Rain, Relief
Disruptions and Deeper Attention
On the first day it rains in months, relief. Cold drops of rain fall, conspiring to revive a drought-laden city, hydrating the ground and soil. The day is quiet, gray, wet, and against the flat backdrop of diffused daylight stand branches, tall, reaching, and the stoic metal of buildings.
I find myself welcoming this momentary disruption and departure from sunlight. Rain is respite, reviving. Rain falls down to nourish the earth, reaching towards plants growing and their root systems. Puddles become obstacles pooled in the streets and momentary discomfort rises, as shock of cold water hitting bare, unprepared ankles. Soil, revived by water, turns to mud, sliding around. The usual haunts of outdoor leisure and lingering around quiet down. On street corners, cars crash into puddles, sending rainwater cascading into pathways of pedestrians. Rain can be restful, and disruption.
I cut the park, deep in thought, and hear two sounds equally: a sparrow, perching somewhere on a damp tree, quiet and nearby, and a siren, wailing loudly off in the near distance. Each sound cuts my attention in two, and then widens my attention; I hear puddles crashing, cars driving by, neighbors shouting, the disturbance a dialogue between the songs of nature and city. Listening carefully both to birdsong and the siren, I hear how each are points for noticing. Each brings me back to the moment. In every disruption of attention there is a chance to return and revive our thinking.
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“How can I practice,” a student asks, “when I’m so distracted by the city, noise, and my own thinking?” and, snapping my fingers together, I respond how the disrupting moment is often the answer.
A disruption arouses our senses. It is a ping of things living, a reminder of the world, and a song rising, expressing, and fading away, a cue from the environment. Awareness is cultivated in the moments of tuning in, of noticing when we’re pulled off, and guiding our attention back. By choosing where to focus, awareness deepens, existing in the space between the sound, and siren, and sensation. The brief song of bird call as each rise and fade away.
Deepening a state of presence, we become more familiar with experiencing everything as it exists around us — a reminder that meditation is a way to nourish our senses and experiences, a tool to be with the moment and stay with our lives, and not an escape. When we sit and breathe, or walk through our days, we are deepening our presence. We are learning to meet each moment, greeting balm or disturbance, bright day or gray, and we are building capacity. Whether silence is present or noise is present, close or far, the purpose of practice is to notice without judgement, return to sensations and breath, and exist more fully in the present tense.
Meditate on the streets, in cities, on the subway, and you’ll be met with infinite reminders of life being lived in a variances of textures and tones at varying levels of distance and sensing. Bird song, bright day joy, rain falling, or the sounds of sirens, each disruption is an opportunity to build awareness in the moments when you bring yourself back. When we learn to be with and breathe into the moment, and stay with it, we are allowing the facets of our experience to give us breadth (a widening attention) and depth (our capacities to feel, sense, and hold an experience). A disruption can be a disturbance or rupture, a moment to revive or repair, or time to spark to presence as a path back to the moment. Sights, sounds, smells, colors, textures, disrupt us from chaos and stillness equally.
Awareness is the witness. Awareness is the stepping back to notice, the way of relating to the moment, the being state where we step back to watch the way the mind works, and return ourselves to our attention. Awareness brings us out of the past and the future, and into the gift of now. Deepening our attention, and cultivating awareness, we create a depth to conscious relating that wakes us up to the texture of the lived experience. Water, cloud, blue, gray, sky, we gather our attentiveness brings us into the feeling of the rain on the sidewalk, the smell of the atmosphere, the weather as it’s shifting, and equally, our inner worlds and outer experiences.
To Practice:
Slow down.
Settle in.
Return to your breathing.
Then open to a page, and write:
What’s returning you to the moment? What’s reviving you this week?
From a Past Season:
Deepen Your Practice:
