Meditation: Head Above the Clouds

One day when I was in elementary school, I was in the car with my dad on our way to a softball game: my dad was my coach. He was (is) a great dad and was my softball coach. He told me to put my hand out the window on this particularly foggy early evening in spring. "That," he said, "is a cloud." At the time, I erroneously thought it ruined the magic of clouds, or space. I'm a little smarter now, and see the true magic in knowledge — the more we know, the more questions arise, the more we can see, the more wondrous the world appears. We begin to also see all we don't know, all there is still to learn, the knowledge of our ignorance creating wonder rather than resentment.

So for this meditation, think about — with love — what you have taken a lot time to accept the knowledge of, and what universes have been opened up to you as the result.

Imagine yourself walking through a fog. It's a chilly spring day, and darker than expected. You decide to head into the woods. The smells are intense, and you wonder what is rotting, what is growing. As you continue on, the trail kicks up. It isn't too steep to maintain traction, but it's steep enough that your body warms and the chill now feels warm against your face as you unzip your jacket. Everything is a bit darker than expected and you can't see far in front of you. Every step is a small surprise, you slowly uncover more of your surroundings while your past is enveloped in fog. For every learning there is an unlearning, but you aren't stressed: you trust the journey, that you made it this far, that the voyage home won't be unmanageable or full of surprises even though you can't see it in the moment.

Soon, the trail is alight. The fog doesn't lift, you have climbed above it. The fog stretches below, but that doesn't matter, because your vantage point spans above it. What do you see? What do you smell, now that you're out of the damp forest? The sun is warm on your face. Slowly the chill starts to set back in but it feels good to cool off. You zip your jacket and head back down the trail. Back into the fog. From this angle, heading down, you see more than you did on the way up, different perspectives showing a new universe unfolding.

As you make your way back to the street, the fog dissipates. By the time you are home, the world is clear. The sun is setting. You can see a few stars start to appear.