“In a mind clear as still water, even the waves, breaking, are reflecting its light.”
~ Dogan (founder of Japanese Soto Zen)
Last week my family and I enjoyed several days at Smith Mountain Lake in Franklin County, Virginia. Our stay landed right in the middle of my current 30-Day Mindfulness Meditation Challenge, but the beauty of this program is that all I need is a phone connection to run the conference call and internet to send the daily Q&A summaries.
The only “technical” problem was that a nest full of baby birds was situated in the living room chimney, with chirping becoming louder by the day. I finally had to shift operations to my sound studio in the driveway (aka the second row of my minivan) to ensure a quiet background for our circle of meditators.
After the call each morning, I would head down to the lake with my camera bag and climb aboard the sturdy paddle boat that has been docked here for the 25 years I’ve been coming. Turning left from the boat house leads to wetlands at the end of the quiet inlet, where I often see herons, egrets, dragonflies, damselflies, and other magical creatures.
Perhaps because of my later than usual start time given the meditation call, I didn’t have as many wildlife sightings as I usually enjoy on those photo excursions. And perhaps that was all for the best, since my perspective shifted from looking for living, breathing creatures—my usual habit at the lake—to more abstract phenomena around me.
As I alternated between cycling the pedals (is that the correct verb for a paddle boat?) and stopping to tune in to the stillness, the reflections on the lake surface captured my attention. First, it was the clouds.
Then it was the trees evoking Monet’s garden…
Monet was soon replaced by Van Gough…
I rested my awareness on the ripples churned up by the paddle wheel, then watched how long it took for the wrinkles to dissolve into smooth waters. Even a slight, unintentional shift of my weight in the boat would create a new kink in the surface. Intentional stillness on my part, however, invited stillness on the lake.
Neither state was good or bad, neither was right or wrong. The rippled, distorted images delighted me just as much as the straight and tidy lines of an undisturbed surface. None of it stayed the same for very long anyway.
Pedal. Pause. Pedal. Pause. By the time the water stilled after a period of turbulence, my paddle boat had floated to a slightly different angle, so I had a new perspective. The before image wasn’t exactly the same as the after image. Time and place had shifted. The picture was something different moment to moment, but still beautiful from each and every reference point.
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