Meditating and Charlie Hebdo

Grey and green outside, like being underwater.  Absolutely still.

Not 100% on my New Years Resolutions (I had a second bowl of salad for lunch today which, considering the size of my bowl isn't as harmless as it sounds), but am being more consistent with the meditating.  The only way to improve is to keep at it. 

But difficulty arises from an unexpected direction.  Chattering monkey mind is one thing.  Suspect with time I'll get a handle on it and be able to focus more effectively for more than a nano-second.  But Restless Body Syndrome is something else again.  Anyone who has ever experienced Restless Leg Syndrome will understand what I mean; that irresistable urge to move the legs to relieve an uncomfortable impossible to ignore feeling of itchiness/creepy crawliness..

That's what I'm experiencing at the deeper end of meditation but it's not confined to my legs.  My entire body, including my brain, is awash with this most miserable of sensations.  Other times the discomfort has been so intense that I've quit the meditation.  Today I decided to see it through, no matter how awful it felt.  There must be a coming through this to the other side.  If there is I didn't make it today.  I held on, poised between that feeling of being in a meditation and that yearning awareness for the end-of-session chime to go off.  The chime sounded but I was no closer to the other side than I was at the beginning. 

Would like to know what it is  and why it is happening.  Feel like there must be some sort of breakthrough at the end.

Like there must be some sort of breakthrough with the human species.  Late yesterday afternoon, during the daily whippet walk, I stood in a hollow made green by looming trees, and listened to the sawtoothed drone of cicadas  punctuated by the sharp melodious crack of a whipbird.  While the three of us stood there listening, absorbing the feeling of  Aliveness which surrounded us, a black butterfly with red epaulettes bounced on invisible air currents across the road.  Life, beautiful LIFE surrounds us.  Paradise for the price of awareness yet we insist on strapping bombs to 10 year old girls to blow up shoppers at a market place in Nigeria, or shoot cartoonists whose sense of humour is the schoolboy humour of Mad Magazine made political.    The only danger the cartoonists represented was the danger to good taste.  Sure their cartoons are offensive.  So is porn or a badly made omelette.  Big deal. 

But that's not the purpose of this violence.  It is to instill fear, so that no place ever feels secure again.  Happily over a million copies of Charlie Hebdo are being printed this issue.  I would love to blanket the world with the offensive images.  More than that I would love to find a way to laugh directly at ISIL.  Evil can't stand humour.  It robs it of its power.  Guns kill, humour, satire and belly laughs disembowel.