Besides being MLK Day and Inauguration Day, Monday, January 20th would have marked the 79th birthday of David Lynch — and the filmmaker’s family invited the world to celebrate him with a “worldwide group meditation” at noon PT.

The meditation will not coincide with the inauguration, which will begin three hours earlier at noon ET.

“David Lynch, our beloved dad, was a guiding light of creativity, love, and peace. On Monday, January 20th — what would have been his 79th birthday — we invite you all to join us in a worldwide group meditation at 12:00pm NOON PST for 10 minutes,” the family wrote in a statement.

They added: “Let us come together, wherever we are, to honor his legacy by spreading peace and love across the world. Please take this time to meditate, reflect, and send positivity into the universe. Thank you for being part of this celebration of his life.”

It was signed, “Love, Jennifer, Austin, Riley and Lula Lynch.”

Also Read: 15 David Lynch Quotes to Live By, and Fire Your Creativity

Some Lynch fans — and Donald Trump critics — seized on the timing.

“Three hours after Trump gets sworn in for the second time,” one person wrote on X. “What a world, what a world. Hard to fathom locating two more oppositional, quintessentially American, massively influential public figures, both born in 1946. Let’s see if our outpouring of love can fix Donnie’s heart.”

David Lynch and Meditation

For Lynch, meditation and making art were synonymous. He was a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation for half a century, starting when he was a struggling filmmaker trying to complete Eraserhead, which would become his debut feature in 1977.

Lynch wrote in his 2006 book, Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity, that he first visited a TM center in Los Angeles in 1973, and met an instructor who “looked like Doris Day” and taught him a mantra, “which is a sound-vibration-thought.” He took to it immediately.

Also Read: ‘Here’s the Heart’: Excerpts From A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune — an Oral HistoryBefore TM, he wrote, he was “filled with anxieties and fears” when he first learned of meditation, and “felt a sense of depression and anger. I often took out this anger on my first wife.”

But about two weeks into his meditation, she said to him, “This anger, where did it go?”

He also likens meditation to fishing: “Ideas are like fish,” he writes in the book. “If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.

“I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that can translate to cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything.”

Lynch became perhaps the world’s most prominenent practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, founding his David Lynch Foundation to spread the word.

“I started Transcendental Meditation® in 1973 and have not missed a single meditation ever since. Twice a day, every day,” he wrote on the foundation’s website. “It has given me effortless access to unlimited reserves of energy, creativity and happiness deep within. This level of life is sometimes called ‘pure consciousness’—it is a treasury. And this level of life is deep within us all.”

Main image: David Lynch on the red carpet during the 12th Rome Film Festival at the Parco Della Musica. Shutterstock.