When the calendar turns to the most dour days of November, when the leaves have just been ripped from the trees, and that first gray barren visage reveals itself, stark and brutal and bare, the only place I’ve found to properly work as an escape is not some far-away tropical land, but the dim living room where I sit down for a daily meditation.
Lit by a candle, which in turn illuminates the curling smoke from a Palo Santo stick, the darkness of November, and all of its absent, fallen leaves, pulls back from this little circle of respite. At the dourest hours of the year, when the sudden onslaught of the winter to come is standing just ahead of us – immovable, majestic, daunting, and mad – I breathe slowly in, and even more slowly out, and the breathing that has sustained me through the day now works to calm and still me. It is the magical movement of meditation, when the worries of the mind shift, with practice and patience into a realm of blank peace. Thoughts that once raced now walk slowly by, pausing to genuflect with acknowledgement, then going on their way, until the line of thoughts has dwindled to barely a trickle, and at last, to none at all – simple, sublime, and entirely full emptiness.
