Meditations on meditation

Exercise 9: If you have a favorite meditation technique, feel free to use that. Otherwise, take a seat somewhere comfortable and out of reach of electronic distractions. Let your thoughts cycle through until they settle. If there are any ideas or thoughts that insist on persisting, write them down on a notebook. Enjoy the respite from the constant forward motion of our overfull lives. At the end, grab a nice cup of coffee to jolt you back to reality (sorry, it has to happen …) take a look at what you have on the notebook. If there is something there, take a minute and go deeper — bring it out in a sketch of a paragraph or two. If you have nothing on the notebook, you can at least enjoy the brief moment of contemplation.


When this #WriteFridays prompt arrived I was traveling through Toronto to Orlando to take two of our grandchildren to DisneyWorld.

It was extremely difficult to "take a seat somewhere comfortable", after all I was on an airplane. "Out of reach of  electronic distractions" is not that simple when there is a small display in the seat back immediately in front of you, as well as the screens other passengers were watching nearby. The normal in-cabin flight announcements and safety demonstrations, in both official languages, interrupted my thoughts frequently.

I usually take notes on my Blackberry phone Memo app, and then e-mail them to myself to work on later. This trip I decided to leave the phone at home, as I wanted to concentrate on enjoying the time together with the grandchildren. Instead I took a small memo book, the type with the coil binding at the top, small enough to be put in a shirt pocket. This one featured a small strip of elastic riveted on the cover that could hold a small pencil.

Once the flight was in the air and the announcement that we were now free to move about the cabin came on, I started to "let my thoughts cycle through until they settle". Initially my thoughts were of seeing my grandchildren again, the last time we had been together with them was six months prior. They live on the far end of the country, three time zones away and at the end of the day here, it is bed time for them, so we don't get to visit on the phone or Facetime often.

Thoughts of them eventually drifted to thoughts of my own grandparents, all long gone now, but still a very big part of my memories to this day. One memory, which is more a collection of a number of scenes with my paternal grandparents came to the forefront.

I took out my notebook and began to write down points as they occurred to me. Reading over my notes now I have a list. The list will form the backbone of another memoir chapter I plan to write and share with my own grandchildren.

My list of notes:

Chores done
Supper
Woodstove
Kerosene lamp
Transistor Radio
CFCW Ukrainian music hour
Grandfather bent forward listening
Frost on windows
Cold draft
Cup of tea, milk and sugar
Bread, homemade, butter, jam
Go to bed
Moonlight on the wall
Get up
Look out window
Dark blue shadows on white snow, of wooden fence, tall black spruce trees
Full moon, high in clear sky
Dogs barking
Coyotes howling in response, distant.

I dozed off, thinking of that scene, or collection of impressions from a number of scenes over the years visiting them on the farm.

We arrived in Toronto, very early in the morning, to "grab a nice cup of coffee to jolt you back to reality" and found our gate to wait for our son and the grandchildren to arrive from their flight.

I see the notes I made while at Disney on the next pages in the memo book, but that will be another story for another time. I will leave with just a little hint of what it will be about, best summed up by the three year old grandson's comment, "I love the whole wide Disney!"

© 2015 NoelHC