Worldlings

I’m sitting by a shallow mountain creek in mid-summer, the humidity pressing against me as the sun sets behind storm clouds. The sound of gentle currents rush in my ears. I’ve walked far enough that local fishers, the only other people down here, are out of view–I am totally alone. 

I think of Siddhartha sitting under the Bodhi tree. In the story, the night he becomes enlightened is full of battles with demons, perhaps ones created by his own mind. It is only when he looks them straight in the eyes and calls them by their name that he is free. “I see you Mara,” he says.

I try to name my demons. Insomnia. Anxiety. Depersonalization. Guilt. I try to take the Buddha’s advice, to not push these things away, or grasp at more comfortable feelings, but accept them as they are. It’s incredibly hard. Discomfort is not something we are used to accepting. 

I try to do less, which is somehow harder than just trying. I can feel a muscle in my forehead contracting repeatedly. A familiar pain that radiates across my chest most days. Something landing on my leg–I open my eyes to see it’s a small dragonfly. 

–

July was the month that I cracked. It’s been almost a year of unrelenting stress: financial, relational, political. I’ve been dealing with this in all the ways people tell you to–developing a twice weekly yoga practice, getting a new therapist, trying (and failing to tolerate) new meds. But none of it has had the results I hoped for. 

A few weeks ago, I tried a new tack: instant gratification. I went to a music festival on a beautiful little stream in the Catskills, I partied with my friends on Fire Island and I got a new tattoo. It was a week of distraction that did its job. My 34 year old body is still recovering. 

Now I’m at a cabin in the woods with my husband and our cats. This was supposed to be the easy part. But the trees haven’t cleansed me of years of stress, of patterns that go back to my childhood or run through my DNA, of coping mechanisms that have become compulsive. I still feel like I’m trying to outrun my own mind. 

–

In my mid-20s, I attended several silent meditations retreats. They felt life changing, but their effects wore off quickly–like taking psychedelics but a whole lot more work. I did develop a meditation practice for a few years, but I quit after I felt it wasn’t “working”. I just couldn’t keep sitting with those uncomfortable feelings.

Back then, I read in a meditation book that some monks called the non-practicing “worldlings”—regular people “of the world,” who exist in a mundane reality of grasping and aversion, caught up in the details of daily life and its goings on. I felt an instant kinship with this description. I know that experience will always be my reality. It’s what I’ve named the new music project I’ve been cautiously working on for the last few years.

When I’m in a difficult mental place, as I have been recently, it can be hard to remember what’s worthwhile about living. The pain is magnified and the good things feel insignificant. I truly don’t know if meditating again will help. But sitting next to the creek, a smooth rock in my hand, I tried hard to remember the look of the evening light reflecting off the calm water, the rushing of the currents, the quiet birdsong. I need to keep it with me for when everything feels so ugly and desperate that I can’t remember one good thing.

Sometimes I wish I could just spend my days staring at the stars, considering the unimaginable distances between us and them. That awe makes me forget the wars we fight, the tension in my relationships, the need to make dinner or do the laundry. But as the Buddha says, discomfort, boredom, sickness and pain are also a huge part of being alive. I am trying to find the beauty in that, too.