Meditation and Water

Sundays are quiet days at our house, and even if we have plans, they feel lighter than plans for other days. White wine and Sunday afternoons go together. It’s a reflective, day-dreaming day.

As a child, Sunday meant eating our main meal right after church, usually hearty traditional fare, and after our time around the table, the rest of the day was open, with napping encouraged. The smell of a roast in the oven, cooked to pull-apart tenderness along with potatoes and carrots, takes me back to childhood Sundays. The evening meal would be small and casual, maybe leftovers.

I still hold loosely to the tradition, making lunch the big meal of the day. It’s not often a roast or a whole, stuffed chicken; those kinds of feasts are reserved for company or holidays now.  I like to take the rest of the day off from cooking, telling the kids it’s a free-for-all night. Lately, I make popcorn for an evening snack to enjoy with a favorite television show. Downton Abbey was the perfect Sunday vibe for me, although Walking Dead worked too when the kids all wanted to gather ‘round and watch together.

Weekdays are filled with work and school, meetings and appointments. Saturdays are relaxing, but usually busy with recreation or catching up, doing the tasks that were neglected in the busyness of the week. Sunday, for us, is different. It’s a day of rest.

This kind of pause in the craziness of life can be hard to find. Sunday is a work day for many people, or a second Saturday that gets crammed with events and chores. When I was young, church, Sunday dinner and a day of rest was a cultural standard. Shops were closed, or at least closed early, and most people took the day off from life-as-usual. That’s not true anymore.

That doesn’t mean we don’t still need it.

A place with a view of water–lake, bay, ocean, even a river–can cast a Sunday spell on me on any day of the week. Gazing at water, it’s easy to get caught up in a reverie, to let my mind roam, to allow creative thoughts bubble to the surface. It can be a problem-solving space for me too; when I stop and listen, hurts or concerns that have been nipping around the edges of my mind have room to stretch out so I can look and them and deal with them.

I don’t think I’m alone; Herman Melville says, “Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.”

There’s something about it: the lullaby motion of waves and currents, the wavy distortion of the secrets hiding in the depths, the tension on the surface that holds some objects up to float and pulls others down to sink. It’s mysterious and open at the same time, welcoming and forbidding, gentle and overwhelming. Just thinking about it gets my mind swirling.

If you can’t take a whole day to rest, maybe you can find some water to gaze at. Ishmael, in Melville’s Moby Dick, confesses that “whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”

We don’t need to cast off in a whaling vessel–that turned out to be stressful in Ishmael’s case–but the instinct to get to a body of water, where meditation can calm and soothe our overloaded, frazzled 21st century minds, is a good one.