Don't empty the ocean, calm the current: Reflection for week 4

It's nice when its more than just one body practicing as I 'teach', since all of us together are less likely to break the spell.

I used the only tool I really know I have - I simply asked questions. One after the other, letting them bubble up from my peripheral awareness, how the sun pressed against the container of my body, the wind gently wrapping around us, the sound of the water and children playing in it, how was it a support, this pull of space, the meaning of texture, the places where it all went in the body, how does our environment land? Am I the container or am I contained? What do I notice, and how many ways can I respond? My students followed my questions like a serious task, but I did not name a shape, I did not take a stance or give direction that wasn't in the form of a question that could swirl around a kinosphere like the rainbow flows on the outside of a soap bubble, noticing or taking in any of those questions, letting them reside inside of that bubble was a choice. The expressions of the two bodies I practiced on in this tiny park were so drastically different, later they both were really appreciative of the 'container' I gave them to explore themselves in relationship to their surroundings, as well as what they were interested in pursuing - and I am not sure what the 'container' was exactly. Was it my voice? Their own sense of their boundaries? Their ability or willingness to listen?

In meditation I am finding that it quickly becomes about how I am everything, expansive, sounds cease to be connected to their meanings, or related to the contexts they arose out of, I bond with all of it. And then I am lost, I am not myself, but a piece of something else - and I wonder if the quiet is so deep that movement has been the only way to feel myself inside of it. Maybe yoga has always been about me trying desperately to feel myself, to find all of the walls and boundaries to know what I am shaped like - and I am really enjoying layering the possibility to move with the kind of attentive patience of meditation, where the thread being followed tastes something like curiosity, in my mouth at least.

I just asked the kinds of questions I wish I could ask into a mirror, and crushed blades of grass between my fingers and smiled at the children who stopped to watch us while their parents pretended not to see us, and took in the sounds and the day shifting towards night and my student's bodies as they let me take them with me along this faint thread, this experience that we were weaving together.

As if all the stars you've seen have been busy looking back,

                                                 *sketches part of early design process for a logo/brand/identity



Nausea, in the space above my belly. Am I making 'stillness' up, by holding my muscles in a certain way?

Allowing the effort to drain away, everything starts to gently shift on its own, eyes closed, as I listen to the muscles negotiate with each other. Rolled and buffeted by space, her voice  washing over me like being inside the belly of a wave, far out past the break, swells of potentiality that subtly shift the direction of the ship of my body. Anchored in space and time, moored by my feet engaging with the surface I stand on gives the rest of my body permission to get lost in the drift.

Internal currents, muscular chatter like gulls on the breeze, hard to tell if I am an object at the mercy of the ocean, or if I am the ocean itself in this metaphor. Sea sickness subsides when I allow my frame to rock with the waves of information and sensation rolling through me. Sunshine pours in the windows, I can feel the brightness against my closed eyes, and after what has felt like a lifetime of winter I can almost smell the salt.

I finally recognize you, Priestess.




Walking my dog to the coffee shop, on our way to the park one early morning, the sun was just kissing the tops of buildings with its blushing warmth. Glancing up at its trajectory, I noticed a small square bit of fabric on a long stick, swinging in wide arcs from a rooftop, upsetting a large body of pigeons that were taking up residence on that roof. They wheeled around it, a wide ribbon of birds moving as if of one mind, like rippling fabric, or an intelligent wave, and alighted right back where they had taken flight from. The flag disappeared, and a face materialized at the edge of the rooftop. He saw me see him, so he waved. I waved back.

I've only seen that flag waving and the birds responding a few more times. But the pigeons are always there, obviously comfortable in their multitudes, and I wonder what the nature of the flag is, what his relationship to those birds might be.

Pigeon Lord(e) was the name that came to me.

Once, last summer, I saw fireworks outside my window, in the late afternoon. Confused, I watched for a few minutes, and finally realized that it was those birds, that mass of pigeons moving together, the deep pinkish gold light of the setting sun bouncing off of their wings in flight.


*A week after I wrote this piece, a massive fire destroyed these buildings and all of the pigeon coops on top of them, the existence of which I discovered in articles writing about the events as they unfolded. Walking by the aftermath, in the light of day, I am distracted by the calls coming from a few pigeons circling above the twisted walls of the buildings, possibly crying desperately for their home and companions who couldn't escape the flames.




On a gig recently, working an impossible amount of hours was overlapped with a huge amount of hours taking classes, and the shift from inward to outward looking manifested abruptly, the seams beginning to show. Like a computer trying to function with too much material on its hard drive, I had little control over my output, and I could see  at one point the artlessness of my responses reflected in my boss's face.

There was a handsome man on the labor crew I was supervising that persistently angled for my number, smoothly uttering promises of sexual delight, euphemisms that quickly began to repeat themselves, no matter how firmly I refused.

But he was engaging in a different way than most of the guys. His sexual banter was focused around the idea of taking care of me, rather than taking something from me, and maybe in the midst of not taking care of myself, it struck a bizarre cord, one that is never quite so exposed. Following that subtle thread, I laid down next to him during lunch, on the floor underneath the structure we had built together. I asked him random questions, considering him as he chewed on his responses. It didn't take long for him to shift toward sexual references, and I asked him 'What if I don't like sex that much?'.

His eyes may never have been as beautiful as that moment when he turned his head to look at me, seeing through his projection to what was actually there for a single, solitary second, realizing that everything he had said had been the wrong thing. I may have proof in that glance that I am more than just a figment of other people's imaginations, a mirror, a ghost.

I understand now, how the seams we try to hide are the places where the identities we've crafted break down, because they are lines we have drawn onto a thing without lines, boundaries we make to contain our own potential, a way to know myself as SUPERVISOR to make up for a lack of knowing who I am beyond that context in any scenario.

I understand now, that what I am looking for is other curious people, and that curiosity lives inside of people from all walks of life, not just in either the intellectual or the physical planes and the people that inhabit them - the mind body split isn't a split, but a series of mismarks on the map, a confusion of languages at the intersection of material and immaterial. Curiosity is the thread that connects us to each other as sentient beings, it is the blood that flows through the veins of the creative beast that lives inside of all of us, however it chooses to manifest, if we let it.

I gave him my card as a reward for the look in his eyes, for the possibilities it made me aware of. Lets see just how curious he is.