5-19-19

SULPHUR YELLOW

Do you think that how you think affects what you think? I have been pondering this for a little while recently as I wonder what might be useful for the meditation classes I am leading. I have tried to emphasize that meditation is merely a form, a container, in which our minds get to wander and, at some point, settle. I point out what master gurus in meditation say about meditation being all about training attention. While it is somewhat difficult to construct such a container, it seems far easier than to confront what gets to fill it. When we let our bodies achieve a comfortable posture that is upright and true for us, and when we focus on following our breath or touching one hand against another without conceptualizing that touch, then our minds are available and open and it is common for that space to be filled with unpredictable thoughts, ideas, and emotions. It is almost as though we have prepared a random playground for our minds. And that is when some of the hard work of meditation begins.

I do think that it matters how we think. Is it spacious or cramped? Is it easy or difficult? Is it superficial or deep? Is it critical or passively accepting? However one might set one's mind to think makes a difference. I have made the point in class that meditation is one part of the meditation/mindfulness continuum, with mindfulness being the extension of a certain mindset in our everyday lives. The same idea about how one thinks in meditation being the portal to what one thinks applies equally to mindfulness. For instance, one can begin on the surface of things, noticing this or that, and then thinking can shift into deeper and deeper layers of thought when one becomes more curious about what it is that the senses have detected. Then, curiosity and inquiry engage and one is drawn into a realm where connections and interdependence of phenomena manifest.

So it was recently that I was attracted to all the early blooming flowers in the fields and the roadsides. I noticed that so many of them were bright yellow and blooming in large patches. When I looked more closely, I saw that there were dandelions in profusion and also smaller patches of Thermopsis rhombifolia, also known more commonly as the round-leaved golden pea (pictured nearby). It is one of the earliest flowers we see here in central Montana. I wondered why so many of them are such a bright yellow color and guessed that it was a property that attracted pollinators to them but I also discovered that the yellow color absorbs certain wavelengths of light energy for photosynthesis and also protects green chlorophyll from photodamage.

And I wondered how one would describe the penetratingly bright yellow color. I remembered reading about the history of color cataloging, most beautifully in a work by Patrick Syme based on the color schemes of Abraham Gottlob Werner (1749-1817), The Nomenclature of Colours (1814). A sheet of his book documenting yellow shades is pictured here. I learned that this little book was one of several hundred that accompanied Charles Darwin (1809-1882) on his voyage of the Beagle. These efforts to categorize and name colors and to document their geological origins (most pigments were originally derived from soil and rock sources) was akin to what Darwin intended to do on his journey of exploration. Naming and identifying has a long history in botany as well, most famously exemplified by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). Linnaeus was a botanist and physician who had a particular interest in mosses and lichens but managed to develop a system of binomial taxonomy for the nested hierarchy of kingdoms, classes, orders, genera, and species for all living things. It is important to point out that, just as I had been drawn to the pea flowers, so he had developed his systems of classification on what he could observe about the organisms he studied. Observation, noticing, is where most of us begin our thinking.

Naming and categorizing fits in nicely with our idea about how the world works. It is useful to have lists of things by which to order the observable facts, but sometimes drawing lines around things doesn't serve every purpose. Naming is a way of defining identity and it is certainly the route most of us enlist in our communications with one another and it is, in part, how we identify ourselves. So, categories establish boundaries and differences but they also box up our thinking in ways that hobble how we think. For instance, Linnaeus grouped man with the monkeys and apes in his taxonomy because that is how he observed their shared characteristics. But in his day that implied certain things about a world view that knocked humans off their exalted pedestal of exceptionalism and made what was considered an animal form close to God no more important than the primates.

Drawing lines around things, making borders and boundaries, is not the same thing as drawing lines from one thing to another across borders to demonstrate connections and cross-connections and what I think of as interdependence of all phenomena. I have found it useful to scatter words and phrases around a piece of paper and to see what relationships they have to one another. I call this a mind map and it is almost a random assortment of ideas, names, concepts—things I have noticed in the course of my travels and reading. It is a scatter of observations. From the scatter I attempt to see if there are any connections that make any sense or that might uncover a new way of seeing them. It is the new ways of connecting that are the most exciting and, for me, the most creative. The mind map is a different way of thinking. It is an attempt to reproduce in real time, in everyday life, what happens within the meditation container when the mind is let loose of its borders and boundaries and allowed to wander. It is an attempt to picture what I have observed in a different way. It is an effort to see things differently. It is a way to stretch my own thinking into new avenues and away from the rigidity that my routine thoughts usually assume.

It is often said that meditation as a form is useless. One sits and sits. But if one thinks of mindfulness as the creative offspring of the staid and quiet parent, meditation, then there is use to be made of the forms and borders of the meditative space. But there is also a shifting between parent and child, one changing in relationship to the other that is generative and powerful. There is an interdependence and cross-pollination. It is what is observed between a bright yellow flower and the bee. One partner is fixed and the other moves to and away, both depending on the other for life. And so it is for us and the bee when we eat an almond or other crop made possible by pollination. But just think of all the associations we can make in our rich lives that remind us of our privileges and our interdependence and for which we are not as grateful as we might be.

So, there is more to the Thermopsis rhombifolia than meets the eye, but what meets the eye is a magical and still undiscovered depth of existence gifted to us every spring. What do we call it that is more than a yellow flower?