Six Word Saturday

Cleaning. Emails. Laundry. Music. Yoga. Cleaning.

shoulda put a ring on it, whoah oh oh.

So my iPod is completely full. (And I can’t stop listening to Beyonce, mostly ignoring the other 700-odd songs.) Do you know how many more songs I can fit on it? NONE MORE SONGS. I’m going to ask Santa for one of those gigantic iPods for Christmas – one of the 160G-capacity ones. The one I have is 8G, so I think 80 times as much storage space should be about enough for all the fabulous music I learned about at training. Nitin Sawhney and Adham Shaikh and Bob Holroyd and all manner of other world music artists. I also found the song on the menu of the Shiva Rea DVD that I love – it’s “Jai Hanuman” by the Shaman’s Dream Project, and you should check it out. Very nice drifting vocals and a minor-key guitar line that’s just great to get lost in.

Yoga last night was awfully interesting. I was moving slower, I was doing downward dog differently, I was moving as my body told me, I was exploring into the pain in my back and shoulder. My focus felt completely different, as if I was within and without, open to what was around me but with my inner senses trained on what was going on inside. I don’t know if this is the new norm, or what, but it was unique. It really didn’t resemble any class I’d ever taken before training.

Part of the reason for this was that the power was out, mysteriously, and we were doing yoga in a mostly dark studio by candlelight. There were only a few of us. I really wanted to talk to Jennifer about my training and also the training she went on, the same weekend that I left for California, but it was all about the class and there wasn’t any time before or after. I miss the looseness of the West Coasties – I could feel all the tightnesses around me, all the self-fear and comparison, in the very air.

Earlier in the week I could feel the world harshing my buzz, and I was able to step back, think of the wind over the canyon, and realize that none of this really matters. I remembered that what mattered were the things I always have inside me. I keep going back to how sad and useless I felt not to be able to sing during the last couple of days’ events, because I wanted to share my voice, and to participate with it. This was really challenging for me, because this was the only impression of me these people would ever have, and I missed opportunities to, you know, not be coughing all the time. This was the only chance I’d ever get to do this, and I didn’t get to sing. But I had to get over it, and be happy just to be there. In the same way, I’m trying to be happy just to be alive, to be breathing. I may not be able to share my gifts all the time, every moment, but I do have the opportunity to live in the space around me, and to share that.

the trash heap has spoken. nyaaah.

I know yesterday’s post didn’t really match with what’s been going on in my life right now – it was in the can from a few weeks ago, saved for when I was really out of time. Which I was last night, and still am, to tell the truth. So here’s another weird schizo post – shorter than usual, though.

BF gave me the first season of Fraggle Rock for my birthday. I grew up watching this show, and I’m loving it again. The songs are just so wonderful. The actual show has seams appearing to me for the first time, but the songs are still teh awesome.

Tonight I’m going to yoga class with Jennifer for the first time in about a month, and the first yoga class since Sunday’s morning class closed out the training. I’m sort of excited about it.

My job is stinky. That’s all I can say right now. Even Mom thinks they’re being unreasonable. I can’t wait to be done with it. My plan is to keep working and saving for as long as I can stand it, and meanwhile apply for other jobs.

Also, I’m planning to attend an introductory massage course at the community college in January, to see if it’s something I want to go into. I’m not clear on whether I should be looking at specialty massage schools instead of looking at the community college – whether it’s somehow “nicer” to go to a “real” massage school. But the thing to do to go into the field is just get the credits and take the state exam, and I’m pretty sure I can do that after getting the education anywhere. I’ll ask around to make sure, though.

Sky, at the training, advised me to go to Thailand for a week and learn Thai massage from her teacher. She said the plane ticket is by far the most expensive part of the process, and that staying in Thailand for a week isn’t even necessary to save up for. I have to say, going to Thailand is really not in my life plan right now, but I got through two weeks in a yurt, after all. To be honest, it sounds sort of exciting. And the little taste of Thai massage I got was wonderfully appealing.

Me? Thailand? What the hell happened to me at that training?

I am still glad to be home. I’m alternating between meat one day and vegetarian the next to try and ease back into having enough protein in my system while retaining the muscle tone I gained and weight I lost while I was away. Yesterday was a veggie day, and today I’m having chili. Woo!

cake

I am in the elevator when I hear the drumsticks begin clicking together. A synthesizer hums a tune in a minor key.

I am walking out of the building.

We know of an ancient radiation that haunts dismembered constellations.

