What is this Meditation Thing?

Today’s a beautiful post-labor-day day on the lake. Crows are ranting in the trees. I have two days entirely alone, for which I’m eternally grateful to my husband. Those of us who’ve been academics never get over the sense of something starting up in the fall, a new rigor in the air, a straightening of the shoulders.The summer has been full of serious family illnesses, of visiting my father, hosting myriad children and grandchildren at the lake, preparing for MFA residency, teaching at residency, etc. All the while I’ve kept meditating almost every day, an hour most of the time. What is that about, and why? I write this because meditation seems esoteric to many, still. Also, I just told people on my large meditation mailing list that I’d be curtailing my weekly message for now. Some of them have written to say they’ll miss the message. So I thought it would be a good time to say something to those among them who read this blog, and to non-meditators.I grew up Christian and understand the value of ritual. I’ve loved it and found it useful in the past. It feels as if, for me now, ritual’s usefulness is worn out. I don’t much respond to traditional Buddhist ritual. I don’t feel moved to take formal vows. I’ve read enough to have a basic conceptual framework for what I’m doing, but I’m not a Buddhist scholar, not even close. I just sit. I have a teacher. I have always had a teacher, which is a really good thing. A teacher functions for me like a rudder to keep me from wasting my time or from getting lost.Any magazine you pick up these days will tell you the benefits of meditation: lower blood pressure, less anxiety, enhanced immune system, more of the “good” brain waves. And the parts of the brain that register happiness light up more vigorously and steadily in long-time meditators. But those eventual benefits aren’t enough, in spite of their wonderfulness, to get most of us to sit with eyes closed or staring at a wall, noticing our breathing and how our body feels and what our mind is doing for long periods of time, regularly. What does get us there is enough immediate internal anxiety or stress to drive us to do something, anything, to make it better. And I suppose we have to have a certain natural proclivity. Some would call it karma.Then we have to get beyond the hurdle of seeing that when we sit, at first, all the internal turmoil comes to the surface, right in front of our faces. It’s terrible! It often takes a group to sit with, and/or a teacher, to stay with it at that point.Things get less crazy after a while. And a description of the practice gets more subtle and harder to understand unless you’re doing it.  We begin to see the instability of what we thought was stable. We begin to see impermanence, if we stay alert and conscious. If we don’t fall asleep. We begin to see “through” our illusions about what’s real and what’s the truth. Here’s where it gets really interesting and life-changing and must be seen for oneself.What do I, personally, get out of this? What do I get out of this as a writer? After all, writing is creating a world that doesn’t exist, that lives on paper. That lives in my head and then on paper. I am making/perpetuating a dream-world. Yes.In very inexact language, I’d say one doesn’t obliterate the created world to see through it. And of course the goal isn’t to sink into some permanent ommmmm state where all is bliss.  But to see through, to actually see (not just agree to intellectually) that everything is created by the interplay of mind and eye and body, that is a freedom beyond imagining and a peace that encompasses and goes beyond all concepts. That's the goal.Good for the writing? I don’t know. The process seems so. How, I can’t say. Writing comes out of me. My Buddhist teacher calls me “word cloud.” “Creating a cloud of words”? Or “Made out of a cloud of words”? or “Clouding the truth with words”? Or something else. Probably all are true. I seem to be one-who-writes. I seem to be also one-who-meditates. Same.