Just a meditation timer...

Moonstone Chimes was created because I wanted a meditation timer where I could just meditate. That’s really the story, tldr;

A reason for simplicity.

Meditating (and yoga) is more about being, than doing. There is some subtlety in this suggestion. It takes conscious effort to learn the yoga asanas correctly, and there may be trepidation when we first settle with the noise in our mind. It feels uncomfortable when we learn to breath in, and breath out, to settle the tension in our nervous system, because of what’s being unwound. Thus, in the beginning, mindfulness may still feel like doing.

Ultimately though, mindfulness is about returning to a state of being, so that even in a yoga pose, the pose acts on you, rather than the other way around.

The teacher I learned meditation from – a James Brown who resides in San Francisco – said that this is because we’re human beings, not human doings.

In that spirit, when Moonstone Chimes was conceived, it seemed important to leave things out – maybe more so than adding things in. What does one really need to meditate, or do yoga? It might be obvious in hindsight, but there doesn’t need to be any gamification or scoring of how “well” we’re doing with our meditation. The only person who really knows how we're doing is us, so the only one we'd be spiritually bypassing is ourselves. As for social-networking tie-ins, or other monetization gotchas – maybe not in an ideal world –, no.

This absense of features is a feature itself, and this was what I sought in a meditation timer. Could there be some simple thing, for those of us seeking to make a bit of time, for some nothingness?

On the other hand, it would still be nice if the app were calming to look at. It would be nice for it to be easeful to use, in those brief few seconds before we find some settling – with our eyes closed.

What if we wanted to meditate before going to a meeting, or before meeting someone? This is the principle reason for having a timer.

It would also be nice to have a meditation timer that’s useful for yoga. Things are invariably easier on one side of the body than the other, which makes it *feel* like the pose is being held longer on one side of the body, even when it isn’t. We want balance, in an objective sense. We want to spend equal amounts of time settling each side of ourselves.

Then there’s practicing on the weekends. A meditation timer is something that could periodically chime along, like a friendly companion with no particular goal or limit in mind.

These kinds of everyday-practice problems guided Moonstone Chimes's design. As inauspicious and trying as the pandemic was, that was when Moonstone Chimes was largely written and completed. The photos for this website were similarly taken during that time, in the distant reaches of Humboldt County, stretching north into the Southern Oregon coast. The people along the way, up the 101, reflect on a part of the world that seems a bit lost today, or maybe a home we never knew, that we could go back and revisit. When I was traveling through the redwood curtain one time, my tire went flat. A local in the small logging town of Leggett was happy to help – just as much as the hippie kids in Arcata had been happy to make bagels for anyone in town.

The remoteness of the “Lost Coast” might not suit everyone, but the settling out of meditation is something city dwellers would appreciate alike. As a meditation teacher might say, we would know that we’ve meditated – that we’ve made time for the nothingness – when we are ready to see one another again.