One earphone is hooked over, into my hair, the other dangles.

A faintly glimmering radio station.

Suddenly I wonder to myself how many times I have listened to this song. I couldn’t even begin to estimate it, I think.

While Frank Sinatra sings “Stormy Weather,” and the flies and spiders get along together

It’s exactly four minutes long, and I first heard it when I was a sophomore in high school. What would you get if you added all those minutes together? All those four-minute intervals in which this song has vibrated its way into my ears? How much time, how many hours, how many days?

cobwebs fall on an old skipping record.

Every time I have heard it, it has been exactly the same. From 0.49 to 0.53 there is only a muted trumpet. At 1.08 a trumpet begins a simple melody line accompanying the vocal that continues through the end of the verse, which ends at 1.24.

Beyond the suns that guard this roost, beyond your flowers of flaming truth, beyond your latest ad campaigns –

It is always the same. It never varies. It plays over and over in my life, over and over throughout various geographical spaces, reverberating into hundreds of thousands of ears, and it never changes for a tenth of a second, because that is how the song was recorded.

an old man sits collecting stamps in a room all filled with Chinese lamps.

This song is a part of me. All those hours add up to some chunk of my life, whether significant or not. I know every moment, every musical turn of phrase, every word and every nuance of the lead singer’s performance. I have listened to those four minutes numberless times. It has formed wrinkles in my brain that help me remember, and sing along.

He saves what others throw away.

It stuns me that the file cabinet in my brain holds the melodies and tunes of most of the 688 songs currently on my iPod, and many hundreds more. How can I remember all those things, and not remember the exact feeling of his lips on mine during our first kiss?

He says that he’ll be rich someday.

wtf, body? more pain?

At some point I will get around to writing more philosophical and tearjerking (and coherent) posts about the past two weeks, but slotting back into my life is crazy and haphazard and narcoleptic and trying to cope with those things is PLENTY ENOUGH, thank you, without having to take the time to Sit Down And Write From The Heart. So, here’s a post about schtuff.

This article is really, really good. So much so that I have to quote the entire last paragraph:

I’m not wishing the Internet away. It has become so integral to my work — to my life — that I honestly can’t recall what I did without it. But it has allowed us to reflexively indulge every passing interest, to expect answers to every fleeting question, to believe that if we search long enough, surf a little further, we can hit the dry land of knowing “everything that happens” and that such knowledge is both possible and desirable. In the end, though, there is just more sea, and as alluring as we can find the perpetual pursuit of little thoughts, the net result may only be to prevent us from forming the big ones.

This is more or less what I was trying to say a very long time ago, with hundreds of words, and she managed it in a paragraph. Hat: off.

On the flight from Santa Barbara to Phoenix on Sunday morning, I think that they actually did not turn the air system on in the plane until almost cruising altitude. I couldn’t hear it blowing, drowning out most of the sounds in the plane as it usually does, and the higher we got the sleepier I got until I was nodding off only a few minutes after taking off. That is, I believe I was passing out from lack of oxygen. I can’t believe that they forgot this minor detail, and the rest of the passengers ranged from just fine to also-sleepy as I was experiencing this, so the sound of the air that I didn’t hear could have been…something else that they forgot to turn on. I don’t know. It was just weird.

BF is so, so awesome. He cleaned up the house and made brownies and chili for me. And he’s been totally leaving me alone about unpacking my stuff and cleaning up my mess and returning to my usual responsibilities. He sensibly pointed out that I haven’t yet been home for 48 hours yet, but I keep thinking that most people would have at least unpacked by now, right?

I feel a subtle but intense shift in my personal atmosphere after having this experience. I told BF last night that as I sat at work yesterday, doing my stupid, stupid, stupid job, I felt as if there was all this space in my mind. Feeling grounded and good-natured are parts of it, but there’s more…it’s hard to explain. Everything has widened inside myself. I’m not so afraid, and I feel grounded and ready.

I have a lot more enthusiasm for my life in general – making couscous soup tonight was such a pleasure, I thought I was going to jump up and down when it was ready, I missed cooking so much! - and for being myself, tooling along in the life I live. I’m hoping this is going to last, that it’s not just the blush after the experience. Thing is, the two weeks were goddamn exhausting, complete with a Kill Bill-esque climb up a terrible hill once or twice a day, so it’s not as if I’m back from an idyllic Caribbean vacation. I think I just understand myself better than I did – and that I’m taking Marie’s advice: not letting anyone else tell me who I should be.

