Monday, November 5, 2007

A Place for Meditation Inside the Caucus Race

I worked for a landscaper during the spring of my junior year in high school. I remember being captivated by the array of colors and shapes and the play between order and chaos in the bedded jungle of his front yard. It was a rather chance occurrence, my finding work with this man. But I learned so much from him and a world of dirt opened before my fingertips. Building a garden can be deeply moving. Stalks and shoots sprout because of the care we give them and “we suddenly glimpse what the world would look like if it were the work of a single hand” (721). The power of creation is profound. I am the author of a verdant genesis in my backyard in which I cause “to spring up from the soil every kind of tree” (741C), vegetable, and flower that delights me.


My very own backyard jungle.

It is a human instinct to try to perceive God in the world around us, and I believe also that it is our natural tendency to occasionally perceive ourselves as God. I see myself as at least a co-creator of my garden. “It’s a human instinct to try to create perceptual order wherever we look,” (721) that is, to find a kind of visual, aesthetic God in the natural world. When we do not read meaning into objects, situations, places, we tend to instead find callousness and mechanism operating our world. Without beauty or order or God we choose the darker interpretation of Forster’s words, “It means nothing but itself” (731). Our right brains want to find patterns and to make connections, so perceiving objects that have no greater meaning than themselves is disheartening.

Forster satirizes the constant race toward, well, we don’t really know where, a race accelerating on the well-greased axels of progress. We may be chasing our tales for all we know, but it doesn’t matter as long as we continue to become “better… better… better” (732). Alice runs a mad caucus race, which is of course done in a circle. It is a satire of political races in nineteenth century Britain. Forster makes the same comment about modernity in which “everyone is always trying to out-distance [his] companion,” yet admittedly there is “no advantage in doing this if the place [leads] nowhere” (731), which it doesn’t. This same absurd race is being run in our world literature class. Our Professor disseminates regular reminders about points leaders and proudly signs each of his emails with “The Caucus Race Supervisor.” The points go nowhere, the heat of the race is certain to keep you dry, and if one were able to witness the race from the outside, I’m certain it would be as laughable as any Wonderland race run by French mice and skeptical ducks.


An adobe wall that one of my friends built in Memorial Park specifically as a space to find one's self in nature. A retreat semicircle to sit and feel the earth.

Meditation is one way that we can find peace amidst the caucus race mayhem, and a way, if we desire, to bring God, or order, into our daily lives. I have often had my most meditative experiences in nature, wandering the sandy pine tree woods north of Houston, walking the red earth of New Mexico, or sitting cross-legged on a bolder breaking the fast current of a mountain stream. Nature meditation is a “bulwark against chaos” (251). Visiting Pied Beauty Ranch was one such fortification against the mounting stress of classes. With my back against a young leaning cedar back in the dead woods, I was able to release. Simply holding in my awareness the elegant simplicity of an overhead arching branch deepened my breath and refreshed my love for the beauty of this world. Finding intimacy in such a place is “a fundamental human defense against loneliness” (263).


The sweeping New Mexico topography, a land who's idyllic rawness touches me deeply.



If we forget to see the garden that blooms around us, if the caucus race sweeps us up and runs us over, the importance of self-love, release, nature, and meditation grows even greater. Find a quiet beautiful place to sit and admire it, feel gratitude for this place and all that you have. There are always more points to try to score. But where are you, the person who thinks it so vital that these points be had? I am on a patio outside a campus café, squinting my eyes at my laptop screen and feeling the hard concrete of the bench beneath my butt; thank you, thank you, thank you. And breathe.