Slipstream

I was driving through northern California last week, listening to a podcast about Buddhist meditation. It was a great way to dwindle away the long, dry miles of the Sacramento Valley, especially since the speaker didn’t talk like your typical Zen-centered facilitator. A cowboy poet would have been more like it, or cowboy koan-ist, as it were, except that he sounded more Brooklyn than Dallas, with a sprinkling perhaps of the great Midwest.

I particularly appreciated his discussion about his own experiences with meditation—how it had helped to bring about a sense of happiness and balance and equanimity and connectedness to the world around him. Meditation, he believes also made him more intuitive, which he thinks is a real cool thing for guys. “I was never intuitive being a guy,” he said. “It didn’t make any sense to me. Why would anyone want to have feelings like that?”

Fremont Troll in Seattle

When he said this, he spoke with the same easy drawl he’d been using all along, a way of talking that somehow emphasized his roots as a real man, despite his having slipped into a more spiritual and enlightened persuasion. (more…)