I've begun attending open meditation on Wednesday nights. I've found a meditation center, here in the city. It's a simple, modern and unassuming looking building located in the middle of a residential block. Inside the entrance a small hallway leads into and open room. Windows line the left and right sides from floor to ceiling. Just before the session begins, the care-taker of the building opens these windows, and the air inside slowly acclimates to the outside climate. At the front of the room is a low platform, maybe six or eight inches elevated from the floor. A table stands in the center. On this is a simple shrine. Several small bowls are lined up on this table, and the attendant fills these, very deliberately, with water from a pitcher. The room itself is very sparsely decorated. The center of the room is lined with meditation cushions. These are dark blue, and there seems to be about three variations in sizes and shapes. This, I am told is to accommodate individual preferences and physical needs of those meditating.
As I sit in meditation the sounds of the neighborhood slowly begin to enter the room. Cars cruising slowly past. The indecipherable conversations of pedestrians passing on the sidewalk. Dogs barking.
On my first night the sounds of a circular saw, maybe half a block away, repeated in no particular pattern during my time there. Sawing. Hammering for a while. Sawing again. Bombing into the room above the sounds of people and birds and cars. I was struck, even during my meditation, by the realization that I was not annoyed by this interruption of mechanized industrial noise. Of dogs barking. Cars. Birds. There are settings in which these same sounds would drive me crazy. In a different context, like when I'm trying to sleep. Working. Watching tv. I was amazed to find them not unpleasant at all. They were simply just there. Neither good nor bad. Just elements in my current, unchangeable environment. Part of the experience of being me in that moment in time.
Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche compares life to driving along in a car. When we meditate, we are simply pulling the car to the shoulder, getting out, and standing there in the road. Taking in the scenery around us, the weather, the car, the road, our bodies. No judgment of these things. Just observation. I like this. I can get my head around it. It makes me think of every roadside pull-out, all over the United States, that I've ever been drawn to. I almost never pass one up. Sometimes I'll spend a few moments, leaving the car running. Sometimes I might stay for an hour or more. Absorbing that space.