Monday was hard; 50 things to start the week with, all due at once, Anette home vacuuming and blasting television while I’m on conference calls, my daughter and her friend running around. It felt a little overwhelming early on, and I was having a hard time just getting anywhere. I think a little of my practice kicked in, and I stopped screwing around and just started and finished one thing. And then moved on to the next thing to start and finish. It sounds stupid, I’m sure, and it probably is. But it’s so easy to get mired when we’re multitasking that doing the first thing first just doesn’t occur to us.

What’s mindfulness got to do with it? Well, that’s kind of what the practice is, ignoring the pointless distractions and getting back to the matter at hand. If I’m practicing being mindful about, say, breathing, my mind will absolutely, definitely wander, and the practice is to gently bring my attention back to the breathing as often as I need to, over and over. Having been practicing this lately, I found myself using the same kind of quiet discipline and turning my focus to my work, over and over, as often as necessary. When my mind wandered, something kicked in and gently brought my focus back to the task in front of me. Suddenly, I was cranking out the work. Temporarily liberated from “not knowing where to start” by the simple act of starting. 

About an hour ago, I had another “moment.” My daughter’s got a cough and was laying between us; Anette had been up with her an hour or so earlier getting her some Children’s Cough Placebo or whatever the ineffective kid’s medication was called, and she’d still roll over every 3 or 4 minutes and cough freely in my face. (And then back the other way to cough in Anette’s face. We’re all going to be sick.) This kept me awake, as might be expected. I mean, almost everything keeps me awake, so it may as well be my kid coughing in my face. I was laying facing away from her when I heard The Sound – a dog pissing, very close to my head. I yelled something like, “Arrrrghg!” and I squinted around to see what I could. My wife and kid jolted out of whatever half-asleep state they were in. Loki, the puppy was bolting away, I could tell his shape and gait even with my advanced myopia thanks to the fairly bright backlit clouds that cast a glow into our room. I was instantly out of bed and had one foot in a dog pee puddle. My rage flared.

Anette asked what was going on, and I told her Loki had peed on the floor. I used a different vocabulary to describe the situation, of course. I grabbed the pillow he’d peed on – I think he was marking it because the guest dog, Gracie, had been laying on it and he’s young enough to still be kind of possessive. He really never does stuff like that, it’s pretty out of character. That didn’t make it piss me off less. I started to walk toward the other side of the house with the pee-pillow and Anette turned on her nightstand lamp. Loki was slinking ahead of me in the dark hallway, and I was going to shoo him outside when we got to the living room. But mid-hallway, he slunk back around and headed back toward the bedroom even when I tried to stop him. I was furious, and I howled with anger and turned back around, half crouching in the totally dark hallway and trying to grab his collar with my right hand. He’s very quick, but he was only going just fast enough to stay out of my reach, mocking me.

Back in the bedroom, Anette and Sydney were fully awake. They were both propped up on pillows, and Loki smashed over them to avoid my grasp. He was carefully avoiding the spaces between and around them and instead stomped squarely on their bodies, which spiraled my anger even further. (Kind of a “How dare he!” type of outrage.) I notice myself still holding the pee pillow in my other hand, which infuriated me even more (“How dare he?” Part II, or something), and I was cursing like a cabbie and trying to grab him as he stomped over my human family, back and forth.

Anette and Sydney didn’t budge as he evasively smashed them, and some part of my Hulk-mind noticed them just calmly watching the back and forth, only moving their eyes as though following a tennis match. Anette shifted out of the bed and quietly said, “Why don’t I take him outside? Everyone in the house is shaking.” I sort of froze to take assessment. I took a look around me and saw my other dogs nervously circling around, noticed the pee pillow still in my left hand and extended away from my body, felt my Popeye grimace of a half-asleep-glasses-wearing-angry-guy trying to grab a puppy in a mostly dark room while holding a pee soaked pillow in one hand. Denied the chance to implement my “put the dog outside for a little while” plan for justice, I stomped out of the room, still cursing and grumbling, threw the pillow in the laundry room and slammed the door.

The insanity of it all hit me as I walked back to the room with Dog Pee Smell Remover and a roll of some kind of paper product so I could sit and mop dog pee out of the carpet next to where I put my head when I “sleep.” My daughter watched me and made some small talk. (It’s weird to catch your 4 year old making small talk.) The anger totally faded, and it only took a couple minutes once some part of me allowed me to let go of it. This is a new thing for me; I used to pride myself for being able to maintain a grudge for years at a time – and I don’t mean some weak, part time conceptual grudge, I’m talking about all consuming constant sleep-depriving single-minded anger for months and years. I took my freshly lucid non-angry state and used the pleasant clarity to dig up a humidifier and some kid’s Vick’s Rub to try to help with her cough. It was then that I became pretty aware of how my mindfulness practice had facilitated my quick shift.

