Meditation

A Course in Miracles says this world is a dream of judgment—judging is how we keep the dream going while we are asleep to our Reality. It also says the memory of God returns to the quiet mind, and that if we ever stop judging, we will awaken. Nice. But it hasn’t happened to me. Maybe because (and the following is the condensed version, believe me):

Today while I was walking the dogs, a man turned the corner. He carried an umbrella. A strange, anxious man talking to himself. I know who this man is, and I knew he would not look at me, we would not greet. I thought if I did not know him, I would be afraid of him, but I did know him. He is, in fact, a cousin to my cousin’s husband. I thought how strange that my cousin, who is not from here, married a man who is also not from here, and how I was not from here, but the husband’s cousin was from here, and now I am from here and how often I see the husband’s cousin, scurrying down the road and talking to himself. I thought how often in my family I feel as if I am from a foreign country and do not know the nuances of the language, and that this is not how I thought it would be when I was young, a pup in a tumbling litter, and how sometimes that makes me sad. I thought of my child who also knew the husband’s cousin, and how the husband’s cousin irritated my child, who once talked about it to my cousin and her husband, who seemed uncomfortable with my child's story, and how the cousin and her husband had never been around the husband’s cousin as much as my child had, so how would they know, but still you do not talk about people’s relatives, no matter how strange they are, and I wanted to protect my child and my cousin and her husband, and maybe even her husband's cousin. And then I thought my child was probably not coming home for Christmas again, and sometimes it seems as if everybody I know is from a foreign country, with an indecipherable language, which makes it me and not them, and….

Stop.

For each one of those thoughts I gave a minus (-) to life. So,

stop.

And then I was simply on the street with my three dogs. A man was turning the corner. He had an umbrella. He was talking to himself. The sky was gray.

A huge silence. And a huge space.

Which might be the memory of God.