A Thousand Summers

I’m not being creative tonight. I’m transcribing. I wrote this as a diary entry 5 years ago. It’s been waiting 5 years to be published.

Feb. 8, 2005

It’s February 8th in Virginia. What some would call the dead of winter. I just got back from my after-lunch walk. The temperature is 61º and it’s going to hit 70º today. That’s winter weather in Virginia. Freeze your ass one day, wear short sleeves the next day.

On days like this I enjoy walking the macadam paths of a nearby park. The warm sun, the warm air, remind me of a day in late spring, a harbinger of summer. I’ve seen many summers. So many. A thousand. Ok, you may think I’m crazy at this point, or at the least, that I’m not good at math. In fact, I am quite good at math. But I’ve seen a thousand summers. And I feel it through and through these days, down deep in my bones. I feel the approach of a thousand summers on planet Earth.

“You have been around through hundreds and hundreds of embodiments on this earth. You're not a first generation human being. You've had some female lifetimes and a lot of male embodiments, but I'm really surprised you're in a male embodiment in this lifetime, because you're still working on the feminine side of your own nature. You've been very skeptical in many of your lifetimes, and this one. You know a lot of things, but it is learning the feeling, the essence of it, to become one with it, is the next part of the journey.”

Walking, for me, is like meditation.  (I don’t mean the kind of meditation the swami teaches, and yes, I paid my money and I learned it and practiced it diligently, morning and evening, so I can say: yes, I’ve meditated, I do know what that – the swami’s brand of meditation – is all about.)

I walked for 30 minutes. Two and a half feet per stride, two strides per second. Multiply that by 60 seconds and again by 30 minutes. That’s nine thousand feet.  One point seven miles.  A person can think a lot of thoughts in one point seven miles. On a warm, sunny day in the dead of winter, after a thousand summers lived, one can think a lot of thoughts.