lightbearinglord | [ closed post: rabbit meditation power hour ]

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[ closed post: rabbit meditation power hour ]

The rabbits have been settling in. They have sweet, easygoing temperaments, which helps, and it helps, too, that the mansion has apparently noticed their presence and supplied Lan Wangji with a little wooden hutch for their keeping when he is not able to hold them. He does, on occasion, need his hands for other tasks. His preferred kitchen has also been forthcoming with hay and vegetables for their feeding. Wei Ying has already threatened to cook and eat them several times, which means he likes them and will be whittling toys for them any day now. Once winter passes, Lan Wangji will work on constructing a sturdier hutch for the outdoors as well, so that they can see the lake and the woods.¹

Because they are so sweet, and also so endearingly small, their presence is calming in itself. Lan Wangji does not exactly need help to meditate successfully -- he has been doing it daily since he was very young -- but the company does not go amiss, either. It is difficult to dwell overmuch on anything troublesome with two tiny, warm bodies in one's lap.

Lan Wangji is not actually meditating yet, but he is seated in that side room he prefers to use for the practice. There is incense burning, and he has a little brown rabbit, munching its way through a piece of watercress, perched on his knee. In his hands, he holds the equally little white rabbit, which is overall doing well, but which does have a greater tendency to startle and to want to hide itself. He is speaking to it under his breath, gently.

¹It's important for rabbits who began life in the bottom of a top hat to be exposed to nature.

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Lan Wangji nods and resettles his weight, careful not to jostle little Xiaoxue. "Do you remember how we began the last time?"

A hesitation. He has that memory somewhere, but it's not a clear one. Mostly what he remembers is being still and quiet and threshing wheat. "No," he says finally.

Lan Wangji accepts this without any particular disapproval. He was only asking, to be certain where to start. "Shut your eyes," he instructs. The incense is still burning, although the stick is nearly finished, and the room smells of sandalwood. There are faint sounds of the rabbits grooming themselves. "You only need to breathe. You may match me, if it helps."

Galahad closes his eyes and does, in fact, match his breathing to Lan Wangji's. It's easier to copy someone else at first.

In that case, Lan Wangji closes his own eyes and breathes with care, each deliberate inhale followed by an equally deliberate exhale. His chest rises and falls, his middle dantian tucked safely behind his sternum. "Clear your mind," he says, once they have been breathing together long enough that the incense is poised just on the verge of burning itself out. "You have done it before. Reach for that same tranquility."

The wheat. The field that Laurel first conjured -- it feels so much longer ago than two months. It's the thing Galahad remembers, and what he imagines Lan Wangji knows, so he sinks into himself the way he does when he's overwhelmed: when the weight of his estrangement from God falls upon him and his mind is silent and lonely; when the desire to do more than kiss Claudius takes over his body in a forest fire; when there are too many questions or questions he can't answer and all the words he'd grasp at slip through his fingers like water. He lets his body be a shell protecting the soft meat of himself. He stands in the middle of the field.

Because he is teaching Galahad, and because he vowed to keep watch over the rabbits, Lan Wangji tethers himself to greater awareness of his surroundings than he would if he were meditating on his own. Still, he skims the surface of it: the still, crystalline waters of the cold spring; the branching waterways of Caiyi that lead to Biling Lake; his own consciousness, calm and assured, gathering qi in the core of himself.

"Continue to breathe, and to follow your own breath." His voice is pitched low and steady. "Notice how it nourishes you. You share that breath with the universe. With me, with Xiaoxue and Danding, with the woods outside this building."

Galahad pictures air coming in and out of his nostrils, falling down through his throat to his lungs -- although he stays standing in the same field, he imagines a school of tiny silvery fish, glinting in the river of his breath, streaming out of his body and into the stalks of wheat. The light flashes off their scales.

The soft, even sound of Lan Wangji's voice is soothing: it reminds him of a priest speaking the liturgy. There's no tone to try to understand. It's only words.

As before, the expansion and calming of Galahad's spiritual aura is nearly palpable. He is doing well, breathing in time with Lan Wangji. The incense has gone out now, and Xiaoxue has tucked itself into a small and warm bundle of life against Lan Wangji's ribcage. "Once you can sense our shared breath, you can sense, too, the interconnected nature of all things. The one produces the two. The two produces the three. The three produces the ten thousand things. Nature is in balance. Your mind reflects that balance."

