This is a photo from inside the old slaughterhouse. When I was a kid this is where the pigs and cattle were brought to be turned into food for the four families that depended on the farm for sustenance.
On the door you can see the brand that we used on our cattle: quarter-circle, M N. The mark of ownership, for those times when fences fail and herds intermingle, and for the time of sales.
When I made this trip last year, Easter morning I drove up into the pasturelands in the foothills above the farm. As a kid, I spent hours there. On my way out, as I was closing the gate, a youngish man and his son drove up on a four-wheel get-about to inquire as to my business here so close to their own land. (It seems they'd bought the farm of our nearest neighbor, Alec Popp.) I recognized in his face the look of ownership. The scowl of the Papa Bear defending his den and his brood. I'm sure I threw that look at a few people myself over the years I'd been here. Suddenly I was struck by the absurdity of the idea that I or my family ever "owned" anything. In retrospect it's clear that our grandfather paid someone so that he might live and work on this land. This right was passed on to his sons, who in turn passed it on to those sons who wanted it. And now that generation probably will have no one to pass it on to and it will be sold to another future grandfather, who may one day stand here at this same gate, posturing his ownership for the sake of some other interloper. "Ownership" at any point in this ongoing equation is at most an illusion.
What does all this have to do with meditation and the Vedic world view?
Before I was a meditator, this land falling away from me meant there was something wrong in the world. Something wrong with me, or with my family, with the system, with God. I was at the mercy of an idea over which I had no control
As meditators, twice each day we contact a truth that is beyond and above all else. All ideas, all illusions. Of ownership of land, of money, power, friends, family, even of ourselves. In meditation we experience nature itself, and us as at-one-with. From that vantage the land is mine as much as I am the land's, regardless of who holds the deed in the moment.
Today I will ask myself what would I be if I owned nothing. I will contemplate an idea of freedom based in what I don't have, rather than in what I have.
Slaughterhouse Door with Brand, Young's Point, Montana