I’ve got to get started on all the post-training/marketing crap I have to do: emailing people to ask when they want to set up privates, talking to MP about doing a group class with some of their friends, putting together a little picture email to thank all the people who donated, setting up a new website, printing business cards (the first round, before I’m actually RYT, will be a small, home-printed batch), calling studios and gyms, etc etc. Pain in the ASS, and I’m not even unpacked, and how am I ever going to get any sleep?

I’ve been having some pain in my mid-back for the last two days. It’s a little knot that doesn’t really go away and changes when I move around. It’s the exact same pain I have when I do backbends without warming up. I have no idea what it is, but I’m worried one of my vertebrae has shifted out of place. This isn’t really fixable without a master yoga teacher, a chiropractor (God forbid), or an orthopedic doctor. And I am without insurance at this time. I hope it will work itself out, that it’s just something kinking out because I’m back to sitting in chairs all day instead of sitting on the floor as I did for two weeks. (My posture is awesome by now, by the way.) But I admit it’s worrying me quite a lot.

On Saturday night we sat in council – long story – and it took FOREVER - also a long story. Afterward there was supposed to be a party, starting at 10:00, but we didn’t even get finished until almost 11, so I figured the party would be cancelled and/or everyone would just go to bed, too tired to party. I was wrong, and I was also really glad I stayed. It turned out to be exactly what we needed, a huge release of energy and pent-up good behavior, dancing to enormously loud Michael Jackson and Beyonce. I didn’t go back to my yurt until 1:00, and one of my yurtmates didn’t get in until 2:30, after naked hot-tubbing one last time. It was pretty great. I don’t know how they knew that this was what we’d need – of course this is what every group needs, every time, but I don’t know how they came up with it in the first place.

Here’s another picture for you. I don’t often take pictures, because I find that pictures are generally a thoroughly poor excuse for what it was like to be there, wherever I was. In this instance, I wanted to try and remember everything I could about White Lotus, so I took many more pictures than I generally do. Of course I found that despite my purpose, I was right all along and pictures are a shitty substitute; this picture is a perfect example.

On this night, the fog rolled in on a high wind so quickly, you could see the shreds of it drifting into the canyon as you stood there. This view here is usually of Santa Barbara, all the way down to the ocean; that night it was totally obscured with cotton. The air was so full of electricity.

PROOF!

I am so dead on my feet it’s not even funny and I’m headed for the futon to take a nap until BF gets home, but I wanted to say just a couple of things.

One, my shoulder/arm injury is extremely minor, thank goodness (and thanks for your comments). When I woke up the next morning my strength and comfort level were easily at 70%. Of course doing yoga (even taking it VERY easy, which my ego managed to step back and allow me to do) and then lugging suitcases for the next couple of days have meant that it hasn’t healed entirely yet, but it was definitely just a pulled muscle. A couple more days of ice and rest and it’ll be jolly good.

Two, here is the PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE.

You ready?

This proves that I jumped in the swimming hole naked.

Yes, that’s right, it does.

Proves it solid.

Okay, here it is.

See that splash? That was me.

[cricket]

[cricket]

OK, but it actually was me in my birthday suit. Promise. All the other pictures of me that prove I was naked are really not for internet consumption. There was a hilarious picture of me right before I jumped in – I was afraid the water would be really really cold (and I was right), and so there’s me, naked, standing on the rock, and my hands are all blurry because I was shaking them up and down in verklemptness.

Here is a different picture taken that day, one that communicates the other half of what this experience was like. I will be sharing it with you, and at great length to all the people around me (luckily for them) for months and years to come.

in brief

Yesterday, I danced. Today, I’m flying. Tomorrow…?

hearing a “pop” in handstand is never good

Hello, yoga injury #4.

This time it was nobody’s fault at all. We were practicing handstand, and my body fell to the left and my left shoulder buckled and I felt a pop. My arm felt weird and numb and weak for a few minutes, then that wore off and it was back to normal. Some I-slept-on-it-funny pain I’d been having for a few weeks now disappeared, weirdly, but I was left with a new pain, an unpleasant, low-frequency soreness. Today it hurts to bear weight – couldn’t do chaturanga at all, and upward dog had to be exchanged after only a couple of reps, and then even cobra was a bit too much – and when I get to the edge of my range of motion in any direction it hurts a good deal. And it’s a wee little bit sore in general, whenever I’m doing nothing.

