Come take a walk across my sites and visit today’s Journey News Blog post for a trip into a beginner’s journey into entrepreneurship. And tell a friend!
Peace and Love,
Gaze.
Stillness Still
What shall I do when my skin pickles and my mind dries splintered?
I won’t stare into dirty window panes.
What shall I do when my eyeballs glitch shudder open-shut, right to left?
I won’t run, slaughter, spin out, or crash in stupor-ful grim.
Where shall I go when cars slam openings cabin space so tight it pierces skin?
To nowhere regret drives home.
How shall I survive the sandwiched time of somatic stares and twitching sleep–
unparalleled movement unceasingly on?
By leaving love notes in your lunch box and writing letters home.
Why do we contrive without power un-surrendering ourselves to the perpetual?
We won’t let the wheel go, let the world spin a’wheel.
Which is in? Which is out?
What matters?
When will the uncleaved door bend, ope-crack and whistle in the sizzling windy train of space,
belly breathe hoary air eons long, trellised and clinging to cilial body, shivering sensoranticipatorily?
When still–
Yet still–
Stillness is.
Pixabay: waterstillnesswoodnets
Preview of Upcoming Publication: Yoga and Gravity Unbound
Happy International Yoga Day. In honor, I have written a soon-to-be-published essay about yoga, meditation, gravity, growth, language, presence and play.
“Growing up” is the metaphor, like a slow-rocket burst through the air in defiance of gravity. So many metaphors about that first half of the arc that rainbows our lives bespeak struggle against warring forces like the pitfalls of acquiring experience called trial and error and raging hormonal bodily take-over that is puberty. Not only the breaking through, busting out and bursting metaphors of rising roots characterize maturing, but also minefield metaphors of making mistakes as we learn, falling in missteps (failing a driver’s license test, picking the wrong partner, losing a job) and picking oneself up from such falls. Struggle.
Learning our bodies and minds requires overcoming. Charlotte Joko Beck in Everyday Zen writes about the spiritual growth of achieving zen and states that “the process of becoming fully independent (or of experiencing that we already are that) is to be terror, over and over and over.” Our struggle lies in the fear of breaking free of our own mind chains–of falling.
Happy Birthday Anne Lamott
I do not at all understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us. Anne Lamott
Today I lost a Teenager
She’s 20.
No more kid stuff.
Taking hold of the reigns now
or soon;
she’s doing the best she can.
Life’s a dare to this one.
The pink princess
in full length satinate gown
and high hennin
who paraded the deli
and bakery aisles at 5,
unfazed by stares and
critical remarks, judgment,
now browses thrift stores
along drizzly Seattle store
fronts; her pink fingernails
tap store front windows
reflecting a pink rain parka.
She, ever the reserved
rebel, attention-seeking
hermit and lover of the
ironic, twisted and fair,
bristles at injustice
and believes in rescue,
animals, people and causes.
Her creative bent
will carry her to lands
exotic and disturbing,
she with the peace corps
heart and that childish
pampered primpery,
but her practical wit and
earthy reason will ground
the journey into decades,
the twenties’ bent up
crazy pinnacle of strength,
stamina, speed, purpose-
less with purpose and youth
in all its media-cracked-up
to be supercharged, idolized
and adored, culturally induced
figural, figurative and free beauty.
**************************
Enjoy the run, my princess.
The best is yet to come.
The Tangerine Tree
We lived at Quo Vadis then, a dumpy avocado colored complex
across from the dying strip mall sputtering out,
stores no one shopped or missed when they closed, belly up or dying out.
Remember that pizza store with brothers in the name?
There for 20 years, like an institution, and then closed its doors one day
no warning
though someone knew the owner had cancer.
We were in our twenties and striving,
you selling pots and pans and me in school.
And Barry would be on the couch some days,
popped out of nowhere watching t.v. while I was in the bathroom.
The apartment door was always open and he wasn’t shy.
Sometimes he would show up at the door and knock.
And there he would stand dressed in snow gear.
“Let’s go skiing.”
No matter that we both had school and jobs.
And we would go.
I was trying out my domestic skills then.
So I grew house plants filling the light of the window,
hung in fives across the ever-open blinds.
Those were the days of open, unlocked doors, drop-in neighbors,
never closed blinds, royal blue apartments and sleeping naked.
We cared so much about the world and so little about everything
but the intimate and local, the near and myopic scope of our lives.
But it was just like you–who you are really–to toss those seeds
behind you,
without a thought to the life already existing in that pot,
the spider plant fledgeling waiting to hang
though still nestled on the window sill
waiting to flop its trestled wings over the burnt clay lip.
It must have been a luscious, tinny sweet tangerine that held those seeds.
Because now, dozens of years later,
that tree that grew from strange sprouts
crowding the spider plant on the sill, a puzzle to me then,
and with time snuffed out the baby spider buds for soil, space and sustenance,
room to grow and then outgrow that small pot to a larger one and then
a larger one yet, moving with us from apartment to house to house
where it now lives in the backyard,
bursting with abundance.
