even think of it as religious: meditation. It is the only spiritual anything that I still practice. The Buddhists have taught me. I like to meditate on nothing, or on my breath, or on feeling wide strokes of compassion for all beings that have ever lived and for the trees and the grass and those poor wasps I killed last week and that girl in class that I hate and the Christians. I like to do it because it teaches me how to live in the present and to feel for others, and those are, to me, the only things worth doing. It also, I think, teaches me the true nature of things, although what is true? But it teaches me that life is totally neutral as it happens, and that we make it what it is by the meanings we attach to it. And so pain is painful because we say it is bad and having lots of money and looking impressive is good because we say it is good. But neither of these things have to be, nothing has to be, we can make everything whatever we want, we can make anything beautiful, we can acknowledge the ways our supposed goods hurt other people and we can work to change that, and we can also find ways to learn from and appreciate those sides of life that we usually try to avoid, humiliation and pain and blame and loss and loss of status. Because all of life is a teacher. And since anything can be made to be nourishing and beautiful, you can trust the universe, it is a safe place to be, and if you fall into it, it will lift you up and hug you close with love love love. And when you look down deep in yourself, past your pain and your irritation and your stress and your crying, there is a you that is constant, that keeps on going, just the same, that does not break down when the rest of you does. This is why I meditate, because it seems to affirm and make clearer all of these things.

I suppose another way of saying this, and another reason meditation is literally the only spiritual thing that I still do, is that meditation makes me free, it is the only spiritual anything advocated by any spiritual anybody that frees me. Most of religion for so long has restricted me, constricted me. Meditation widens my world. I want wider and wider worlds with wider and wider possibilities. And also, deeper, fuller moments. And meditation lets me see the deeper, the hidden things, the obvious things that I never acknowledge. That is why I meditate.