Tranquility of Space

I have been working on our other sit-down exercises this week, but this afternoon I decided to practice the “deep tranquility of space” as my “walking around” exercise.  However, when I walked outside, I noticed it was quite windy; gusts of wind pushed on me and tossed my hair, and made the leaves around me dance with a loud whooshing.  At first, this felt like an “impediment” to the practice, but then I became cognizant of the clear open sky, and the invisibility of the wind itself, and these things enabled me to drop into a sense of space that was clear and undisturbed by the wind or any of the other objects around me.  At first I was aware of space as a field “in” which the wind and tree branches moved, but this shifted as I “expanded” the sense of space through an intensification of its felt presence.  Then space was a simple, bright, clear allowance of this teeming and jostling thickness of phenomena.  The expansion brought this sense of space into my body and also into my thoughts, of inner spaces, so that I was aware of layers of form and being (thoughts, sensations, perceptions, and textures) which overlapped and seemingly interpenetrated without obstruction.  As I intensified this awareness, precision emerged as the very rapid, complex lines and flows of this seething messiness of form upon and in form, upon and in form.