risky business

I find that the April 14th weekend seminar on the G.I. Gurdieff and J.G. Bennett Fourth Way teachings presented by Ben, Cindy, George and Ana Bennett - who, along with planning it from a distance, so generously flew out here all the way from Massachusetts - has left me with much to write. Where to begin?

One thing it made me reflect on is risk. The potential latent in risk, as well as hazard. I never personally met Mr. Bennett but imagine if I were him the temptation to rest on my laurels, with so many students looking on, would be high. But he never stopped pushing forward. He never stopped learning regardless of what he already knew or what status he had attained. This alone garners the greatest respect from me. It speaks of his commitment to life and all that is alive, to his humility and his humanity. That, though he may have had something to say about it, he never shunned even the weakest of us and never seemed to forget himself or his origins.

Accepting risk into one's life is accepting the challenge of the outside world and circumstances against your beliefs - also accepting that, as a consequence, you might have to revise them. The moment you drift away from this willingness to be challenged and be changed, to be found out, to be found wrong, you die. It may happen in increments as the decisions you make to avoid risk multiply, but it's death just the same. And it is observable. It is as instantaneous as it is slow because when it happens our world contracts. We are sometimes, as a result, made more comfortable for it. But this is akin to the blessing of a person who dies quietly in their sleep. If I am to die, I want to go kicking and screaming. It's not the death of the physical body I am referring to. That is quite apart.

alchemy

I've been working on the Prelude to the Third Suite for Solo Cello on guitar in my "play" time. With Bach there are so many damn sixteenth notes. It's easy to want to jump over or hurry through those that are difficult or whose phrasing isn't your favorite.

A few nights ago my approach changed. Looking at the music the notes began to remind me of people. A crowd of little heads on sticks. What if they were people, embodying the same complex relationships to each other, the same depth and range of experience, of characteristics? What would I want to bring to them? How would I want this to go?

It sounds cheesy to write but, at that moment, I decided what I wanted most was to love each one individually, to give it it's due, to listen to what each had to tell me, rather than imposing my will on it or rushing through to the parts I find interesting or which express more closely what I want to say. Keeping this in mind, I began. The difference was immediate. A transformation had begun beneath my fingers. Rather than simply pecking out on the instrument what my eyes read from the page, they responded more and more to what was heard. 

There is an ocean between playing notes and playing music I am not sure it is possible for us to cross. At least, not without help. We endeavor to play music, but perhaps it is music that plays us. I was amazed to find that each note really did have a life of its own, a rich life at that - independent of any meaning I could give it. How many more dimensions this piece took on when approached, sincerely, in this way. It was the best kind of magic. 

collateral damage

That's what I am every time I'm caught standing next to a person the moment they decide to self-destruct. 

rolling with the punches

"Fig. to absorb the force of a blow"

March is almost over. Given the last three months I'd say 2012 is shaping up to be a year fraught with personal difficulty. I'm certainly not shaking my fist at the sky, taunting God to bring it on, but perhaps I can accept this as a challenge all the same. Can I hold the center? Find my place within the flux of everything changing. Do I have any stability with me? Can I feel loss, can I suffer and yet hold fast to the knowledge that these are impersonal - these are natural, they are bodily, they pass. 

Prevention is a pretty word. It's a word you seldom hear in Western medicine. Over here you don't worry about a thing until it hurts. This is not how we treat our hearts though. I can't make time for my yearly physical, but I'll make damn sure no one has an opportunity to break my heart again. You lose something or someone and it becomes easy to wall up, to begin viewing your attachments with suspicion. Which one of you will leave me next? We demand an answer and when one doesn't come sometimes we make one come. 

In my experience, energy spent obsessing over prevention and protection is energy wasted or worse. Pain and loss and suffering happen and will always happen. They are part of the deal. If we try too hard to protect ourselves from these inevitabilities we run the risk of shutting not only the bad, but also the good out of our lives. And, though it may make us feel a little safer or a little more in control how effective is it, really?

the golden rule

It is impossible to violate another person without also violating yourself.

possession

How could you know you'd remind me of my godless days? Those days when I'd stopped singing. His hands around my throat. His fist in my mouth. My happiness choked completely out. I was the farthest from myself I've ever been. This is not a metaphor. It happened. First I was a lover, then an object to him. Objects don't suffer, they don't hurt. You take what you want and discard them. No part of me left untouched, unmolested. No part of me too sacred. By the end his reach had gone so deeply in, I never thought I could feel safe from it again. And yet, here I am. Here I am. Here I am.

Color Improv 1

what I know

I know the jasmine bushes on May St. are in bloom but, there's nothing quite like catching their scent from the back of a motorcycle after an evening of darts and drinking at the King's Head Saloon.

lost and found

I went to the Long Beach aquarium Friday afternoon. I wanted it to touch my bad mood and it did, but not before I made a comment. There is such effort and artistry put into keeping those ecosystems alive. So much work required to maintain it. Why bother when everything will die? "Everything will die." Vocalizing this felt darkly childish, but I still expected it to ring true. It didn't. I've been thinking about why not and have come to this conclusion (a notion I have been introduced to before but which hits home ever so often in new ways): life never dies, it only goes in and out of experiencing itself (as a sea urchin, anemone, jellyfish or me, for instance).