What’s meditation got to do with it? Everything. My imperfect and human initial reaction of anger, not so much, but the ability to let go of it, 100%. In the practice of mindfulness, emotions and distractions are permitted and even expected, but you’re not expected to follow them – that’s the discipline, that’s what you practice. So after having practiced watching emotions like anger pop into my mind and then working to not let my attention be carried away by them, I found myself doing the same thing in real life. I had pee to sop up and a daughter to talk to, and my attention quietly and automatically went there and the anger dissappated since it was no longer needed or relevant. 

Again, it probably sounds dumb or  even imaginary, but for me, just letting go of my anger over a minute or two is a big deal. It wasn’t like some automatic saintly response, nothing like that. The effects of mindfulness practice are not dramatic for me, they’re subtle. It was like driving very quickly toward a tree, and rather than hitting the tree as I normally might, I made a tiny course adjustment early enough that I easily cleared the tree. Not a last minute swerve, either, just a tiny correction. Little differences that result in a greatly different outcome. Nothing more complex than me catching myself doing stuff that I’ve always done but haven’t always caught myself doing. 

Wide awake, I sat and did zazen for 15 minutes. I was pleased with my focus, normally it knocks me out at the end of a day, and while it should have bugged me, I found it pleasing to be distracted by laughter instead of stress or anger or frustration. I caught myself chuckling and snickering at the ridiculousness of it all during and after my meditation. I’d caught a little glimpse of how funny life really is and how silly my own actions are even when I’m not being silly. My half-asleep wife wanted to know why I was snickering, and I couldn’t quite get the words out to explain how funny it struck me to see how seriously I take myself in such matters as dog night-peeing, or the weird fun I was experiencing at having caught myself in it.

So it’s been a full night. Face-coughing, dog pee, rage, laughter, meditation, humidification, Children’s Placebos, a mini-satori, and now blog-rambling. Maybe I can get some sleep now.

I didn’t know what to expect.

She’s just up the block, and my wife Anette went early to help with some of the setup. I took my daughter up, I just pushed her up the street about a mile on her little trike – it’s got a handle to prevent her from swerving into traffic, so it’s no big chore.

When we got there, our friend’s house had a subtle incense and had been really worked out since I’d seen it last. She was finally starting to look like she’d moved back in, tasteful artwork and little Buddhist trappings. One large corner was set up with a carpet and some cushions and facing a little shrine-like setup with a couple statues of various Buddhas. Maybe 12 other people came, mostly severe looking older people who turned out to be incredibly nice as we all met each other. People were milling about and talking to one another for maybe 15 minutes until the monks arrived in a big van.

After some brief setup and logistics with the host, the monks set up; they arranged themselves in 2 rows and sat cross-legged facing the shrine. They had red robes, not saffron, and short-cropped hair. Most of them had wooden prayer beads wrapped around one arm. They distributed bowls of flower petals and rice and settled in.

Their leader asked if it was OK to begin after they’d sat for a few moments and grounded. He started with some throat-singing, the rest of the group followed closely after, and a chill went down my spine. I hadn’t expected it, and I’d never seen it live. I could see the people immediately around me and their eyes all widened for a moment. My daughter looked up at me and smiled. I have recordings of Tuva singers and similar music, and by dumb coincidence I’d been playing some the day before and she wasn’t shocked or surprised.

The ritual took maybe 30 minutes. It’s a little hard to judge because time suspends when you witness something amazing, and I didn’t do any kind of before/after checking. They went through several styles of singing covering different prayers with different functions, threw some flower petals in the air, some rice, etc. I couldn’t describe it, but it’s one of the most powerful things I’ve seen in recent memory. In the jaded West, we’ve largely lost sight of the idea that words can have power and sounds can have power. It would appear that they still can. The singing filled the room in a strange, otherworldly kind of way. If I spoke to someone in that same room in a normal speaking voice and volume, the sound would clearly have come from me and toward that person; a little room ambience from the concrete floor, etc., but no confusion as to where the sound came from and was going. But with the singing, it surrounded us and came from everywhere. It was amazing. During the moments where I could shut out worrying about my daughter fidgeting and noticing the dog digging outside and the cool horse photos behind the monks, there was something electric in the room. Subtle. Tangible.

