Writing on the Couch

Writing on the couch warms my words.

I do my first outpouring of words into my little black journal while folded up on my couch. I have learned that I will spend far too much time later sitting upright and alert or hunched with effort, but nonetheless at my computer doing later drafts, polishing sentence structure, rearranging paragraphs, formatting pages. Here on the couch I just generate words. Writing here warms my words.

Here on the no longer pristine white couch with the red and blue pillows, I can arrange and rearrange my body parts so they don't get so achy.

This couch carries so much resonance. So much body memory floods my system in each of its corners. This is where I have been meditating for the past dozen years. Every day, early and fresh with sense awareness, or still groggy and grouchy, or heavy and soft and melancholy. No matter what state I am in, I sit here, on this simple throne overlooking my domain of high ceilinged spaciousness populated with ordinary but pleasant furnishings. A warm environment, mostly clean and tidy but far from designer sterility. The loft nurtures a simple open presence without too much self-conscious judgment.

Early on, my sitting practice moved up from the floor where a solid cushion had rooted my trunk, not because the floor was too cold, but because I wanted to be able, at a flicker of the eyelids, to take in the far reaches of my kingdom.

The terrace, shaded in summer, functions as an extra room with always fresh air for half the year, and opens to the harsh winter sun for the rest of the year. The bird feeder becomes a busy marketplace for the comings and goings of finches, titmice, chickadees, cardinals, and the occasional downy woodpecker. And beyond that, the lawn, sidewalk with its morning and evening neighborly parade of dog walkers, the shed and vegetable gardens backed up by a small stand of trees. I sit up on the couch to be able to oversee my domain.

The couch also oozes its invitation to rest. After-lunch naps have soaked the couch cover with sweet dreams and wild imaginings. When I sit here, some part of me recalls the elation of imagining limitless possibility.

In the last half dozen years, the potential silence on the couch has doubled as Nick has brought his meditation practice here. When he stays the night, our morning routine always gets us to the couch together, starting together before setting out on our separate spelunking through the crevices of our mental geology. I do not know what he finds there in his inner world, but his deep stillness next to me reassures me. I feel reassured that this time and place is the right time and place for me to do what I need to do--to crawl down through the slanting broken layers of mental constraints and dissolve myself; to seep deep into the hollow chambers where awareness is the only movement and often no more than a flicker catches a glimpse of something precious.

This couch also resonates with our affectionate sharing, sitting facing each other, backs supported by its arms, legs intertwined, and toes tucked under thighs or pressed suggestively into crotches. Here is where we invest in our more conscious explorations in vulnerable, authentic communication. And this deeper communication process we now refer to affectionately as simply “Couch Time”.

Our mutual caresses have been woven into the fabric of our conversations here, too, so much so that each of our bodies expect those particular pleasures the moment we sit together. Here we allow ourselves the anticipatory rush of our body's own sense-pleasure, no matter what other mood or discussion topic is in the air.

This cocoon of safe vulnerability has revealed over time and repetition an emotional intimacy neither of us anticipated. Talking here warms our words.