Bath Story

Sunday, everybody went to the Baltimore Visionary Art Museum without me.

It was Rachel’s idea to leave me behind.

That sounds bad, but only because I put it that way on purpose.

What she said was, “you don’t have to come if you need some time to yourself.”

I think the reason she offered is because I’d been a grump.

And, I think she was right - I think I did need some time.

So, I took her up on it.

I stayed behind and took a bath.

Well, I tried to take a bath. Just before they left, I had filled the bathtub with hot water. Townes, seeing the hot water, decided to take a bath.

Which is great. He needed a bath.

Once they left, though, I tried to draw a new bath.

When it was halfway full, I stripped and got in. The water was somewhere between lukewarm and cold. And the water coming out of the faucet was colder.

Let me tell you, when a middle-aged grump, anxious, desperate to relax, lowers his naked ass halfway into a cold bath, it’s not pretty.

I was miffed. But I was also desperate. So I did what any sane person would do and put my boxers back on, started heating up several large pots of water on the stove, then dumping round after round of boiling water from the electric kettle.

Between rounds, I collected the zillion books I’m currently “reading” (if you can call it that) and stacked them by the bath:

• The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen

• The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami

• Godel, Escher, Back, Douglas Hofstadter

• Tripas (poems), Brandon Som

• The Playwright’s Workbook, Jean-Claude van Itallie

• Ingenius Ideas Inspired by Cannabis, me

That last one is (or was - cause I lost it) a blank journal Rachel’s mom gave me for Christmas. It’s the only one I ended up touching…

…but not for about an hour.

For the first hour, I just sat there in the cooling water, trying not to be grumpy.

It did, eventually, work.

But only after I remembered one of my New Year’s resolutions: to get serious about mediation again.

There’s something about deciding to get serious — it works.

I mean, meditation is one of those words that’s so huge and can mean so many things, maybe it’s a bad word. But it is the word I’ve been using - at least in my own head - to describe my bath, though maybe a better word is active imagination.

I imagined my body, as seen from the inside of my mind - that is, looking at myself looking, and then looking further and further, past my heart, down to the bottom of my feet. And I saw something there.

To quote David Lynch (taken from a reel that pops up on my phone every few months), I saw “an ocean of pure consciousness.”

Maybe a better way of putting it is pure energy - energy that was all bound up and locked away in frustration, anxiety, seasonal (and political) sadness - and I let my awareness linger there.

And watched the energy come loose and up and OVER that wall holding it back.

It wasn’t dramatic - nobody is going to make a movie of a 44-year-old nerd taking a bath - but it was meaningful. I unlocked something. Or maybe, better, came back into communication with something.

Whether energy experienced this way is “real” or not is, I think, sort of besides the point. Imagination, dreams, thoughts, the unconscious, the inner world - are immensely meaningful things - places, even - and yet traveling there, experiencing them is sort of the opposite of addictive. It takes so much quiet sitting to even remember they are there. And they are so easy to forget about.

I’ve talked before about what you might call “peak experiences” that took place in my inner life, moments where I felt like I touched eternity - or whatever word you want to place on that thing which evades all permanent naming - and so many of them felt like big final answers. Yet, none of them were.

I don’t think the “meaning” of life is a thing you can figure out and then write down; I think it’s a living thing that you, well, live. You are that meaning, and for your life to have meaning, you have to live into that meaning. Something like that. Words about the strange space I’m talking about quickly end up looping around and referring only to themselves, then fade and empty, like memories of a dream, which is, I suppose, what they are.

My point is, it was good to say hi again. Real good.

*

Then I cleaned the house.

And everybody came home.

They came home with huge smiles, dressed in bright, beautiful clothes.

They’d had an amazing day.

Did I do the right thing not going?

I’ll never know.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but what can you know, really?