"That meditation shit? Not so much..."

Chris Comstock

In the dark hours before sunrise, Vigor Alaska’s shipyard bosses circle up their crews. Dwarfed by vast steel segments of a new ferry, welders, painters, and electricians twist their bodies. They roll their heads, shoulders, and wrists. They ask about each other’s families. They celebrate pregnancies, raises, and second chances. They jump. They lunge. They do push-ups and backbends. Seagulls call. Rain drizzles. Then – in jeans and work boots, sweatshirts and hardhats – they meditate....
Crews meditate, stretch and socialize – on the clock – for a few moments at the start of each work day.

Not everyone is on-board with the group efforts, but the company has an additional brownie-point in my book by taking on those who have been released from jail -- a group largely ignored and blockaded by the U.S. justice system.

Looking back, I remember hating the get-together, group-hug feelings that could be associated with brown-rice pastimes like meditation. But now I wonder: Since the mind/intellect is frequently too stupid to take in more than feather-merchant tidbits of good advice, it is the body that can learn and teach in credible fashion. How I remember the lessons that the pain of meditation taught me and taught me in ways the crafty intellect could only blather about. Now THAT took balls, to sit still and quiet and straight and take a look.

Funny how the bigger the balls, the more nagging the sense that I lacked the balls for all the "mushy stuff."

Oh well, wimps are us ... or anyway me.