Finding peace and tranquility within one self. Meditation is sitting quietly for a few minutes to clear your mind and collect yourself, allowing time for you. Giving you those 5 minutes of “me time” to allow one to remain living without too much stress. Meditation is complete silence just hearing your heartbeat and breathing. Meditation is useful to one if they approached it with an open mind and actually tried it. Meditation is silence.
I visualize a blank room that is slightly lighted by candles, walls covered in bamboo. This room contains either one person or very few people no more than 7. Often the occupants are of Asian dissent and are sitting cross legged in the middle of the room. Silence is heavily present, only the breathing of the select individuals can be heard but even that seems to be at a hushed volume. Meditation instills calm and peace into one and I believe while meditating everything seems to just float away. Sometimes when a book or piece of writing has meditation in it my visual also shows these peaceful individuals floating above the floor, as if they are feathers, when they reach inner peace. I feel as if I were to meditate I would be the one who would be like a rock on the floor since I always am worrying about something, unable to clear my mind completely.
While reading the first section of Ceremony, Silko began having Tayo just remember everything and anything about his time over in the war. Tayo had dreams or memories reoccur due to not sleeping & little things would send him into a “memory cyclone”. One of the methods for remembering was to just write down every detail you could possibly remember about any event. Tayo recalled anything and just about everything he could, but you have to piece it together from different parts of the reading. Not all the details are together and listed, more scattered brained like Tayo himself. Tayo recalls in great detail the time when the corporal and himself were carrying Rocky after being wounded by a Japanese grenade.Tayo remembers almost everything about this event it seems, from what he heard before the flood waters came, to how the soil felt beneath him. Tayo remembers not only the hardships but then also jumps to an even more distant memory of his and Rocky’s childhood. Silko does an extremely well account of what Tayo is remembering, often I feel as if I am in his mind and feeling the confusion he has, but I am not sure if it’s because I can connect with him or that the writing is just so scattered. Tayo often connects his recent life to “old” memories, such as when speaking about the drought the reservation is experiencing now he instantly remembers riding the mules with his Uncle or father(I can not recall) as a child during the other drought.
Equality is making sure everyone and everything is treating the same way as everyone else. Equality has so many different places to go but they all lead back to the base word, equal. Making actions and words and how we adjust our selves to others should be equal. Whether you spend the equal amount of time on a topic or talk to someone as an equal it all means the same and has a huge impact on our society. Our society has two extremes, either it lacks equality or it does too much to make everything equal. Equality is important to me, everyone is a human being no matter what color their skin color is or what language they speak they all have the same make up and insides as the next person. One should not judge based on these qualities, one should not judge at all but instead embrace this person and their ideas that they bring to the table. Equality is making sure one is not discriminated against for any reason whether it is race, disability, ethnicity, religion, sex or anything that makes them an individual. I believe equality goes hand in hand with uniqueness, everyone would have to be the same and we would lack diversity in our country if equality wasn’t a factor of opinion. Equality allows our country to be the way it is, giving everyone the chances they deserve.
Kasey Anderson 