meditation day 1

here I am working at the kitchen of the Zen Center, and watching all the guests (monks or lay people) in the zendo right beside my room sitting in their zafus hours and more hours!!! We kitchen crew are supposed to be “practicing the way” too. That’s to say, meditating in a way too. But in fact, I don’t do it. I’m just thinking about the clock and the end of my work for today. Then I could rest. I feel tired and sleepy. I didn’t feel so sleepy the weeks before… There are quite a lot of pretty and interesting women as guests, but I could not talk to them because they should be silent most of the time. I don’t want to be appointed as a bad guy for trying to approach women in retreat. Really, nobody wants to be singled out from the crowd and be appointed with an accusative finger. Me neither. I didn’t do anything wrong!!!!

Or maybe I shouldn’t even look at them! Just with the corner of the eye maybe… They don’t exist. They are not there. We work in silence in the kitchen. These are the orders. So, I chop quietly my vegetables. I don’t even look at other people’s work. But this entails a certain uneasiness. A certain tension. This happens at the table in the dinning room too. I don’t like it. It should be taken easy and not with so much stiffness. I’d like to be making and hearing jokes, to laugh at somebody’s stupidities. That’s a way of laughing of ourselves, and not taking us so serious.

Uffffh!!! my work for today is done. Everything is useless (that’s how I feel) and meaningless. I know it would eventually change, but it lets me exhausted to think about the eternal struggle for the $$. This critical view of mine has its origin in my mind, I know. I know that actually, everything is perfect as the Universe itself. The stars are almost eternal, the atoms inside matter are almost eternal… They might be short as a breath for God, but for us it is as if they will last forever. We might see one or two of them (stars) die, not more.

For me God is not that image we are used to imagine. It’s something implicit in matter, but not explicit anywhere else. He does not rest on a cloud. It can be a thought or the big Thought. The mind and the big Mind.