One day in mid-Winter, I ate the passing storm until it spat back at me.

Sitting in seiza atop a field of grass and sandspurs, I sighed under the beating droplets that form a salvo of Adam's ale spread over Placer County’s dead brush and dry conservatism. My Renshi instructed me with a task many years ago: square breathing. Fifteen in, fifteen hold, fifteen out, fifteen hold. I can’t tell you how long I sat there, drenched in the pitter-patter of recycling. My v-neck was sealed tight against my chest and my sweatpants dragged on bending blades. It was glacial lukewarmth. I couldn’t feel the fingertips as they lay on my thighs, splayed out and downwards in a grounding stance. I was tense. I’m always tense when meditating. My body’s innate response to non-motion is tightening in all faculties. Teeth, grit. Hands, clench. Toes, flex. Mind, race. The breathing slowed each of these bonds to lethargic pulses of carnality between vacant reverie. One moment, I’m awake in the rain, and the next, I'm Schrödinger's kitty. The pitch black shunned my eyes, the stuffy nose banned my smell, the hydration satiated my mouth, leaving only the monotonous drone of water to envelope my remaining senses.

I’m a susceptible soul with a body always swimming. Moving, growing, fluid. I dash around, gesticulate, and stim like there’s no tomorrow. My swamped gourd is overwhelmed by a puddle’s retort. A single voice cuts through the butter, but many suffocate me in dairy. Picture a radio. Now picture a motorboat. Now picture a raspy teenager with a pimply voice ranting incessantly about their B-grade lacrosse team. Amalgamate all those sounds together, and that’s the public space, baby! That’s what burns my skin, rising hot and parched to the Heavens.

It was raining in Loomis, California. It never rains here. My house roosted adjacent to a forest filled to the brim with poison oak and scratchy foliage, which sopped the primordial soup from our gravel roads. Parents weren’t home and I was bored. Meditation is just boredom without caring about boredom. Spontaneity kicked in.

The grass was withered to Hell. There’s something calming about dehydration drowned in water. The feisty beige and spattered green flicked my legs affectionately, bringing one’s mind to an adoring crowd. I smiled. Then I remembered not to smile. The canopy overhead was dauntingly docile. It’s scary how unscary plants can be. They were poor simulacra of flora, with gnarled feet and pathetically twiggy appendages that barely reached beyond their thick neck. Around me, their fingernails littered the Earth. Above me sprawled the sky. It was tenebrous by design: the stratus formed a bladder that squeezed every last drop of piss from its holistic organ. In Placer County, you can’t consistently see the stars. You have to squint hard past the dimming azure to see the faintest twinkle, and often enough, those are simply your eyes playing tricks on you. When I looked to those opaque clouds, I saw brilliant tusks. Wrangle yourself, darling. I closed my eyes and screeched the iron-ringed drapes to a shackle.

Fifteen in, fifteen hold, fifteen out, fifteen hold.

Rain screamed and wind pestled and grass pealed and Earth groaned, and I was snipped from the material. Like rotted skin against live bone, tension sloughed away. Teeth became the welcoming doorway for unconscious breath, hands the doughty roots, toes the stone foundation, and mind… a void. The world might’ve fallen. Everyone might’ve ceased. I became a hole in the whole, an incongruence in true harmony. I found that special silence in the cacophony. The eye of the storm. While those trees were shredding and those stars were fiddling, I was more natural than the surrounding phenomena. I was natural. I was ethereal.

Fifteen in, fifteen hold, fifteen out, fifteen hold.

For a single second, I was totality.

Fifteen in, fifteen hold, fifteen out, fifteen hold.

God, this is so boring.

Eyes flashed open, revealing Loomis. Eggplant Festival. Megachurches. Not a soul in sight. The creaking chill of wet Winter caught and curdled my focus, shivering me down to the spine; almost as cold as Summer swims in Donner Lake. In the distance, excerpts of my house peeked through the vegetation: the hammock, the other hammock, the oatmeal-esque plaster. A roof sounded mighty appealing. Better than this lame-ass exercise.

I stretched, flinging my arms open with a hearty, unwary yawn.

Bam!

Recoiling from the sharp blow incurred on the back of my hand, I squeaked out a short noise—some nonsense that vaguely resembled a trilling curse—and floundered into a loose guard. Heart panting. Lying on the squelchy ground, frantically straining its wings and hopping away on minuscule sprigs, was my secular destiny. The brute that slugged me.

A bird.

Arteries blasted music through me, quelling rain in a wrap of flushed crimson. I stared at that mute warbler, dumbfounded. The perpetrator/victim was neon blue through dull goat-shaved scrub: a lightning bolt fashioned to smite a deficient meditator. While the waterlogged planet didn’t catch fire like it should’ve, I was aflame. What the everliving… Breath sporadicalled as the bird ruffled off residual human in flashes of feathers. It looked at me, that kismet thing, all greased and pointed like the second hand as it ticks into oblivion. It could’ve struck me down right then and there, this transient flutter-body in the ocean of Placer County. The hand stung no longer, but the bird had ripped flesh so completely that I was afraid of tearing into tears. Immortality never looked so colossal. I never felt so small.

The blue roc beat its wings. My heart galloped, my soul flapped, but my bones were gummed to Earth. Awestruck, I watched as it soared in a twirling arrow, shot like a rocket through the branches and into that drizzling infinity.

I was alone again.

And I broke down laughing, from giggles to snorts to painful belly-blows.

The night was arduous. I sat in bed for hours, staring up at the ceiling, drawn back to when the tattooing droplets, now pitter-pattering overhead, soaked my absent muse. I’m not a being in motion, which formal meditation can bind. I’m a being of motion, who exists as a vessel for liquidious kinesis. That bird, it knew. It moves without rhyme or reason, without thought or sight, without thinking of flying. It simply flies. I simply sprint. We flit in different directions, on different planes of existence, yet our paths intersected in a crash-landing. I failed my journey and it failed its immaculate aviation. In an instant, the dichotomy between transit and rest was flayed and ripped away, revealing the macrocosm of flight. It moved on. It probably forgot me by now. I didn’t.

I’m stuck.