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we climbed down through some tall grass to climb over a fence that said "NO TRESPASSING" to get to the place in the picture. the last time I was here I was with the same person but it was several years ago, and it was nighttime in the summer and the stars were somehow gorgeously immune to the light pollution from the university

now it was daytime and very nice outside and it was perhaps a little more trespass-y to be here, since it seemed to have been developed a bit. there were important trucks in the distance and they had been doing things to the sand, and the bowl in the earth had changed but it was still lovely and large, too large to capture with my phone camera

we sat in the sand bowl in the earth and kicked sand and rocks down the steep slopes, creating small noises that were the only ones present besides the voices of the birds. I talked about how you could do a lot of fun things in the sand bowl: hide and seek, bikes, a big camping trip

I said "I've never successfully meditated"

he said "do you want to meditate?"

I said okay and we sat overlooking the sand bowl and he talked me through it, or explained to me the ways in which he was succeeding in meditating so that I might do the same. he said things about focusing on your breathing and then something about a feeling in the stomach that I couldn't find. that's why I've always felt like I'm bad at meditating: I don't feel air or oxygen spreading through my body like other successful meditators do. I know that in the past I have claimed to feel this moving energy but I have always been lying to myself in the hopes that the lie would turn true. I am missing out on a crucial sensation that, if felt, might act as a momentary salve. but even though I didn't feel that particular sensation, I did feel very good with my eyes closed

the birds were very vocal and I could sense that there were many of them and my pulse slowed and I thought "here is a group of animals that I greatly admire." I felt very positive that these birds were happy while being simultaneously aware that this perception existed inside of me, a member of a species that has very specific ideas about happiness. but I didn't pay this awareness much attention and it felt very nice to feel positive about something, and about something such as the state of mind of a group of birds

I opened my eyes and watched them, and he was watching them too. there were two hawks circling the sand bowl, above the smaller birds that were flying around in circles for apparently no other reason than to sing at interesting altitudes. there seemed to be no reason for their behavior other than enjoyment. there were a few small drops of water from the sky that never actually turned into a lot of rain

because my eyes had been closed for a while I had strange orbs floating in my vision. they would bounce around to adjust to wherever I was focusing, and as I watched the birds fly back and forth the phosphenes followed them, and they were synchronized without even knowing it. I thought about the niceness of unknowingly being synchronized with the phosphenes that exist in the eyes of a person you care about. I thought about how you could portray phosphenes in a film. I've been thinking about this for years

he said "try to hear the sounds without classifying them"
"try to look at the things without classifying them"

I said "when I was a kid I used to stare at my face in the mirror until my eyes would unfocus and my face would lose context and become something weird, until it was too scary to look at"

we decided to leave. right before the fence he found a raspberry bush with tiny raspberries. he ate two and I said "are you sure those are raspberries." he said yes. I ate one. I went to work covered in dirt and nobody said anything about it to my face