He hesitates, turning around in the field. He picked the wrong thing to imagine, he thinks -- he shouldn't have gone somewhere by himself. He should have chosen something that could be interconnected with other things. How can he reflect balance in this place?

He considers changing everything and starting over; he could imagine something different inside of himself, something better suited to the task Lan Wangji has given him.

Then he thinks, verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. The one produces the two. The three produces the ten thousand. His field is fine.

He sits down among the stalks of wheat, heavy with grains, shifting gently in the breeze that blows over the field. The fish dart across the surface of the massed heads, rippling them. Galahad breaks head from one of the stalks and separates each of the grains, holding them in his hand. Things grow, and when they grow they multiply. The stalks must wither and lose their grains, and the grains must die and crack open to let the life inside them out (a bur is only a coat to protect something precious: the seed of life enclosed inside it. It searches for the ground its seed can grow in).

The details of Galahad's mind are his and his alone, but suspended in this moment and in this familiar room, Lan Wangji knows it when Galahad begins to understand. He knows it in his golden core, all along his meridians, in the intangible places where his qi brushes Galahad's like the petals of one lotus brushing the petals of another as it drifts past, a fleeting touch of brightness in murky waters.

There are things that want to pull at his attention. Thoughts of Wei Ying, the crescent moon of his smile. The perpetual problem of Luo Binghe. The question of whether he will ever again see Lan Sizhui. Those things, though, are only a few of the ten thousand, no more or less material than the rest, no more or less pressing than memories of the jingshi doors open in summer and mist-laden air streaming through, of A-Yuan's small hand folded in his own, of the winding paths of his home with their tidily-calculated feng shui.

Lan Wangji sits and breathes, keeping the motions of it slow and easy to follow. The rabbits are dozing. The two of them will need to surface in time, but not yet.

It's peaceful in the field like this. Galahad watches the fish, the wheat, the wind that shifts its direction as he breathes in and out. He feels quiet, and it's a comfortable quiet -- it reminds him of when he and Claudius are both reading in bed together, each of them absorbed in their own books, and yet conscious of the other body close by (or at least Galahad knows he is). Claudius is rarely quiet for long, admittedly; he reads for a page or two and then inevitably remarks aloud on some detail, telling Galahad how the author is following a series of rules in expected ways, or complaining about a character he finds trying, or laying out the puzzle of the mystery for Galahad.

"Poirot is such a student of human nature," he'll say, tapping his finger against a word on the page in a manner that Galahad is coming to understand signifies approval. "I think we'd have gotten along well. Perhaps we will yet," and he'll smirk knowingly.

Galahad will wait to be sure he's done before he goes back to The Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen.

He lets his mind empty out until he's thinking of nothing, only following the movements of the things inside the field with him. He lets nothing else pass through the wheat.

After some length of time, perhaps half a shichen or more, Xiaoxue stirs against Lan Wangji's ribcage. The movement isn't restless, exactly, but it draws his consciousness back inward. He opens his eyes and looks at Galahad, with the little brown rabbit nestled against the bend of his knee and the lines of his young face relaxed in his meditation.

"Galahad," he says gently.

Unlike the last time, he comes obediently out of his field, opening his eyes to look at Lan Wangji.

The light in the room has changed, just a little, with the passage of time. Lan Wangji pets Xiaoxue's ears with one hand as he asks, "How do you feel?"

He looks down at Danding, dozing in his lap. "Quiet."

As he should. Lan Wangji gives him a small nod of approval. "You did well." For his second time only, in particular. Meditation is often not an easy practice.

Warmth suffuses him, the way it does when Magnus fills him with summer, at Lan Wangji's words and he flushes. "Thank you."

If Galahad is feeling quiet, and peaceful in that, Lan Wangji will be the last person to disturb that. He reaches into his qiankun pouch again and draws out another handful of watercress to feed to Xiaoxue, who settles more contentedly on his thigh and begins to eat it.

He waits for a while, for Lan Wangji to tell him something he wants him to do next, or bring up the next topic, but time stretches on, quiet, its pace unhurried, and Galahad begins to understand that there isn't something next. He only needs to sit here, with a rabbit in his lap, and sometimes hold out his hand without having to speak so Lan Wangji will put a little more watercress in it for Danding. It's like being with Claudius in their room -- they can each work on their own projects, Claudius writing in his dossier, Galahad sketching him while he works, and not need to say anything.

He wants to thank Lan Wangji again, but he doesn't have to.

He's not completely sure, but he thinks he's made another friend.

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[ closed post: rabbit meditation power hour ]

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