coordinates: Upper West Side, NYC isolating in case this chest congestion turns out to be the dread ‘Rona. Send me healing vibes, please.
We continue with week 7 in the final 100 days of the year of becoming fully alive. We are HALFWAY through! Hooray!
This week’s meditation is about the power of the mind to analyze and translate so we can create maps of our human existence. Maps made in isolation without connection to our hearts and the hearts of others distract more than add to our navigational powers. We must reconnect those depths to have anything significant enough to be worth mapping in the first place.
transcript of meditation
Good morning. Every day we begin with a fresh and empty slate. Every day we begin with gratitude for this new start. Today we enter again into the mind, the vast territory of the void. As often as you remember, allow your breath to come in through the heart and rise all the way out past the top of your skull. — I sit between chaos and structure, I am the mapmaker. I am enfolded in solitude to balance these two opposite poles When I notice I am over-structured, I dip into the nourishing flood of emotion. When I notice I am over-emotional, I anchor myself in the sadness and emerge with new structure. When I feel myself as disoriented, I celebrate. I have annexed new territory to map. Good. Very good. I am located once again. I am the mapmaker. Though the gap between mind and heart seems at times wide it is my tool of calibration. How far apart they are tells me inescapable things I could not learn elsewhere. I map the territory of my mind with the data gleaned from all my senses, with intuition of my heart, with the instinct of my belly I am the mapmaker. The mapmaker will always have new maps to create and fascinating new territory to map. We burn our old maps as we release them with a prayer. We honor the mapmakers of old. We thank the ancients and ancestors, the stars, and star nations. We have mercy on ourselves for realizing where the errors were as we draw up new ones. I am the mapmaker. I don’t know if I have it. I do know I don’t have all the pieces. I never will. My map will always be lacking, limited by a limited world a limited perspective, limited data, limited analytic powers. And yet, and yet, the map maker is. And yet, and yet, I know we all have all the pieces. We have all the perspectives. We share all our data. We share all our maps for we are the mapmakers.
“When I feel myself as disoriented,
I celebrate.
I have annexed new territory to map.”
🔥❗️