One minute of stork during Muezzin:
And one minute of Beldi (undomesticated) dogs playing in the Garden of Koutoubia. At the end, the seem surprised by their friend's arrival. Thant they all leave together, leaving the frame like professionnal actors:
Two very bad reasons not to act.
And yet: the two main causes of our inaction.
To the point where, now, when I feel I’m about to not do something, big or small, I ask myself: « am I giving up out of fear? ». If I realize that fear is the only (or main reason), I think twice about it. Or, at least, I try to analyze that fear, make it more apparent so it doesn’t control me in the shadow.
And if it isn’t fear, I ask myself: « Am I giving up out of comfort? ». Is the warmth of my cozy nest preventing me from going on an adventure? The nest in question isn’t necessarily materialistic: it can be a comfort of thought, an attachment to some habits, or an excessive satisfaction with what I already have. Here, same treatment: I try to shake myself out of it, or, at least, I try to become aware of it. Once you’ve seen the trap, it’s easier to avoid it.
Fear repels us from the new. Comfort ties us to the status quo.
Let me be clear: there are a thousand perfectly good reasons not to act. Sometimes, not doing something is the real courage. But if those reasons boil down to fear or comfort, it might be worth looking into it a bit further.
I could tell you the history of how I started meditating and why it changed my life but we’ll do that another time. It’s a mistake I’ve often made: when I create a new website or a new notebook, I want to start over from the beginning and explain the genesis of everything. But soon enough, I’m overwhelmed by the task and I give up.
So let’s talk about the present.
A notable progress I’ve noticed in my practice is being able to recognize more and more inner contents as thoughts.
You probably know that meditation is all about taking a step back to realize that a particular anxiety, fear or anger is actually “just a thought” which will pass like a cloud in the sky. This shift in perspective is often enough to get rid of it. When an existential anguish is seen for what it is – a brain fart – it looses its power.
But we don’t always succeed.
If some apprehensions are soon recognised for what they are – intellectual constructions – some others are more insidious and harder to let go. As if in the game of “thought spotting”, these particular thoughts didn’t count. “This is not a thought, it’s reality.”
These thoughts which won’t let themselves be classified as thoughts are often the most intimate. The ones we’re most accustomed to, the ones we’ve been dragging around in our head for years, sometimes since childhood. They’re part of us, part of our mental construction and often play a huge role in the way we react to everyday life. They’re like a wallpaper glued to reality for so long that it becomes impossible to imagin the world without it.
Progress in meditation, for me, is the process by which we manage to put these contents into question as well.
Day after day, the frontier of consciousness expands and what we thought to be the fabric of reality, the essence of things, fatality (…) turns out to be just another item of our inner world. Just another brain fart.
Until the day when, faced with an anguish so familiar we thought it was inescapable, we find ourselves in the the position to utter these magic words:
“That, too, is just a thought.”
(PS: I wanted to illustrate this by a picture of a cloud passing in the sky but, of course, no clouds today. Just the blue sky. Not that I’m complaining. Oh well: I guess as my metaphore goes, it works too.)
The video is really small but I don’t know how to make it bigger yet. (Update: I kinda found out.) And it’s so quiet, it looks like a still picture (it’s not).
The garden is beautiful. I’ve walked by it dozens of times but today, I went it. Calm, manicured, peaceful. I was delighted.
You can imagine that a pagan like me is not particularly concerned with the birth of Jesus Christ. As for New Year's Eve on the 31st, I'm too much of a snob to want to celebrate at the same time as everyone else.
Yet, I really like the holidays.
Precisely because (almost) everyone celebrates at the same time. Kind of like Sunday. We agree not to do anything on the same day and everyone chooses how. Parks, walks, vacations, biking, family, Satanist masses.
So little we agree on.
New website.
I usually spend months tweaking with the appearance, the menus, the code (so far I’ve coded all my websites in php myself). Never mind all that!
My resolution for 2023: content first.
I’ll post once a day, no matter what. An image, a text, a sound, a drawing… anything. Who care about the website? I mean: I care, but it comes after the content.
So I’ll start publishing something every day and I’ll improve the site little by little, under your eyes. It’s part of the « learn in public » trend but we’ll talk about that later.
It’s also a special day for me because it’s the first time this year that I haven’t posted my daily vido improvisation. Since January 1st, I’ve posted a 10-minute improvisation video each day except on weekends (in french). Never missed one so far. And yesterday, because of a delayed flight on a trip (photo related), I didn’t post anything. And you know what? It’s fine.
I don’t know about you, but I, for one, am ready for something new.