It took 25 years for that tree,
grown from thoughtlessly tossed seeds
by one too lazy to get off the couch and trash them,
to bear fruit.
It simply grew and followed us from home to home,
life to life, childhood to adulthood,
and then our children’s childhood to adulthood,
and our puppies and kittens and hamsters and birds and fish and frogs
to their graves,
some feeding the soil of tangerine tree roots,
finally strong enough
firm enough to bear the weight of hundreds of sweet orange sun nuggets.
You, unwittingly, mindlessly, grew that tree you love so much now,
picking one tangerine each morning,
cold from the morning’s chill dew,
sucking its sugary juice and tossing the peel to the soil,
just like you planted it 31 years before,
when we were young and the tree was yet to be,
its fruit long time coming.
And now the fruit is plentiful and we are old and love infertile,
like sterile lovers circling, unwittingly trodding the soil of our graves.
Bhavana
Bhavana, meaning to cultivate or develop but commonly used as a word for meditation in Buddhism, filtered down into my comprehension pool of late, that place where I can see a term’s reflection and pair it with illustrative experience to flesh out the bones of the word.
Cultivating takes time; it slowly sweeps widespread across a large swath of reading, span of years and percolation time. Like when I first tried vegetarianism back in the 90s. I ran tons then and ate little meat to keep light. Thinking the natural evolution of cutting back on animal protein was a vegetarian diet, I took the leap but was unsuccessful. I craved someting, felt a huge hole in my diet and so gave up.
Fifteen years later, without much thought, I just stopped eating meat. And never missed it. Like yoga and meditation, dozens of attempts over several decades and then one day it all made sense and was effortless to form the habit with full understanding of that seepage, that diffusion through mental pores of cultivated disposition to bend not only body but behavior, to flex a will to become. Unfold.
Sometimes conscious understanding needs time to catch up to that deeper knowledge, the stretch between knowing and understanding like the lightbulb lit with the words, “So that was what he was trying to tell me,” or “now I get how to play fifth position on the fingerboard”. Before, it was flat mystery like a hollow idea.
Bhavana is like a road trip uncharted and unknown at the start but so expected at the destination. As if you always knew where you were going after rolling back all the miles that you thought you had no idea where you were–an illusion, like your shadow catching up with you.
credit: wikipedia
Shucking Seeds
Flustered, mind agape, silently wide-eyed,
I know not what sits behind her eyes.
She, a squirrel up a date palm, looking for acorns,
and I, a logical storm looking for a landing, apace,
we dance the squares of the place, tiled and tidy,
a touch of mildewed madness escaping. We spin.
She hides, a cushion pin stuck in the grimy wall.
Magenta stew toppled around her meaty face, her,
I stare across the room at only silhouette;
flat ribbon plastic words float to her
cordon her off like a crime scene
in the corner, dark, smoldering
punk in a steamy seamless-ness,
drunken porridge, we two–a corruption,
an oil leak of foul forethought.
She takes me home–her home–
a wondrous oak tree, reaching
branching, bleeding out the red roots.
We shuck seeds, plant acorns, see what grows.
On Rebelle Society–my intimate journey to self acceptance
Please visit Rebelle Society to read “my intimate journey to self acceptance” which has been published today. I hope you enjoy it.
Peace
Evan was not my first love. My heart framed in poetry books, I sought love early. By fourteen I had had my first heartbreak and by sixteen, I was initiated to the world of embattled sex my mother fear-burned into me: woman as fortress and men as invader.
It was the 70s and free love was the slogan but not the practice. I was not the only young woman who paid the bodily price of losing what I did not understand I had–self-love, real love.
So when I fell in love with and married a French man a few years later, love was permeated with heady visions of Romantics like Byron and Wordsworth, but sex was informed by the attitudes of Plath and Sexton, hardened and cynical.
In my mind, love and sex were distinct and only the former was indispensable.
I loved Jean-Marc, but we were not so much “in love” as we were good friends. To me, that was more important.
Besides, it was clear I was not his physical type. He had had a girlfriend when I met him in college, a French goddess of natural beauty, as if she emerged from the heather, golden smooth skin delightfully coating her delicate bones and showcasing her eyes of sea blue.
She was the essence of what I deemed poetic femininity at the time. And I was nothing like her, not delicate, soft, supple, petite or graceful. I wasn’t French. I was New York, bookish and big.
But several years into our marriage, I grew thinner, more athletic. I struck a lean, tall figure with improved grace and balance from running and tennis. I had transformed the book worm smoker of pubs and diners around New York to an outdoorsy athletic competitor in California.
When I separated from my husband, I was in the best shape of my life, 28 years old with a hard body everyone noticed but me.
That is when I met Evan.
Evan taught me to love my body. I met him after my husband confessed that he was in love with someone else, a friend he had grown up with in France. Even though that relationship did not pan out, both of us needed time to sort things out.
