Recently I’ve been talking with a couple friends about meditation. I’ve been resistant to it for a long time due a number of reasons. Primarily, I am already a perpetually happy and relaxed person. Secondarily, I felt like I needed someone to tell me what I’m supposed to be experiencing while meditating so I know when I’m successful, though that any guidance seems to be antithetical to the whole objective of meditation.
I did have a friend who told me not to worry about the objective, just to focus on my breathing or the different parts of my body and what they are experiencing. To a degree, that was all the direction I needed to open up my senses to a world of experiences as I sat on a park bench in the main square of the Town of Tapalpa, Mexico.
I had spent the night in a tiny artistic village in the hills between Guadalajara and Puerto Vallarta. There wasn’t much left to explore, but it was my day off, and I didn’t see any reason to rush home to just sit around there. Instead I chose a bench in the shade of the overhead trees and began to experience, or in the case of meditation, to be present in the moment.
After watching several people walk past, I looked down to see a white downy feather blowing in circles on the flagstones in front of me. I watched as it danced along the dark surface, occasionally getting caught on an imperfect shard, protruding from the otherwise flat stone, before breaking free to continue its flight, like someone attempting to flee while being grasped at.
The visual animation of my dancing feather was interrupted by the sound of water splashing behind me. I turned to see an old woman in an apron tossing soapy water on the sidewalk. It is common to see proprietors cleaning the sidewalks in front of their businesses every morning, and there are times you have to take care not to get your feet wet lest they miss your approach. There is also the concern to avoid walking on their freshly cleaned sidewalk, and I often find myself walking in the street to avoid soiling the newly laundered paving stones.
The woman used the same method of cleaning I see often in Mexico. She scooped soapy water from a bucket using a small plastic cup and distributed it evenly along the pavement. She then disappeared into her store and returned with a green bristled push broom and began to scrub the sidewalk. The broom made the familiar scratching sound as she pushed and pulled the bristles across the stone surface. After another retreat into the store, she returned with a bucket of clean water and rinsed the sidewalk of soap. The smell of wet concrete wafted my direction, before my ears were again redirected.
A squeal came from the center of the square as two young boys chased pigeons around a covered gazebo. At first I thought it cruel to terrorize the birds in this way and wished that the parents would discipline their children for their behavior, but at the same time, how could one deny the joy of the children running after something they wouldn’t actually catch. Besides, it’s probably best for the birds not to get too comfortable around humans.
The boys’ attention soon turned elsewhere as an old man crossed the square with a block of ice cradled in a wheelbarrow. They knew this meant raspados would soon be served. Raspados are basically the Mexican version of shaved ice, except the street side vendors offer as many as 50 flavors. I’ve never actually tried one. Though I think all consumable ice in Mexico is now made using purified water, I have retained my childhood fear of consuming ice in Mexico, lest I suffer Monteczuma’s revenge.
The man took a rest against a stone wall after the strenuous labor of pushing the cart, and then, with care, he began to wipe off each individual flavor container while a truck behind him kicked up a fresh cloud of dust to recoat them. With the colorful uniformly sized containers lined upon his stand, he looked up to address his first customer: not surprisingly a young boy holding his mother’s hand.
I wondered where he’d gotten the block of ice from and how far he’d had to push it along the uneven cobblestones that made up the streets and sidewalks up the village. And how did he prevent it from melting with only a towel to cover it? I noticed that children weren’t the only ones to begin gathering at the opening of the raspados stand. Bees had begun to hover around the containers betraying the sweetness of sugar within.
Movement closer to me caught my attention as a man with a diamond studded crown belt buckle reached into a bucket with a plastic cup and began to water the poinsettias surrounding the tree in front of me. It was a reminder that the Christmas season had begun since, in Mexico, they don’t have the Thanksgiving holiday to wait for. Each poinsettia was growing within a small plastic container that was weighed down by a rock lest it be blown over and cover the surrounding artificial turf in dark soil.
The man’s belt buckle sparkled once more in the sunlight as he climbed over the fence surrounding the poinsettias, and he headed off behind me. It brought my attention back to the flagstones beneath my feet. The feather was resting, apparently exhausted from its dance or perhaps finally captured by one of the stones.
No longer distracted by the feather, I noticed pieces of glitter, from some earlier celebration, collected in gaps between the dark paving stones. The stones had likely been collected locally and carefully placed in the square years after being violently hurled most of the distance from a nearby volcano. Squares had been created by craftsmen piecing together a mosaic of stones connected by similarly laid lines; their inverse, a light colored concrete from which emerged the shape of a cross I didn’t see originally. It was like when you look at one of those posters for several minutes before an image finally appears.
Illuminating the stones in random places were scattered spots of sunlight, light that had traveled 91 million miles only to be carelessly obscured from reaching the stones by the shifting leaves of the plaza’s protective tree canopy blowing in the wind.
I felt the wind against my cheek, bringing the warm air from outside the canopy to inform me that the morning had passed on to afternoon. I shifted focus to my aural senses and soon heard the birds in the trees above, the music emanating from the speakers attached to poles surrounding the plaza, the rumble of traffic from a street adjacent to the plaza, and finally the annoying drone of the ubiquitous Mexican polka horns now emanating from the ederly woman’s gift shop.
There was also a persistent electronic squeak that turned out to be coming from a toy dog that a couple of children were playing with to my right. They seemed more interested in the fabricated pink robot than the natural animals that the boys had been chasing earlier. It wasn’t surprising as the group of adults surrounding them all had their faces buried in their cell phones.
I realized then that I had accidentally stumbled upon the essence of meditation. For over an hour I had been present in a series of moments. I’d moved from one sense to another: listening, feeling, smelling, seeing; receiving all the experiences the world was providing, instead of actively generating experiences. It was an enlightening moment, and I decided to celebrate my sixth sense, as I headed out in search of a place for lunch.
