Walking Meditation and Mellow Rock Gardening

On Saturday I led a meditation walk for a group from my temple. I have for some time been interested in the intersection between my love of the outdoors and my religious beliefs. I’ve also been involved with a Jewish meditation group, which in some cases draws upon kabbalistic tradition and in others outright appropriates or invents other ideas to create a Jewish meditation practice. I decided to combine all of these and do a Jewish walking meditation. Again, I didn’t invent this particular mash-up; I drew heavily on the writings of Rabbis Mike Comins, Jamie Korngold and Jeff Roth.

Nine people bet against the forecast of thunderstorms and showed up for the event (a winning bet, it turned out - the afternoon was unexpectedly sunny). After having a chance to ooh and ahh over a hickory horned devil caterpillar a ranger had just caught, our group off down a trail in River Bend Park alongside the Potomac to explore various meditative approaches – walking and stationary. I will not detail all what we did on our meditative shpatzir here. Rather, I’ll say that I was nervous about whether people were enjoying this (which was messing with my mindful awareness) until we got to a stopping point along the trail where we did some seated practices then shared a bit of how it was going. Listening and watching, I realized that not only were people into it, they were so into it that no one wanted to leave the beautiful spot we had chosen for our stop. The same thing happened when we sat down at some picnic tables at the end of our walk. After the silence of the walk, people were eager to talk and we wound up spending some time just lounging around by the river chatting. I certainly had no problem with this – lounging on and around rivers is one of my favorite activities.

Finally, people got on their way, leaving my friend David and to hit the river. While David and I had long known about each others interest in kayaking, we had never paddled together before. We put in at the boat ramp and headed upstream. Unfortunately you can’t get very far upriver before you start to run into riffles and rocks – not the ideal situation for a sea kayak. Still, we gamely explored various paths up the little rapids, ultimately successfully making our way further upstream. While the conditions on this section of the river are rocky, the views are awesome and further enhanced my enjoyment of the day. The meditation event had lasted longer than I expected (not that I'm complaining) and so I was somewhat time-limited on the water. So, after a little more exploration we turned around and let the current shoot us back downstream to the put-in.

As always, the drive along Georgetown Pike back to the Beltway was twisty fun. And I always wonder as I drive past the mega-houses that line the road – who is it who owns these multi-multi-million dollar things, who could possibly use so much square footage, at what size does a house just become irresponsibly large, …. and how can I get one?