Eyes locked with a Cyclops dressed in Armani gear and high tops

Sometimes I wish I could just walk away from everything and busk my way through the underbelly of this city, living from handcrafted latte to latte, rich and thick as a meal, food for my soul and nothing else, my hands and body emanating ambiance, tapping, striking into the collective mood, and inspiring random emotional resonance in the rush of faces and days. A playlist for our lives.

Working so steady, the days repeating themselves, so painfully bland, 9 to 5, I miss being lost in the semi emotional trance of genius, walking at some brink in my brain that accesses a higher self, dips into some collective emotional truth that leaves me when the work is finished, and I am shocked by what I have created. It's a similar other, higher self that walks in my feet when I dance, rolling and riding the waves of my sexuality and the air is heavy with sound, and I am unable to stop until the music finally releases me.

I want to live in this state all the time.

Hold me like a conversation

Door clicks shut. The instructor's voice cuts through the chatter, as rhythmic, pulsing music washes over the room, baptizing it, transforming the space and our bodies into a sacred space, a port in which to dock our souls, a respite from the pace of the city and our own obsessive feelings of inadequacy. We coalesce on our mats, torsos flowing, cascading over folded thighs, arms reaching and resting in supplication or prayer, stretching the skin of our ribs long and deliciously free. Something about sinking back, hips to heels, sinking into the floor in child's pose, and for the next hour of flowing and rippling, rooting and growing into our musculature and the sophisticated architecture of our bones becomes one liquid blur, like sinking into a hot bath and feeling your whole body yawn, open and loose. Turning our constant ingestion of information inwards, to listen to the silent screaming of our joints and the subtle relocation of ligaments and tendons wrapping muscle around bone, I could feel my soul sinking more deeply in. It finally made a commitment to itself, filling and expanding the space like my breathe filling my lungs, wrapping itself more truly in the crevasses and the wrinkles, getting lost in the striated cords of muscle fiber, impossible to know where inner self ends and physical self begins.

Like parallel existences overlapping in space, sometimes sinking into one's self like this feels like greeting a childhood friend from a hazy past, or a sibling you haven't been in contact with, with a strong sense of having lived a shared experience, but from two different points of view. Disparate, disconnected, but intimately knowledgeable about each other. 

But this time, it was different.

It was myself. I was me. And I was moving through space with gravity, with weight, not the lightness and noncommittal lack of being that is refracted light and projections, smoke and mirrors... but a solid connection between brain and body, material and immaterial. I am not a ghost any more.

The instructor closed the class with a quote:

'you must let go of the life you planned to live, to live the life that is waiting for you.'

Let go. I dare you.

amen.