After asking around, I think I’ve overstretched a muscle or, less likely, overstretched a ligament or a tendon. If I’d actually torn a tendon or a ligament, I was told, I’d know it – be in a lot more pain and be a lot less able to move. It’s a different kind of pain than when I tore my hamstring, not sharp at all, and indeed the pain it most closely resembles is next-day muscle soreness after I’ve pushed too hard on the forward bends. So I think if I rest it and ice it (RICES!), it’ll heal up in a few days.

The lecture yesterday was at the fire circle. Ganga talked about the chakras, and also briefly about tantra. His version of the chakras is a bit different than the version I know, a la Anodea Judith, but it’s close enough in most ways. He talked about the notion that the chakra system is syncretic, which means it’s a jumble of different traditions and sets of knowledge, all tumbled together until they make a whole that’s a synthesis of its parts. Ganga was talking about this essentially as a positive thing, and I’ve always thought of it as the opposite.

Not that I believe that things need to be pure to be good – that notion leads to little troubles like the Holocaust – but I always think of Hamlet. There are two major versions of Hamlet, and the way scholars have come to one definitive version is by melding the two versions together, making the play a lot longer, and calling it a “conflated” text. Throwing these two versions at each other until they splat together is not, in my opinion, how you find a “correct” version of Hamlet. And truly, neither one nor the other is the correct version either. They both have their place in publishing/playwriting/literature/British history.

People need surety, though; they need to be reassured that there is One Right Way and they’re following it. Hence Christianity. So it’s not all bad, I guess. Having a conflated text means that there’s a lot more security out there in the minds of people who need it.

Where was I? Oh, yes, the syncretic chakras. So I’m now reexamining the whole notion that mixed-up traditions are not necessarily bad. The way of things is that they wear down and evolve and alter until they’re hardly recognizable, like boulders in the ocean, but it still makes me sad when things are lost, or when things that matter are polluted and perverted. Yet I’m beginning to think this is not really the right way to look at it. All of mankind’s beautiful brilliant innovations have been subject to this process: TV and the internet sullied by advertising and pornography, American “traditions” being invented via untrue legends and thinking the best of our ancestors. Knowing that this is how it is, okay, fine, but liking it and finding it a positive thing? Whole other ball of wax. It’s very challenging for me to see our evolution towards this 2009 world as being wonderful, the best way it could have happened, rather than a garbled mess of wasted potential and mouth-breathers sexting each other.

In other news, I got myself into a coughing fit during savasana today that was so intense I nearly threw up. It was our last savasana as a group, and I still feel absolutely awful that I disturbed it. I’m hoping it was the last gasp of this stupid infection, though. I’m going to try and avoid talking as much as I can for the remainder of my time here.

I still love it here, and am determined to move to this coast (and to return to this beautiful, sacred place, someday) but I’m ready to go home. Crippled in one arm and coughing like a lunatic does not a good vacation make.

This morning we took a written test (Not-test! Tracey told us, because we’re not being graded on it, but it looked and felt an awful lot like a test to me), and tomorrow we teach little ten-minute classes to each other. There is much nervousness about all this. I cobbled mine together from some notes on a hip-opening class I wrote a while ago. Since I never actually put the class together, I don’t think this is cheating. I’m pretty confident about it, but I think I need to test it and go over it a couple more times.

I think I’m going to go enjoy the afternoon. Me and my ice pack, sittin’ in a tree.

the blue bird

At some point in the next week or so I will present you with PHOTOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE that I jumped in the swimming hole naked today. But for now you’ll just have to trust me, that I did. And that it was so fucking cold that my lungs froze up and I could not exhale until I climbed out onto a rock. It was a blast and I’m so glad I did it.

Just a short thing today, although soon I have to write about “syncretic”, and the chakra system, and some other things. That’s philosophical and I am not in a place to be able to do it right now (tiiiiired and my diaphragm hurts from coughing), so I’ll just tell you this little thing.

When I was in middle school I used to lead guided meditations to anyone who’d agree to do it with me. We’d sit knee to knee, cross-legged, and I’d put their hands in mine. I’d tell them to close their eyes and imagine themselves in a hallway.

How many doors do you see?

Do you want to go in any of them?

Which one?

Open the door.

What do you see?

Do you want to leave this room?

Do you want to leave this trance?

And then we would either go into more rooms or I’d tell them to open their eyes and we’d talk over what they’d seen. I think now that this was totally bizarre and irresponsible of me, to just invent this mode of self-exploration and talk a bunch of impressionable young people into doing it with me, but I was just a kid myself, you know.

