Latvia: February 5 and 6, 2016, meditation and poetry translating

February 5, 2016
This morning I visited the embassy to collect my scholarship, which I prefer to call “a bonus”, because if anyone thinks this is enough to survive, they are delusional. Small bubbles show up on the surface of my anarchist soul, why I hold a light conversation with a nice lady about being in a good mood in the cold and a flu pandemic.

It’s pretty ironic, how I’m sitting now at the kitchen table by the window, visualizing some tuberculosis or other disaster that Velta fleed from. I asked Ingus, the real estate agent about her today, and it appears that, indeed, there is a poet on emigration. His eyes flashed with truest joy, when he found out that I knew. Since the 50s in London, so today she is about 96.

February and March rent paid, coffee ingested, time for a couple of hours with Karlis. And he is, as usual, kind and dear to me. A couple of pieces from other books worth translating, even if it’s just for the sake of exercise. I read his children’s poetry too, and I understood why he got an award for that.
To finish off the day – a buttermilk, banana and berry smoothie, editing a video about Valmiera, and reading Karlis’ review of Latvian poetry.

February 6, 2016
It’s fairly easy to get lost in Riga, even in the city center, if you trust your memory of places and don’t regularly charge your phone. I was late for the mandala meditation and I regret it, but eventually it was a meditation Saturday and even if it’s just the second one, I want more.
I couldn’t really concentrate this time and I wasn’t trying to stop my thoughts from wandering. I see great progress in my meditation practice and I didn’t want to rush. Today, I felt that letting my thoughts flow smoothly was more beneficial, so I let my imagination go wild for half an hour. It was a much deeper experience than for the first time, fewer situations were new, uncertain and undefined. When I left, I was convinced that what I was imagining was real, but the impression passed.

My favorite meditation is still kundalini (shakes, dancing and calming down), which is recommended to be done after work. One of the ladies attending achieves the “jhana stage” (a very physical and loud one, to say the least) and I have no idea how she does it. They say it is related to an infinite state of relaxation, a lack of internal and external conflicts, and a feeling of being a part of the earth, which you can all achieve through meditation.

A continuation of strange coincidences – I might start marking these up in my calendar, because weird things happen to me here almost every day – the teacher (Latvian, who goes by an Indian name), whose wife is called P. and comes from Kazakhstan, calls her by my name (Kasia) and did not know the meaning of it. He wasn’t really impressed with the fact that the name doesn’t carry much meaning, other than that it is derived from the Greek word katharos (pure).
The session was closed with an hour of gong meditation. Vigo played on Tibetan copper singing bowls and it was so fantastic it was extended to last a little longer. Even the scared girl who went there for the first time didn’t feel like leaving (or felt too awkward to do so). Wonder what she would do if her first time would be the hara center meditation, as it was for us.