Meditation on Change 10/15/07

Paying attention to times of spontaneous reflection, meditation, in my life. I probably spend more time doing this than I realize. Some people might call it daydreaming. So, while I seem not to be doing as much "formal" meditation, the time that I spend in "creative reverie" is increasing. I notice that this happens while I am driving the car, taking a bath, petting the cat, doing such mindless, automatic things. Water seems to me to be an element that supports this kind of non-thought. Water for me has properties of emotional flow, intuitive meandering thought, a non-solid, flowing structure. This morning in the bath tub, I was thinking about my ancestors, mentally visiting the drawer in my mother's bedroom where she keeps the old family photos. There is the photo of my paternal grandfather with his over sized, winglike ears; the photo of my father as a young man, wearing a tall white chef's hat. He was employed at the time as a cook during the construction of Larson Air Force Base (now defunct) at Moses Lake, WA. Memories surface of Sunday afternoon dinners at my maternal great-grandparents' house. After dinner, my great-grandfather and the other male relatives would sit and rock in the living room, blowing smoke rings from their pipes and talk. I remember the smoke stand that sat by the rocking chair and the brass spittoon in the corner. The women would be busy in the kitchen cleaning up after the meal, visiting, my great-grandmother humming a tune that sounded so much like Enya's song "How Can I Keep From Singing." I would be playing child games with my cousins: hide and seek, running around the yard among the row of bushes at the side of the property, exploring the woodshed. How times have changed. I remember my great-grandfather's name was John Calvin. My great-grandmother called him Callie, and he called her Lulee. Her name was Lulu. My reflections also happen spontaneously when I am doing what I think of as childlike things that spark my sense of wonder: gathering the natural treasure of brilliant autumn leaves and pressing and preserving them to use for making collages, cards, and other sort of useless, magical things. I did some shopping at a thrift store this weekend and picked up some useful items of clothing. My prize was a heavy wool winter coat, which I have been thinking about buying for a couple of winters. This particular coat is just what I was looking for, for $6.99, almost new. I reflected about who might have owned these items of clothing before me, what they did when they wore them, how they interacted with their families. I arrived at the sense of how all these things, people, circumstances and times change, how things pass through my hands, people pass through my life, times and events change and are changed by people, how it all changes and is impermanent. And I feel openhearted, able to change with everything. I am happy.