In reality, the separation between us occurred long before, had been growing inside me. Jean-Marc’s vision of me affected my own. I was a rebound, the consoler and good friend when the goddess dumped him one New Year’s eve.
I was no beauty, but I was comfort.
His eye for aesthetics and style were distinguishing features of my attraction to him but also the very features that attracted him to others, beautiful, lean, olive-complected men I later came to find out.
So why did I choose someone who could not love my body? Over the years, I have considered that question.
Perhaps the body-mind division I fixed early on, prioritizing the intellectual over the physical sublimated my bodily emotions–etched the picture of an unlovely woman in my mind.
But I imagine, poor body image grew out of many seeds: my parents’ relationship, genetics, cultural dictates, social influences and my own love relationships.
Though Jean-Marc and I shared a love that made us grow in the comfort and safety of that umbrella love of young adults, he could not love me intimately, the way a lover sighs at the sight of his beloved’s nakedness. And we couldn’t talk about it for the pain and the guilt. But the elephant in the room nearly crushed me.
Eventually, I was flattened. I no longer had desire–until Evan.
I fell in love with him in a cafe in New York. He spoke soothingly about presence–being present in each moment–and though I had read my zen and Heidegger, I was witnessing the words rather than thinking about them.
He warned me beforehand and then he touched my hand and said, “You’re a writer; describe the experience of my hand.” Of course I didn’t know what he meant; I only said I wanted to be a writer–not that I was–and I was off balance with his touch.
So I described how I felt uneasy with a near stranger’s touch. To which he asked, “Does it feel warm? soft? rough? Can you feel the arced tips of the nails unforgiving yet pleasantly smooth?”
I hadn’t even thought of the physical sensation. I never did. All passed through my mind first and the physical was always sublimated, denied or ignored. Probably why I rarely saw a doctor, going about my business trying not to think of what ailed me.
Later, his first touch of studied tenderness opened my eyes and aroused passion I buried long before I knew its heat, its colorful flavors. He touched me, what was before his eyes, not a projection of me.
And then he took me on a tour of the secret vales and rich verdure of my body. It blazed real love.
Love–true love–is presence in touch; it needs no longing, fantasy, style, grace or poise–merely acceptance in being.
When I embraced my own beauty, uniquely my biological experience, replete with singular angles and curves, scars and splotches, I learned to be heart-wise loved by someone who could love me–all of me–and confirm I was worthy of another’s hand softly sweeping the hair off my brow.
My feminine, I learned, was desire—being—in touch.
How can we ever know how others sense the world? The question should evoke a yearning to find out without the hope of ever doing so. However, it is the practice–the focused being of and with others–that matters. It’s how we connect, avoid loneliness, while maintaining our own integrity.
It is how we find love, real love.
Touch led me from interpreting the world to experiencing it. Getting out of my mind, possessed with others’ formulations of love and sex, and into the moment–breathing presence; it brought me the fullness of acceptance, as a body, my body, with someone else’s.
No, Evan did not teach me acceptance by his touch; eventually, I was able to receive his touch by my own clarity–of space, moment, nearness of another’s presence becoming my own.
He taught me to “see” like the scientists and philosophers and lovers we are–empirically, intellectually and emotionally.
I wasn’t rushing headlong into someone else’s story for me. I had learned to better integrate my body and mind, which took examining inherited perceptions: those of my mother, husband, authors, and culture.
It took practice to own my body. It still does.
And being in the precise moment recalled by someone’s touch–healing in its grounding.
Evan lies next to me now, his pillowed head in the shadow of mine. I am reading, elbow-propped, turned away.
We are prone, bare, having just settled into bed for the night. Humid heat of a New England summer makes flannel impossible and silk torturously sticky. We sleep this way most nights four seasons long.
His body is serpent shape mirror of mine with inches of space between us, creating the comfort of a cooling air canal. We are art in symmetry.
His hand, open palmed, smooths across the contours of my hip, waist and shoulder, smearing heat like oil upon the line of curvy seas in the imagination of his hand–port to starboard to port again. The slow rhythm of his caress lulls my lids to half mast as the warmth and tingling skin sensors combine, dance me to lullaby languor. These are the moments.
I stop reading to softly lower my head to the pillow, ever so slowly, avoiding the slightest ripple in the water of his soliloquy wave. I hold my breath the whole way down.
Releasing, exhaling in measured silent wisps of warm air through my teeth and the pebble O my lips make, anchor hits bottom, the sync of his hypnotic oar undisturbed; it continues to brush the still of my anatomy’s ebb and flow.
I breathe just enough air to live, causing not so much as a flutter-by in the sheets. If I fill my lungs too deeply, selfishly, I will signal sleep’s onslaught, killer of this powerfully peaceful moment of breath, body and hand. No dream could be better than this. I own it–to the coral depths of fibrous memory.
In the gaze of the other 