ediblesf.com | 33 out of my mind Today isn’t about the miles I drive or the map I follow. I could be anywhere but I’m here. Where doesn’t matter. Maybe I’ll drop a pin to locate me? I’m a fast walker but today I slow down. In place of my mental chatter, I count my breaths. Inhale, exhale, repeat. Closely watching where my feet strike. Notice surroundings. Step down 79 stairs. Cross a wooden bridge. Listen to the plink of a tiny waterfall. My struggle isn’t finding beauty around me, it’s not forming the words when I see it. The effort to quiet my mind is a constant ebb and flow. Thoughts form and I ask them to recede. Push, pull. A wave of thoughts. Wild purple irises along a barbed wire fence. Circular threads of a spider web. Angular roof tips of houses. Squeaky brakes on a truck. When my thoughts overtake me once again, I go back to counting my breaths. The liminal space between knowing and unknowing. Be in the physical world. Arms swing subtly at my side. Head balancing on shoulders. Feet take me where? It doesn’t matter. How often do I take this for granted? Movement, breath, life. “We can’t be grounded in our body if our mind is somewhere else.” Zen teacher and poet Thich Nhat Hanh wrote about his reverence for walking meditation: “We don’t rush. The Earth is sacred, and we touch her with each step.” I repeat his words on my walk: “Breathing in, I calm my body. Breathing out, I bring peace into my body.” I hear the ocean before I see it. The roar grounds me in its totality and banishes my thoughts. Step slowly down. Count out 141 stairs. Beyond them are rocks to step on. Then sand. Dried tubes of kelp. A dead crab and a reflecting pool left behind from high tide. Blue mussels coat massive boulders by the shore. These images are burnished in my mind, yet I attempt to unsee them. Later, I’ll learn that mussels are ecosystem engineers. They filter out toxins and flush nutrients back into the waves pounding on them. Like my own skeleton, a scaffolding that holds up fat and muscles and skin that allows me to move, the collective of mussels, with their oblong blue and iridescent shells, create an aquatic ridge that stabilizes the shoreline. I stop to listen again. The repeating sound of the ocean is a natural reset. I turn around and go back. My days are so full of doing but today it’s not like that. “Walking is for nothing. It’s just for walking.” I don’t think, I don’t see. I filter out my thoughts again and again like waves coming back in perpetuity to wash over the mussels.
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