The one time I got someone to guide me, I saw, in my room, a totally white room that was shaped like an egg, with no wall-corners. There was a window to one side, with light coming through. On the floor was the most beautiful blue bird, and as I thought about taking a step closer to it, it flew out of the window and was gone.

Today I was in the yoga studio here, and I looked up at the ceiling, and I realized for the first time that this studio had no wall-corners. It was rounded at every edge, and painted white.

What is the bird? Has it already flown away, or am I keeping it here, cradled close to my heart?

What Now Then

Day 89. Endless expanse of white. Had to eat Jenkins’ legs last night, as remainder of supplies have run out. Don’t know how we will reach the Pole at this rate. If anyone finds this journal, please tell my darling Rosa that I love her always.

Wait, that’s an arctic expedition. This is just yoga. HA, I guess I forgot where I was.

I am feeling quite homesick today. I miss BF terribly, and I miss my bed and my soft comfortable home and my DVDs, and I even miss the normalcy of chaotic and unhealthy American life. I miss my too-small kitchen and the chore of making my own meals.

Also, just a note: trying to do three hours plus of yoga per day, with more hours of lecture and breakdown, when you have a respiratory infection, is not any fun.

I know, I’m complaining, and that’s stupid, because this is still a blissful place, I’m still immersed in yoga, and I am still in full-on dread mode about the very notion of going back into my cubicle in five days’ time, but the pace here is relentless, y’all. I’m reveling in it, but I’m also starting to wear out. If I ever do a residential teacher training, in some distant Bizarro World of the future, I will probably make it three weeks.

A second note: my clothes, sweaty from this morning’s practice, smell like last night’s dinner. Exactly how cleansing is this place? Because that seems nuts.

A physical therapist came to talk to us last night. (Really a very great idea.) He started his 2 1/2 hour lecture with the spine, which was a HYOOGE mistake, because we got off onto a zillion tangents about the spine and particular questions and the spine took up an hour and twenty minutes. He only got about 10 minutes to spend on the knee, and didn’t cover ankles, elbows, wrists or neck at all. He did get to the pelvis and hips, which was interesting, but I would have liked to hear more about, oh, I don’t know, every other part of the body. You and I both know that there is too much in the body that yoga teachers theoretically need to know to realistically cover with a single 2.5-hour lecture, because yoga works every muscle in the body and understanding how they all work together with bones and ligaments and tendons and prior injuries and chronic conditions and so on could take years or a lifetime or never. But I was nevertheless sitting there seething during the lecture, wanting everyone with their questions to just let them go and let him get on with his actual talk.

Rrmph. Okay, I’m over it. No biggie. Still breathing. I also still managed to take three closely written pages of notes from his lecture, so I must’ve gotten something out of it.

Going back a couple of paragraphs, come to think of it, I’m not sure if three weeks is actually a good idea. People’s personalities are starting to wear on each other, I think (or at least they are in my case), and if we all had to stay another week away from our families I think it would be even harder. There’s just so much to cover, so much to say, and I wish we had another week to go even deeper.

I keep finding all these different directions that I want to go in. I’m thinking about physical therapy. I’m thinking about massage therapy. I’m thinking about life coaching. I’m thinking about all manner of other careers that are out there and available to me, some with more school and some not. I feel like I’m having a crisis of wishy-washiness, a mode where I’m totally flaking about what I actually want to do and am not able to settle on something serious and realistic that I want to be when I grow up. I’m trying to see it from the other side: suddenly the possibilities of life are opened to me and I don’t feel restricted to doing what I have always done and/or what I am currently doing.

Few of the attendees here have traditional lives. Many are bodyworkers, one is an itinerant National Parks ranger, another lives and works on a boat that goes back and forth across the Pacific, and many others are between careers as they search for their next direction after this training. (Like me?) This is quite inspiring; there are so few people in my life who have lived out of the box that I begin to believe they only exist in the movies. But there are indeed people who blow in the wind successfully: I’ve now met a couple dozen of them.

I’ll wind down with a story from Ganga’s lecture this morning, which he said is actually from the Upanishads. A salt doll decided he wanted to see where he came from, so he went to the ocean and jumped in. He learned where he came from, but he dissolved and was gone. This is a metaphor for enlightenment. Perhaps it isn’t the best thing to be attempting to reach enlightenment as quickly as possible: discovering that you are part of a whole, and your uniqueness vanishing as a result, is not necessarily a desirable end result.