Martin LeFevre: Following the Water

It’s about 45 degrees Celsius; I sit in deep shade with my feet in the creek. Some kids throw rocks at the iron footbridge a couple hundred meters upstream, but despite the heat and noise, meditation ignites.

A short, slow walk leaves me feeling overheated, so I grab a towel from the car and walk down to the creek. Approaching the site, I hear a hawk’s piercing cry. Reaching the water’s edge, I see the raptor sitting on a low branch overhanging the stream.

Walking toward it, with rubber sandals cushioning my feet from the rocks on the streambed, the hawk doesn’t fly away. Each step brings me a little closer, and soon, to my surprise, I’m standing directly under it, just a few feet away. It looks hot too, and swivels its head to look at me, shrieking all the while.

The hawk’s eyes are incredibly intense, and its claws are huge. They dangle over the small branch like daggers, ready to be driven into flesh at a moment’s notice. If the raptor wanted to, it could probably do me some serious damage, I think. It turns nonchalantly toward an opening in the foliage on the branch, but doesn’t fly away until I stumble slightly on a rock.

I walk upstream and lay down in the water, letting the slow current carry me back to the place where the hawk was perched. The water is tepid, but refreshing. Holding my breath, branches, leaves, and sky pass by in slow motion.

With my ears under water, and moving with the current, there is no sound. Though the creek is shallow, my feet and torso don’t touch the stones. Everything dissolves in the movement and water, including me. Is this what it feels like to die a good death? (Not that I’m going to kick off anytime soon; I plan to live to a healthy 100.)

My feet come to rest against a small rock dam people have laboriously constructed, and for a quarter hour I lay there floating in the water. At one point I sense someone looking at me, but don’t sit up. Looking down the emerald stream, I feel delightfully disoriented by the immersion.

The next day, another very hot one, a friend is driving down one of the main thoroughfares in this town of 100,000, wondering if she should get the car washed. Some guy drumming up business motions her in. The woman behind the counter engages her in small talk about the heat.

³I didn’t want to go out, but my four year old daughter asked to go to the creek yesterday afternoon. We walked down to a picnic site and saw a man lying in the stream on his back. My daughter said, ŒI want to do that.’’

My friend asked what the man looked like, and confirmed that I was the one they saw. The woman went on to say they went to another site, where the little girl laid down in the creek. ³I held her hand as she happily floated in the water,’ the mother said, ³and at one point she gleefully exclaimed, ŒI’m just like the man.’’

We never know the lives we touch when we don’t care what people think, and ³return and become like children.’ But as we get older, it’s easy to become top-heavy and world-weary. The same old patterns and the same old thinking are repeated over and over again. Underlying assumptions aren’t questioned, because our egos, and livelihoods, depend on maintaining the philosophical status quo.

Ruts of mind and weariness of heart aren’t inevitable however. But what does it mean to grow old well? The body inevitably slows down and wears out, though if one takes care of it, one need not age before one’s time. But does the brain need to age at all?

Our brains automatically record experiences. Therefore without right observation and attention (which are the essence of meditation), mental and emotional memories accumulate. In colloquial terms, the Œbaggage’ of adult life piles up.

Spiritual growth is not a positive movement, but a negative one. Negating the false, the true is. One grows not by virtue of addition, but subtraction.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments

© Scoop Media