This pack is massively heavy. Seriously, it must be twenty-five pounds of blankets alone. Sand blown in the wind sticks to my sweat and I glance eastward to the Algerian Plateau, rising dark on the horizon, it sounds so foreign, it has that mystery. Dunes spread beneath me shine in black and red contrast as the sun lowers in the west.
"Vous-allez ou?"
I look over, surprised. A young Berber about my age draped in an aging blue turban has come up from the other side of the dune. He's leading a small entourage of tourists on an overnight camel excursion, I can see their dromedaries down below, they must be climbing this sandy ridge to see the sunset.
"Uh, I dunno really. Probably over there I guess," and I motion vaguely south.
"You what? You just you now? En seule?"
"Er, yeah just me. Should be fine."
He gives me a mystified look before I rage down the dune, plunge-stepping in red sand for three hundred feet, I can see tourist camel trains everywhere heading to camps for the night,
The ever-present southeast wind whips. I find the deepest bowl I can find beneath a steep dune, and throw my blankets down. Sandy bread and tomatoes for dinner, and I settle into all my clothes for a cold night.
The stars rotate bright above me in the clear Sahara air.
------------
"what kind of scientist would you want to be?" asks my Mom.
"I dunno. Maybe an Atlantologist, the people who study Atlantis or something," I respond.
It's the middle of a cub scout meeting, and I look over at Ethan. Wow he's so young.
"Yeah, me too I think," he says. I think about what if Ethan and I took a submarine...
Focus. Focus. Focus. Come back. Come on, man, you're here to...
I am walking up that dirt road to Salat again, all of a sudden Mohamed from Ouarzazate shows up with a camel. He's holding my surfboard from Taghazoute... what? We talk a moment before...
FOCUS. Foooooocus. The breath. In. Out. Stop thinking.
I have been in silence for eight days now, learning to tame the wildest animal -- my mind. I place my butt on a cushion, and listen to instructions. Then sit. Its a slow process, there is so much to unlearn. My eyes sit in blackness nearly nine hours a day, but my mind races with images. My ears hear only the subtle stirs of the other students in the meditation hall, but my mind is filled with music, song stuck in absurd repeat. Memories and daydreams come up from every season of my life, and in this remarkable inner access I lose focus. Often.
I see Blair about to take a massive fall half-way up El Cap. I'm belaying, I look down, I've forgotten my harness, I yell to give me a second while I sort this out, he frantically glances down...
Vipassana. To see as it really is, not as you would like it to be. To find peace in the acceptance of stark reality, whose constant change is the source of your suffering only when you want life to look "just like this" or stay that way. You realize you grip your vision of a better day with miserable conviction. You learn to let clingings and aversions lose their power over you, and the magic consequence is an acquired ego-lessness.
You lose ground in your mind as the center of attention. This somehow becomes a compassionate selflessness, filled with what Gautama called "lovingkindness," and it's mysterious to me. Yet I know enough of it to sit in amazement beneath a blooming cherry tree, covered in sunshine south of Montargis, France, my mind finally somewhat quieted, having forgotten myself entirely in the busy work of a hundred bees and a profound sense of all that is other in my world.
Focus.
