meditation

The World Outside the Mind

It’s the fifth week? Tenth week of the pandemic? Who knows. I wake and put on water for tea and sit down at my computer again. The world is contained within the window of my screen every day now, separate from me. My friends call occasionally from their own separate windows. The window itself facilitates our stilted, delayed connections. Before all this it was just the eye which mediated, now it’s this window. There is no coming together, drifting apart, only separation. I’ve come to love my neighborhood. The magnolias, blooming pears, crabapples, and tulips are the only things that seem to me both separate from me and tangible. They’re right here. I believe they exist. They suggest to me that there might be more than just my own mind.