not getting caught up in the finite

today's meditation is one of those when there's nothing to do but to take refuge again and again and again in the breath flow. towering thought waves suck attention under their massive momentum. they sweep awareness brutally along. i am literally under water at the wild mercy of mental activity. at the times when i catch myself reacting to the thoughts with more thoughts i manage to tenuously cling to a thread of breath. from the horizon of this vast turmoil i hear a faint recurring echo. it will go away. i will sit through this. and so i do. while it is a struggle i emerge from meditation with a renewed sense of watchfulness. i realize what would happen if i don't strive to stay close to the breath as much as i can. i would block grace and be unable to see what i ought to see. whatever the contents of the mental activity and even though they feel so real and do contain some grains of truth, like rare grains of gold in a huge mound of sand, they distract me from being connected to my own true nature, from taking what are reflections in the mirror of consciousness to be consciousness itself, from getting caught up in the finite waves in the infinite ocean of consciousness.