news from this end of the road
Finally.
This morning, March 31st, marks the beginning of an eight-month daily practice of yoga asana, meditation and spiritual study, in preparation for an even more intensive certification program to attain teacher status. I have walked along any number of similar roads, most often to some form of completion, as they led on to bigger ways or to smaller, more arcane ways… in all cases the next way. It have been a wonderful, challenging, art-filled life. I am excited about the next challenge.
What I have always desired is to bring as much of human philosophies and physical practices into one place - me - as possible. The core sciences and high energy physics and astronomy and all of that out-leaning western thought… remarkable truths are found, when you crack open an atom to find smaller particles, the those particles to find smaller pieces yet, until finally the pieces begin to look imaginary. That is when you know you are close: when the substance dissolves in your fingers. And the psychological sciences (if sciences they are) with the movement of intent and self-concept and self-conceit and self-deceit; the machinations of a mind that are cracked open to reveal motivations, then motivations cracked open to find drive, drive cracked open to find urges, and behind the urge… nothing. Everything.
The arts, as an expression of being: if I cannot hold Being in my hand, then I will approach it with a sound, with a color, with movement, and in that shared vibration of sights and soundings, become part of a human fabric (so long as my thread has not played out), and instead of grasping life’s meaning, simpy become it. The lens of the physical, in connection to another and in training of the self: athletics, then T’ai Chi, then the martial forms, then yoga. Language, from my native tongue to Spanish, to German, to French, to Indonesian, to Portuguese… where each tongue tested, or tasted with that deep kiss, explores and explains some facet of the self that one language alone could never express.
I don’t neglect the art of self-deconstruction. You know when you are far from Grace when nothing comes apart in your hands. When everything is so firmly built that no wind can shake it, you know you are looking at a house, not a collection of shifting, ephemeral atoms and cells. It is important, if you are to understand your impermanent nature, that you find the greatest courage and allow yourself to be undone. Sell everything. Leave your place and your name behind. Breath other air, and eat other food. Allow your head to spin - like the dervish: spinning, you find your center.
The last time I wrote about a small deconstruction was when my friend Manny and I travelled to India, to spend a month’s sabbatical in search of Not I. You can search for the same from your comfortable armchair, but it is more difficult, and certainly less entertaining. I hope in the next months to practice a similar deconstruction, but this time from within the fortress. If feels like an act of espionage, or of subversion. I am the spy in my own army. The general within knows who I am. I am a double-agent, with the key to his battle, and the key to the city’s gates. How interesting!
I feel a bit breathless. Whenever one plans to hold devotion above the demands of the world, it feels prone to life’s small disasters. A big push at work. A family crisis. A vacation. Any change in the clockworks mean the alarm doesn’t go off at the same time that morning. But I am well accompanied. There is a whole community of people just down the road, with a lot of experience and similar goals. There is my physical body, whose health wanes… ahh, the poignant, afternoon sun. Everyone who’s lived enough days knows afternoon precedes evening precedes a gorgeous setting sun precedes a heaven full of uncountable stars. There are small tangible objects around my house: Bible and Koran and Buddhist texts, yoga mat and meditation zafu, fresh organic foods, bow and arrow (did you know? the arrow and the archer and the target are one?), guitar, distant friends, close friends, and intimate partners.
All that conspires for my success, for everyone’s success, so longer as there is the right quality of surrender.
And for that, I offer my prayer to all that is greater than me…
Finally.