Haibun: Slow Thoughts
When I stand on top of a mountain or am in the high desert plains, I find myself more reflective with the unbound space. There’s nothing to define once the sky has been defined, so there’s nothing to get in the way of settling into what the mind wants to think about anyways. When I was in the mountains of Upstate New York, there was endless amounts of new data for my brain to process: maybe a twig that could catch my eye or a spider web stretched from one tree to the next. Just the amount of different types of trees worked a part of my brain.
But left with a view that is only sky, my mind unwinds or slows down. The most common way it slows is when my phone’s battery dies and my mind slows down a bit because I don’t have the rush of notifications coming at me; I kind of forget about the connected world because, “oh yeah, it’s dead and I have no way of charging it.” My mind slows down some.
The level of reflection on a big desert sky slows down enough for me to visit random thoughts. Sometimes I find myself remembering people who I tried to forget. There was a time I pieced together my need to apologize about something I did. The slowness of the thinking gave it space for me to see where I was in the wrong, but it happened slow enough, I was relaxed enough, that the rush of shame I usually have wasn’t there this time.
I know I can feel some regret about things, but when I am thinking at the speed of technology, it comes fast and hits hard. I tend to want to push it away as fast as it arrives. My anxiety jumps as if I was just attacked. But, when I’m in the sky, the thoughts and feelings and memories come slower. They don’t really sneak up on me, they more emerge and I can deal with them. I can sit with these thoughts and see them on their way to me and on their departure away from me in their resolution.
endless desert blue sky views,
summer’s flying shoes
