Ripples, Mental and Otherwise....

Rippling is the Way, flowing left and right!
Its tasks completed, its affairs finished,
Still it does not claim them for its own.
Lao Tzu

....I had another one of these kinda psychedelic experiences in yoga class...it was at the end of class and we were in savasana...that, it should be noted, is the one pose that is nearly always given its Sanskrit name in yoga classes, even if everything else is half-moon, sleeping pigeon, radiant warrior, crazed aardvark, etc....that’s because, in English, it’s corpse pose...kinda makes ya appreciate the Sanskrit, doesn’t it? Anyway, I was lying there, eyes closed, minding my own business, and started seeing these ripples in blue water...like in a large creek...just vaguely at first, but then I started to focus in...and no, I didn’t actually think I was outside looking at a creek...but it wasn’t like the way I’d normally imagine something either...more like projected onto the backs of my eyelids...what my hippie freak friend Jedediah calls an eyelid movie...but a bit less colorful and chaotic than what he’s described...so I lay there watching for a little while...then kinda refocused...like I moved back a bit, and suddenly, just for a second or two, was looking at the ocean...and then back to plain old eyelids, somewhat illuminated by the sun coming through the window....I tend to put my mat down in an area of the floor somebody called the beach...as, if there’s any sun at all on a given day, it’s shining there...

The river flows, it flows to the sea, wherever that river flows, that’s where I want to be....
Roger McGuinn

About forty mile south of Rochester, New York, the Genesee River runs through a long and spectacular gorge with a series of waterfalls in a place called Letchworth State Park. I did a lot of hiking there, and found some cool, out-o’-the-way spots, including a high cliff overlooking the largest of the waterfalls. It was off an unofficial trail, so there were no guardrails or anything, just a sheer drop to rocks and blue water rippling in a very shallow stretch of river far below. Most importantly, the cliff was concave, meaning that there’d be nothing to get caught on, nothing to stop you, no matter how the wind might shift, from plummeting to your death—no chance of ending up quadriplegic, nothing but to sleep, perchance to dream. But...as it turned out, a grad. school friend was getting married that weekend. We weren’t that close, so the wedding wouldn’t have been cancelled, but it would definitely have put a bit of a dark cloud over it...and who would want that? Two weeks later, the planes crashed into the towers, and, on September 12th, having gone to the hospital to give blood, only to be turned away, since, apparently, everybody else had the same idea, I considered walking over to the psychiatric ward and having myself committed, but ended up taking a long bike ride along the Erie Canal, instead...more rippling blue water...and so it goes....