March is here.  A beautiful gentle morning light flows through the eastern window I face in my morning meditation.  Light comes earlier and earlier each morning.  The dark days of winter will soon give way to the birth of spring. 

Thoughts of open space come to me.  I remembered when I had moved back to Waimea to be closer to my family.  My father suffered a heart attack, and I wanted to spend time with him again.  I had been living in Los Angeles for a year.  It's the second largest city in America, and the unrelenting traffic, constant noise and asphalt really got to me.  I needed peace, quiet and green.  I was 38 years old.

So we moved to the Big Island into our new home at the edge of a small rural subdivision off of Mana Road.  Our back yard faced magnificent Mauna Kea with miles of pasturelands going up to its base.  Whenever I paused to look at the mountain, I almost always took a deep breath.  I was deeply affected by the vast mountain and the space around it.  It was especially magical at sunset.  Over the years I saw it turn amazing colors of orange, magenta, pink and many more colors I had not seen before.  And I also was initially struck by the "deafening" silence of the place.

My father loved Mauna Kea.  He had been a hunter who often went up the mountain to hunt for wild game for his family and friends.  He worked as an auto mechanic running a busy garage to provide for his wife and five children.  The mountain became his refuge and a time to be quiet and to listen. He said that he slept best up there.  It refreshed him and enabled him to meet the rigors of daily life filled with warmth, humor and kindness.   I learned from my father that Nature is healing and essential to maintain balance.

Today I live in Oak Park, a suburb right next to Chicago, the third largest American city.  Although Oak Park has many trees and large house lots, Nature's open space is missing.

Fortunately sitting meditation cultivates openness and it provides for me the open space that I find so healing. 

When beginning to practice meditation seriously, you start to notice a kind of  "gossip" going on in your mind.  Poetically we can call this a "din in the forest."  We all create so many narratives about our every day lives.  It's a habit that we can be addicted to.   I don't mean that thinking and reasoning aren't useful.  But ruminating about past events or future possibilities robs us of the present reality.  It causes us to suffer. 

For example the din in the forest gets loud, when our inner critic gives us a thrashing for not being good enough.  Or after a dispute, we create and embellish stories to tell ourselves how right we were and how wrong the other person was. That cycle of elaboration can go on and on.  That's the endless wheel of samsara (suffering) where we work ourselves up into a state of frenzy or down into depression.

There's a way to step off of the wheel of suffering and break the habitual cycle of mental gossip - the din in the forest - that does not serve us.  Meditation.  Practicing meditation means deep listening to ourselves.  It's an opportunity to simply be with yourself - fully accepting all of your faults and foibles.  It's being with your thoughts and emotions as they arise and not doing anything except bearing witness to them - neither changing them nor indulging them - just silently sitting with them.  It is one of the most loving things you can do for yourself.   

Here's to spring, meditation and openness!