Wudu

Working as a public school teacher and trying to balance personal time, project time, hang time, etc. is a very difficult task and the whole shebang so to speak can seem as stressful as the actual work itself. Being a practitoner in a Sufi group, I follow the Islamic act of purifcation before prayers, known as wudu. In this act, one washes several extremities with water in order to enter into a purified state for praying to God. In Islamic teaching there is a heavy emphasis on the use of this act to remove polluted acts and pollution from the body. Sufi teachings often discuss purifying the mind as the higher meaning in this act. But today I found it purifying in a different way, that of setting up a boundary between relative time and ultimate time, or we might say between all that takes place in those two different time periods. Like the ringing of a meditation bell, the washing becomes a clarion call to remove oneself from the confusion and stress of relative time and enter into a place where those elements are only mere plays in the culturally-conditioned mind. I also rang my meditation bell today as I entered into a meager but peaceful couple minutes of stillness. The bell chimed a shift, collapsing all relative reality into a stream of one note, one taste. The thoughts that danced on that note arose and collapsed as simply shadows. Now, I feel a knot in my stomach again. Time for cleansing once more.