Looking in the tanks you see that they are teeming with life - from very low to sophisticated levels of intelligence - but life just the same. How could life die? Only things die. Our different faces give the illusion of separateness. Faces whose expressions, nonetheless, endlessly reflect the same thing. Whole and inseparable. Even though we are given names and tend to eat each other. What a brat I was to have said something like that, even for effect. I suppose I'm afraid of death, of loss.

J.G. Bennett writes that it is "a risk to go forward in spiritual life, because all progress in the spiritual life must come from dying in order to be born again. Every step is a death, and everything that one finds is a new birth." I can't argue. This bad mood I've been in really had me by the balls for a few extraordinarily long and messy days. I was it's bitch. But I still did my sitting and practiced my guitar. It was in doing these that I found the strength and the wherewithal to ask for help. And there was no mistaking when it arrived. 

I've said before that I am like a dead thing all the moments between noticing. This was no less like being raised from the dead. I was struck from out of nowhere with a sense of renewed compassion for my self. I suddenly, lovingly, occupied my own body again and breath flowed in. This experience of relief had no clear connection to anything in my head or amongst my surroundings. A weight had literally been lifted from my shoulders. A weight I had already tried, and failed, to lift myself.

It was a good lesson for me. We prepare the soil. We lay the ground with our work. We strive to survive and to find balance, to become the architects of our own internal and external environment, but it's not enough. There is something we simply cannot plant in our own hearts but must be placed there for us. If it weren't for life continuously and uncontrollably flowing in and out, with its own will and its own purpose, we would still be lump of some mythological clay waiting for God's breath to invigorate us. We would get lost, as we all must do, but never be found.  

anemones

I know we're not meant to live forever but after losing Nana, an important figure in my life and also my maternal Grandmother, all I want to do is hold even more tightly to my own Mom.

I also thought about my Dad tonight. Sometimes when I read bedtime stories to the twins I hear his voice in mine - the one on the tape he sent Melissa and I because he couldn't be there himself (it was a white cassette tape with rainbow stickers on it). I liked the one about the birds who couldn't get along. Those fables might have actually been my first indirect introduction to Sufism. 

I tend to lose dart games to men who sexually harass me. Though I am reputed to be a dart-playing-hard-ass who doesn't take any shit, I know it's because I'm afraid of them. 

yes-women

Some guys in Los Angles tell me I think too much. This is usually one of three types of men; 1) those who are surprised, then intimidated that I think at all; 2) those who do not want me to think because it interferes with their plans; and 3) those who wish I were more agreeable (like women are supposed to be) and less questioning because they are not so interested in being understood as they are absorbing some female's time and attention. 

Most of what I don't see I don't see because I don't want to. 

True compassion doesn't cherry-pick.

Or, put another way, compassion that cherry-picks is just another word for prejudice. 

14th and Pearl

I pass things on my way to school, sometimes beautiful things. Friday I saw an elderly man standing next to a fence cup the reddish-orange bloom of a trumpet flower in one hand while he ran his fingers tenderly down its fuzzy stem with the other. That the alien fruit and foliage of this city still inspires it's aging resident. That there is always so much wonder in this world worth stopping and reaching out for.

counting to a googol

oh, Zuma! trace those words again on my skin. secret words. you only mouthed in my direction on a whim. I slipped my toes into them. and ran a race to win. miles away now at the Getty. coloring butterflies with crayons in the gallery. my friend, can you also be caught and counted? like pennies in our fountain or stars out over the terrace. are you my Polaris? a north star to point the way for tired Capricornus? or just a fickle wind.

Matthew 5:44

I've been thinking lately on forgiveness and the prescription of loving our enemies. I don't have many enemies to love, but there are those whose actions in one way or another have caused me to feel unfairly treated. This ranges from the absurd (that asshole who cut me off in traffic) to repeated acts of insensitivity or hurtfulness. I have been lucky. There is not much in my personal history which cannot or has not been forgiven. But I've found it helps if I am able to understand, even a little bit, the underlying cause of the action or miscommunication. Why did so and so do x, y & z? How have I interpreted it (because it is an interpretation, not fact) and why? There is often some sort of ailment at the root of it. Mine or someone else's previous hurt working itself out in the present. This is ok. Even when it's not ok. I have more trouble coming to terms with what I fail to understand, especially after exerting some mental and emotional effort at working the problem out. 