Afterwards, the lead monk explained what they’d just done. They had started with a ritual for invoking the powers of good; they had followed with mantras to channel positive energy and good fortune on the house and those within it. That sort of thing. As a Tibetan, he spends his days across the border in India and has evidently picked up some Indian accent. “Thee first prayer was meant to summon the forces of good and so on and so forth.” For someone dealing with lofty spiritual issues and coming from a presumably impressive level of spiritual development, he used a lot of “so and and so forth”s, which was charming. If he had been from the US, he would have added “and stuff.” “We were using our mantras to manifest the power of universal good for the protection and health of this dwelling and those who are present in it. And stuff.” A serious topic treated as though it was as natural as eating or breathing. Serious, but no big deal.

It was yet another of those experiences that was powerful, but I can’t say exactly how. My eyesight wasn’t healed, I didn’t leave with any problems magically solved, nobody and nothing levitated, I didn’t see colors or witness anything overtly miraculous. But it was powerful nonetheless. I keep having powerful experiences that are hard to describe and that have little-to-no commercial value; there’s a message or lesson in there for me, when you start to notice connections between things they’re no longer coincidental. Maybe the message is that I should experience life firsthand more and think about experience much less. I don’t know. I have a tendency to use my “thinking time” to multitask, and it doesn’t do me any favors. In this instance, I find myself pulled toward the odd an personal question, “This rare spiritual experience was fantastic, but how does it help me sort out my day job?” Aaron Copland once said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. An interesting notion, probably, but when you try to tie basically different experiences or ideas together, a little something gets lost. So I’ll take it for what it was, whatever that means. And I’ll work on my day job problem separately, maybe that’s a start.

On further reflection, that’s definitely part of the message. The fact that I can describe more of what I like about a sunset or musical performance doesn’t mean that I’ve mastered “saying what I think.” I can use all the dramatic adjectives and adverbs in my limited vocabulary to wax poetically about my monk experience, and at most I can convey my enthusiasm, or perhaps trigger someone else’s ostensibly similar feelings about an ostensibly similar experience. Even that’s shaky; if you describe the new Batman movie to someone who’s only seen Tim Burton’s version from back in the day, it’s hard to say that you shared a similar experience even though they share an awful lot of surface elements. Even trying to know if you shared an experience with someone on the same night at the same event is sketchy; you might have seen something life-changing, and I might have been distracted by work. So my frustration at not finding words to capture my Tibetan monk experience is misleading; I can’t describe a sunflower any better, but I’ve allowed myself to think I can. Madness. Ego. My real frustration is at having the limits of my ability to communicate brought into focus for a moment, monks or sunsets.

Do you see the same red that I see? We may never know. There are words and there are experiences, and maybe there’s not any way to ever cross between them without changing something in the process. Doesn’t mean that we can’t try to bridge the gap, even knowing that we can’t succeed, but maybe it’s important to understanding that there’s even a gap to begin.

Anyone who knows me knows that I don’t get a lot of enjoyment out of the work I do to make a living. (That’s comically understated to take it easy on anyone who doesn’t know me who reads this.) I’ve had what most people describe as midlife crises since I was roughly 16. This time, it’s going a little differently, and it’s partly because of the still-novel practices of mindfulness and meditation.

First, I sleep better. I’m a “mind is always going type” to frequently ridiculous degrees, and taking that down a notch, even when it’s only a little successful, has been a big deal. And when I sleep better, I’m more effective at my day gig, and that leaves me with a tiny bit more energy at the end of the day for “other” stuff. (Like everything else in my life – music, family, photography, reading, sleeping, shopping, walking the dogs, cutting of various nails and hairs.) And that leads to small, but important, footholds on improving all those other areas. And by improving some of those other areas, I’m more likely to feel like I’m moving toward improving how I make my living, and the circle is complete.

Second, when I confront stresses, trying to be mindful helps to circumvent my usual overthinking and amplifying of the stress. Rather than taking a molehill and spiralling it into that proverbial mountain, I’ve gotten a little better at stripping away the emotions and looking at things for what they are. “What’s REALLY happening here?” If I’m stressed about work, maybe it’s about a hard deadline, and the deadline itself isn’t stressful, it’s the knowledge that if I don’t make it, I might get a gentle scolding that I don’t want. Since I never, ever, miss deadlines, it works out that I’m spending energy worrying about nothing. Right here, right now, I have a cup of tea, the sun’s out, I hear birds, and it’s all good - moment right here is pretty damned fine. So I can let go of the future stress a little more easily and take care of the present a little better, which leads to an even smaller chance that the bad or stressful outcome will ever come true. It’s the opposite of a vicious cycle, it works out very well.

