A few weeks into the quarantine, we decamped to our Florida home to ride out the remainder of the school year away from upstate New York. The weather was about to get the best of us with snow into late April and the feeling of being shuttered in our home, unable to get out to breath in some fresh air, was making our son drift into depression. Why not go where sunshine and warm temperatures would allow us to be outdoors while still maintaining our social distance? We are lucky and blessed to have this option.
So this morning I am enjoying our backyard garden, reading, writing and meditating. I use a variety of sources when I meditate: quiet music, guided meditation, silence. It all depends on what my mind and body need to start the day. I particularly love Shatki Gawain’s Creative Visulization Meditations, an audio companion to her book Creative Visualization which was first published in 1978. Her voice is soothing and lulls while bringing you to the power of your own imagination. I started listening to the audio as I went to sleep over twenty five years ago, wanting creativity in my life so badly I could taste it. But life happens and along the way my strong urge to be creative left me for many years.
This morning’s meditation brings me to a place of bliss. Gawain asks us to think of a beautiful place, real or imagined and travel there in our mind. I have an easier time with real versus imagined so I bring myself back to Greece, a country I traveled to for the first time last summer, a place more beautiful than my imagination could conjure. I arrange myself in front of the large open window of the room we spent the week of our yoga retreat at the Aegialis Hotel and Spa and imagine myself meditating with a view of the Mediteranean, the hills of Amorgos framing the blue sky. The air is tinged with a saltiness from the sea below and the soft breeze brings the amazing smell of the bougainvillea that surround the resort like a beautful fucia necklace. Breath in. Breath out. I am good. I am whole.
I’m back in Florida now, in this garden which is beautiful in it’s own right. The plants are coming to life in a way they won’t in upstate New York for several more weeks. The key for getting through this time is feeling everything life sends us, the good and the bad and the uncomfortable. But there is always the option of going inside yourself to recall another place and time when things were amazing and someday will be again.
MC
I Am Writing 