Glass in my Foot, by M

I spent some time meditating the other day. An hour actually. Which is a throwback to all those days in highschool i sat in the dark with candles lit, incense burning and a lethargic, melancholic posture as I contemplated existence. I had it down back then. Nowadays the most I normally do is look wistfully out my window. Or save it for yoga, or before sleep prayer. I do not these days often long for night swimming by REM or for somebody to love by Depeche Mode or even still those rainy days of Skid Row where everything is tinged with sadness and longing and awesome 80's hair. But I do a have rekindled love for Beethovens sonatas which i was in love with back then and his violin/cello suites with a dash of Grygorian chanting. Equally mysterious I think and ennui expressing but just a little bit different... but as it was those Cd's were in the car, so i chose another old throwback favorite, Enya's watermark.

And instead of pounding me down into the bottom of the sea as it used to I floated blissfully on top, dutifully lit the candles, burned the incense and wondered, how exactly does one meditate and on what exactly? I felt compelled to after my visit with the holistic chick. Wrote it down even, like an assignment. Meditate 1 hour. Which I always long to do, in the yard, with a long list of Bible verses at my side. I never do though. So to open up, and its often criticized, I flipped through the Bible and randomly landed at a passage. Normally Psalms. I am possibly hedging my bets that its going to be good but it usually is somehow shockingly theme appropriate. Here is the one from the other night:

Psalm 92
A psalm. A song. For the Sabbath day.
1 It is good to praise the LORD and make music to your name, O Most High, 2 to proclaim your love in the morning and your faithfulness at night, 3 to the music of the ten-stringed lyre and the melody of the harp. 4 For you make me glad by your deeds, O LORD; I sing for joy at the works of your hands. 5 How great are your works, O LORD, how profound your thoughts! 6 The senseless man does not know, fools do not understand, 7 that though the wicked spring up like grass and all evildoers flourish, they will be forever destroyed. 8 But you, O LORD, are exalted forever.

For one, its a song for the sabbath, classic! day of rest, what am i doing? resting... listening. And with enya i've got the lyres and the harps sort of... so anyway then i thought the bed was too comfortable and so I got on the floor, (after about 50 min in i went to scratch my right thigh and found i couldn't feel it. Which was an odd sensation to arrive at. I wonder if it meant something)So I began, took deep breaths and meandered my way to the theme of the meditation which was my health and the main things that came to me were these,

first: Not my will but His will, not my struggle but His struggle, not my success but His success. Mainly in an act of giving it over to God, my body, which is His.

middle: As the holistic chick requested I phrase the term weightloss into a positive, which is something I often point out to other people. Negative thinking. Tsk. Lets turn that around and call it, I would like to be at my optimum weight which got me thinking, I would also like an optimum job and an optimum relationship and in an optimum place I would be traveling. And all of this thematically wound around being able to help people, being able to belong, and being able to serve.

2nd middle: Ask for help, Ask for healing. I am not good at being active in asking, deliberate or intentional in this area. Mostly because i'm a little obsessive and it plays like a loop until it breaks- this hurts, that aches, this frustrates, this annoys- i'm sure there's a request in there somewhere but they're often statements that need a little more recipe to them than that.

Last: I turned, with no deliberation, to where I am on my spiritual landscape. Since Nov 2007 I've been, first near a stream in dappled light looking toward a far off mountain, then walking toward the mountain with jesus, then a little further up, then sitting and waiting on a wheat strewn side of the mountain, (never mind that i eventually found myself on a volcano tour climbing a mountain and meeting god there) but on the mountain it is always warm and always pleasant looking out into the valley, where just once i saw a black tree grow and then was cut down, and then waiting at dawn/dusk on an outcropping of the mountain intermittently windy and calm, further up so that the sky was all that i saw, then the place got a little larger and flatter, like the waiting would be longer, and intermittently, lately there's been a small cabin surrounding me, sometimes there's a broom, other times not, and the minute i realize there's a roof and walls, it gets ripped off and sails, or is flung right off and out to the right of me and disappears into a bright blue sky. I can no longer see the valley below though I remember it.

So when I went there again, this is the first time it has ever been at night, I was dancing with someone on the wood of the cabin floor, no roof to be seen, but a few walls, and i was happy and had an exalted feeling, and as I turned to look down there was a piece of glass in my right foot, and I couldn't keep turning, and in my mind I kept trying to forward the image so that the glass was gone and the dancing could continue but in my image I just sat down and the man was holding my foot and sitting on a stool. And I sitting on a bench in low firelight.

And then Enya clicked off and my right thigh was waking up from its issues and I was left with pondering if, and this actually did happen when I was 3, what stepping on glass has to do with anything and is it me that put it there or was something more sinister involved. The actual incident was that my mom warned me not to play with the glass and I did anyway and the bottle broke and i stepped on it, then i had to get stitches and the doctor pretended to be santa claus and i was angry at the man for lying and i, to this day still have a very wide 2 stich x----x scar on the pad of my right foot. So that in my mental landscape I often find when I am in a dark place or feeling attacked, it is often by glass, either flying toward or raining down upon me or coming up from the ground. So that it seems significant that there appears to be glass in my foot in the last part of my meditation. Perhaps it is warning me against willfulness, or that there will be someone there to remove it finally, whatever wound this really is. I am curious about the answer.