9/27/10 - practicing falling in love.
I read in a book by the Dalai Lama yesterday that His Holiness does a meditation practice 6 or 7 times a day on dying, so that when the time eventually comes, he will be able to accomplish that transition with appropriate calm and grace (I assume), and go through all the structures and colors of the various levels of being that pertain in his belief system. I've decided that it's now my duty, since I've been on a dating website for almost a month, to practice falling in love with a similar devotional zeal. After all, people are afraid of it in this society, or they're doing it in the wrong say & making themselves ill, or some people do it but would they share how it happens? And I apparently haven't done it properly yet, or it might have lasted. So far what I have is this (practiced once this morning at home and twice on the bus on the commute home): Falling in love feels like the wing of a bird sweeps the top of your head, spinning it slightly, and then there are these clouds around the outside edge of your being that billow and drupe like clusters of grapes or lilac flowers or the leaves in the canopy of a great tree. The colors change like something you thought you knew in a fire, like a darkly tawny magazine photo of your body and someone else's, and you drop the page into a bonfire, so you still see the picture, but it starts to be engulfed in flames...that instant of fleshy picture and glowing fire simultaneously--that kind of tawny glow. And the colors and the clusters change and roll, like ocean waves crashing on the outside of your energy field, and then it is an implosion, and it washes over you and you are standing there no longer just your own person, but part of a set. That's what it feels like in meditation so far.

I want to keep practicing this, so I am ready at a moment's notice, because there are so many things in a day that I need to fall in love with. People on the streets downtown, and the newsstand guy reading his magazine article while I get my lunch, and the people at the office, and the clients who come in and their children, and a skittering dog on the sidewalk, and my son's face when he comes in from his game, and knowing the exact healing practice needed for my brother and his relationship, and knowing the exact exercise practice I need for my own health, and the ridiculous objects I've chosen to live with me in my house, and the compost I take out to the bin, and more and more.