With music, it’s helped me buckle down and start and finish stuff. I protect myself from certain things by being too perfectionist to ever let most stuff I work on be seen by anyone. Now, I’m getting a little better at shutting out the games I play with myself and instead participating more completely in the process of working on music. And when it works, I’m happy enough to see myself getting stuff semi-finished that I don’t really consider or worry about how it’s “seen” by others. Sure, I can go back and fix things I hear later, but letting things out there as they are vs. sitting on them until they’re totally perfect is a big difference for me. Sure, it would be great to come up with some stuff that people found out about and liked. But I start stuff for myself, so maybe there’s enough incentive in there to finish it for myself, too. I never would have controlled whether someone liked what I work on anyway, so I’m not letting myself put energy into somehow trying to make sure anything I do is likeable.

My latest stuff sound boring? Weird? Unfocused? Too focused? Too jazzy? Not jazzy enough? Too busy? Too slow? Too fast? Could be, any of it. But I do know that with anything I’ve posted, I had fun making it, and that’s a pretty good place to come from. If I write an opera next year, or score a Hollywood feature, or play piano at a bar, or create a ringtone for the local drycleaner, the stuff I learn now will have had some role in shaping future-me, and anyway, it’s pretty hard to worry about doing the things that your self is telling you to do.

By working to create even the tiniest bit of extra space in my life, important, good, new things seem to be sprouting almost on their own. The strangest thing about it is that it’s all been here all along; peace, mindfulness, life. It’s like spending 20 years looking for the greatest book ever written, and when you finally find one that meets your criteria, it had been one that was on your own bookshelf, unread, the whole time. Nothing has actually changed in my life, everything that was good before is good now, everything that was bad before is still bad. But the small shifts in how I relate to it all have felt monstrous, and I can’t wait to see what this week, next week, next month, next year, and 10 seconds from now bring into my life.

So we’re trudging along, the air is crisp, it’s probably 18 degrees without the breeze, and there’s the amazing moonlight. Even though my dirt road has been pretty well travelled by people coming home from work, the breeze has redistributed the powdery snow and it’s almost smooth again. The hills around here and the scraggly high desert bushes on them are clearly visible jutting out of the snow, and people are all burning pinon and juniper, there’s a distinct and pleasing smell to wood fires here.

And I had this strange, almost past-life experience, it came on slowly and left slowly so it’s hard to pinpoint. But suddenly became aware that I knew that I’d seen the same moon before in the distant past and was looking at it in a memory with an unfamiliar reverence. I had a weak but clear impression of wearing furs or heavy skin garments and knowing that “back home” there was a roaring fire waiting and I was looking forward to it; my only impression of “back home” was a dark, cozy space with a big fire, not a lot of other details because it was sofamiliar and didn’t even warrant closer scrutiny any more than you examine every detail of your coat before you put it on. I was aware more and more of an incomplete but detailed memory of a time I’ve never lived in, just at the edge of awareness like when you can almost remember the dream you were having right before you woke up. Something about heavy boots, and of having drunk some kind of sweet fermented beverage before I’d gone into the cold. (I want to call it mead, although I’ve never had mead.) I’m surrounded by low, dark houses and  powdery untouched snow in real life, I picture almost the same scene in the back of my mind but with thatch roofs and different trees more or less superimposed – maybe like when you meet a teacher from your past in a grocery store; you can see the person standing right there in front of you, but you know them most intimitely in another environment so you can also vividly remember that other environment. Hard to explain. In my memory, I’m not sure why I’m out walking, but it’s lighthearted, I’m not hunting or hunted and as much as I’m enjoying being out, I’m looking forward to getting home where it’s warm. No names, no people, no idea about some daytime job. There’s a dog barking in the background and wind, that could be here and now or the memory just as easily. Just a little memory that’s comfortably my own and at the same time absolutely foreign.

It was not exactly vivid, but there were lots of distinct impressions. Not a deja vu, more like a presque vu, the feeling of almost, but not quite remembering something; in modern terms, I didn’t remember anything of value, no dates, no map names, nothing, but in an older part of me, I remembed what would have been just one of those pleasant moments like watching the sun goes down or smelling freshly cut grass on a spring day, those moments where you’ve stopped your internal dialogue for just a moment and are genuinely in the moment. A pleasant walk in the snow on a crisp night, knowing that I’d be in the warmth of home soon but also enjoying the moonlight and the kind of private moment that I have so few of here in the present.

Kind of nutty. Anyway, think about that when you’re trying to tell your friends how “Dungeons and Dragons” isn’t affecting your kid in any way. Maybe I’ve lived many lives before and an almost-familiar moment from one slipped close to consciousness for some reason. Maybe I just watched Return of the King one too many times. Hell, maybe I’ve had a stroke. But it was an uncommon couple moments, I’m much more of a deja vu kind of guy.

Gotta go. Simpsons are on.