I am, however, at least as frequently incomprehensible to myself as others are to me. Today in class I noticed a willful interference with my own experience of physical freedom. I can honestly say I didn't want to feel better. I wanted to pull down on my lousy body. Perhaps I wanted to punish it. This flies in the face of some assumptions. Love your enemies, heh? As though our enemies seek our demise while we, on the other hand, are perfect purveyors of our own health and good intentions. Perhaps there is some personal dimension to this biblical saying. This afternoon I was my own adversity, my own antagonist. Maybe the practice of loving our enemies can work directly in our favor - not in some mysteriously altruistic way - but because we are often our own worst enemies. Should we not then love ourselves? I can see how, practically speaking, adherence to this golden rule might give a person (me) more patience and flexibility dealing with their own frustratingly complicated and unhelpful selves.

these are mine

With this cigarette I absolve thee.
Penance will be self-love
And a felt-tipped cowboy hat.

lesser things

How many fears and insecurities we bump up against in just a day. Am I able to bear myself up? Will I meet the demands placed on me physically, mentally, emotionally? How afraid I am that I cannot!

Last night these melted away. I sat outside on the bricks, smoked a cigarette (I know it's unhealthy), and took myself in. I am not so bad - even though I am not transformed into some higher or brighter thing. This waist, these legs, my critical mind and nagging desire to get closer to others. I am not always gentle, but I am mostly good-willed.

I am reminded that it is ok to begin again, to always begin again from where I am at. I sometimes find myself crawling back to my center, pride in hand, after having been distracted by some lesser thing. But as long as my return is sincere, I have yet to be turned away from that source of self-acceptance and benevolent comfort.  

chameleon

with all your various affectations

you are a study in adaptation.
in fact, your body is replete
with parts made specially for deceit.
from spiny tail to parrot feet,
bulging eyes and horny head
without these you might just
be dead.

but, one thing I should confess,
though saying so might cause a mess,
I find that your most helpful trait
(and one that many emulate) is
not one of my favorite.
crimson, amber, indigo,
tangerine, tea-green, peridot,
chartreuse, emerald, cobalt blue,
you conform yourself to any hue.

so no one knows
where you begin or where you
end or how to ferret in your
grin sincerity from fitting-in.
in other words, I think I must
(although you might call me
unjust) compose a poem
for some other animal
I trust!

helplessness blues

I nannied on Saturday. One twin commenced to hit the other. The victim of this abuse appealed to their mother. Whereby J. replied with a question, "Then why don't you move away." This doesn't mean to imply J. was un-empathetic to the abuse; she was merely pointing out that the aggressed-upon twin had the power to remove themselves from the noxious and hurtful behavior of the other without her intervention. I found this bit of wisdom totally rational and wish for myself that I could follow the same advice. Acknowledging as well, were I to follow it and distance myself from those who hurt me I also would not, like the twin of my story, be as tempted to hit back. 

the way home

One of the greatest gifts I received growing up came in the form of a sunny afternoon's walk home from the bus stop. I was overcome with the sensation that, regardless of what trials lay behind and what awaited me at home, I was ok. I was not only safe in this green, insulated bubble of Copland Drive, but happy. I took a seat on the curb and basked in this realization before continuing on my way. For those few gloriously stretched out minutes I felt liberated from fear and from the kind of debilitating worry which, we come to find, renders us powerlessly ineffective as adults and taints far too many of our experiences with mental anguish and physical tension. This experience (and many since) of momentary awareness is what emboldens me in my study of the Alexander Technique and why every return to length and width feels fresh after having lapsed into anxiety. This place of opening and gentle release is a home you can never return too often. It is the kind that leaves your sheets made up, your favorite quilt on the bed, the lights on. 

body

all
the guys
at the bar
tell me I look
younger
than I
am.
I suppose
I should be
thankful
they
seem
to like
this body
bag.

nursery rhymes I

"As your bright and tiny spark,

Lights the traveler in the dark,

Though I know not what you are,

Twinkle, twinkle, little star."

 - "The Star" by Jane Taylor, 1806.

melt away my fear my dear. take the reins. light the way. show me what I have to say. not everyone has a heart that speaks to them that way. in fact I find it's dark beneath the surface. and struggle without hope to find a purpose. a will beyond my will that must be done. a hymn that finally moves this poet into song. if only I could be as submissive as the one. that bears fruit when the time has come. cherry blossoms bent low in the sun. do not doubt the branch on which they're hung. cherry blossoms bent low in the sun. do not doubt the branch on which they're hung.

I left M.T.O. because I could no longer see a way forward. That doesn't mean I did not directly benefit from my time there (under the help and guidance of several mentors), or even that a way forward did not exist - only that after looking, I did not myself find it. 

my dark horse,

my underdog,
favorite of my choosing,
I'm done cheering for teams that
can't win unless they're losing.

Sometimes I see you with a golden light around you.
Sometimes I can see through you. When I do,
baby all I find is how good you are.

my black infinity

I do not regret any of the 30+ acorns which fell from the tree I used to park my car under in Atlanta, or the pock-marks they left in the paint. Nor do I regret the smear Luke left when he permanently rubbed "wash me" into its dirt-covered hood. Like a friend you have both battled with and gone to battle for, these scars only make me love it more.