Pink Linguini

Today was the first day I was able to meditate in the sitting room since it got re-painted.

The spare bedroom in my house serves as my sitting room, my meditation space, my home zendo. The walls of the room have been covered with a hideous pink-stripe-on-white wallpaper since I moved in (the former owners had used it as their daughter's nursery). Sitting in that room, facing the wall (Soto style), staring at the pink-striped wallpaper would cause an interesting stereogram illusion: after a while, the pink stripes seemed to float in three dimensional space above the white background, and even seemed to have a texture and thickness of their own, sort of similar to that of linguini.

It was just a trick of the eyes, or more precisely, the mind, and if I changed the focal length of my stare, the stripes would snap back into two-dimensional space, sort of like a Magic Eye picture when you stop looking at it "right."

Amusing, but ultimately distracting. It was a diverting milepost on the way to shikantaza ("just sitting"), and it had no significant meaning other than it was an experience I had to go through on my way to meditation, just like having to pass your own mailbox every day regardless of the length of the trip you're taking.

But the wallpaper was also badly peeling and it looked awful, so I had to get rid of it to sell the house. Last week I had contractors come in and strip it off, prime the walls and paint the whole room flat white. I finished off the job by placing a one-dollar, white wall plate over the light switch (bringing the $1,639 project up to $1,640). No more floating pink linguini (not a bad name for a band: "The Floating Pink Linguini").

But for several days the fumes from the paint were too strong for me to sit in there, so I held my home practice off until today, when the smell had finally abated a bit. This morning, I set the timer for 50 minutes (Antaiji style, to make up for the lost time), and sat facing my new white wall.

It's amazing how much the mind can do with a white wall, given enough time. Visual consciousness, if not stimulated with something new to perceive, will start to alter its perception of a bare white wall out of sheer boredom. Despite the priming and the sanding, there is still some texture to the wall, and the mind magnified the subtle ridges and crevices until they looked like mountains and gorges. And as the room is lit with natural light and today was a windy day, the brightness of the wall increased and decreased as clouds darted in front of and and away from the sun. At one point, as a particularly thick cloud (I imagine) passed before the sun, the white wall literally appeared black to me, and at other times, when fully illuminated, it would strobe back and forth between white and a shade of grey.

But this is just the visual consciousness being restless due to a lack of fresh input. Soon, I was able to ignore this distraction and just concentrate on my breath, until I was ready to let go of even that, and just sit, cross-legged, facing the wall.

After 50 minutes, the timer went off and I slowly got up (my feet had fallen asleep, so I had to stand up a little gingerly). Refreshed and relaxed, I felt ready for the day.