I pulled up to the park with acres of grass, tall trees, and a small playground in the distance. Several adults paced in the leaves, looking down at the ground, concentrating. Occassionally, they would stoop down and pick something out of the grass and place it in a pouch. When I got out of the car, I walked past them and noticed nearly twenty of them slowly roaming through the trees and gathering these small objects. I was blissfully mesmerized. I’m not sure why. Watching them struck a cord deep inside.
“What are they looking for?” I wondered. Lost change? Mushrooms? Easter eggs? It didn’t really matter. I was drawn to their behavior and their state of mind, to the activity itself.
They stepped slowly and meditatively, never lifting their eyes from the earth. They peered deeply into the leaves with only a bare stream of thought and certainly no machination of a separate identity in reference to the scene surrounding them. I could feel it. They were enjoying the land.
They found things. They picked them up. They searched further, all the while surfing a sweet energy. Tranquil yet intent. Permeating and diffuse yet present and palpable. Awake and alive without force or agenda. Beautiful. Something about the quality of their awareness and the way they held their bodies infused me with pleasure, a taste on my tongue that bordered on orgasmic. I wanted to merge with their demeanor and connect with the earth in that very same way.
I moseyed over to one man and asked what he was looking for. He approached and showed me the contents of his bag, a heap of pecans. He smiled. “You like?” he said. I nodded and smiled, so full of contentment that I scarcely felt as though I had just participated in a social interaction. He returned to his search, silent.
I wandered through the leaves near the playground where my four year old explored the paint and metal. I was wearing my tall black boots and a tan suede jacket (a gift from someone unaware of my aversion to leather). In any case, I felt so… Native American, and I liked it. I am a Cherokee in the midwest. I wished I could take off into the woods and stomp and sing and chant until the spirits came out to play.
On Friday night, I did just that. My brother and I set up a dance event in the park. We made two huge fires in a picnic shelter that kept us all so warm, we were stripping off our sweaters and running out into the trees to cool off. I ventured out into the meadow of trees, still within reach of the beautiful music, a mixture of world, trance, dubstep, ethnic beats, and tribal rhythms. The stars were so bright. I looked up at the trees and moved my body in whatever way the music and the trees asked me to move. I moved like the people in the park searching for pecans, but I wasn’t searching for pecans. I was searching for the sacred nothingness.
For nearly an hour, I moved and swayed like the writhing starlings that gather in Europe.
Samadhi. No words. No thoughts. No time, objects, or self. I could feel strands of energy passing through me. Eventually I sat on the ground in meditation posture. I sat with everything.
I ceased to be the seeker. Instead, I was the pecan appearing in the vision of the divine.
