Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

Because of computer issues, today's Refill will be delayed. It's going to be about the way flow oh-so-perfectly dictated my current living situation. You're going to love it. You can't wait to read it.

My student today struggled and struggled, far more than I expected of him, and then suddenly he had a breakthrough and found himself actually skiing for the first time ever.

That was pretty cool. But far more cool was when I heard him remark to himself, "I can see now why people love this."

My lesson yesterday was with a 14-year-old girl who'd gotten hurt skiing about three years ago and had unsurprisingly been experiencing deep fear on the mountain ever since. I taught her the centered breath, then brought her attention back to the breath again and again. Her fear lessened, and she said, "Skiing is fun again!"

My lesson today was with a 16-year-old girl who was struggling with some issues in her home life. I taught her the centered breath, brought her attention to the breath again and again, and, in her case, taught her the basics of self-protective energetics--how to expand herself via the breath so as to have more confidence and meet challenges more boldly. At first, she wasn't sure she could learn to ski, or that she even wanted to, but by the end of the lesson, she said she was having fun. And she had new tools to meet the challenges in her life.

To both of them, I said, "These practices can change your life."

And they can.

Upside-down, right-side-up, or somewhere in between: what made me return to a publishing practice?

Long-time readers of Free Refills will remember how much I fretted about the value of what I was doing here. I hit a point at which I felt there was nothing more I could learn from daily publishing, unless and until something changed in my approach.

So what changed? I mean, besides everything? What in all that change pointed to a return to publishing?

I have explored and learned and grown in ways that I wouldn't have previously imagined--and wouldn't have invited into my life, truth be told, had it not been for the utter necessity of it. So surely after all that, I said, I can find something, five times a week, to say about flow.

Since last spring, when I last maintained my publishing practice, I've been on a long, sometimes challenging, often beautiful journey.

"My life turned completely upside-down," is how I just yesterday described it here.

I live now among mountains and new friends.

My life turned upside-down, I said. Could it also be true that for the first time in a long, long time, my life is actually turning right-side-up?

It's been almost a year since the last time (but for one) I published anything here.

The last time (but for one) I published, I was in Rome.

That day, I wrote, "The person I was when I left [on that trip] will not be the same person who returns."

Little did I know.

Three days later, my life began to turn completely upside-down.

It's been nearly two months since I last put up a Refill. I've done a ton of drafting, but I backed away from publishing as my life went crazy.

It's still crazy. It looks like it's going to stay crazy for a long, long time. Like I better get used to some long-term crazy.

If crazy is my new normal, it's no excuse for not publishing. I guess I'll just be writing about all the crazy.

Today marks more or less the halfway point of my trip. That's kind of amazing to consider. I feel like I've been gone a long time already. Were I to hop on a play this afternoon and return to the States, I would feel that it was an amazing trip, well worth my money, time, and energy. I'd tell stories of my experiences and feel that pride that comes when you believe you've done something really cool and worth telling about.

That I still have three-and-a-half weeks to go tells me that in the final analysis, I'm likely to find--pretty much as I expected to when I put the trip together--something transcendent about the experience. The person I was when I left will not be the same person who returns.

If you want to get a positive and somewhat skewed first impression of Rome, do as I did and arrive on a Sunday afternoon. After the almost aggressive energy of Madrid, Rome felt pleasant and peaceful.

I have since discovered that Rome's natural state is one of unmitigated and unrepentant chaos--but on the seventh day, they rest.

Wednesday afternoon, 9 May 2018

This afternoon I again, after all these years, got to wander the halls of the Museo del Prado. I took an art history class during my time in Spain, and we met every Friday morning at the Prado. There was something wonderful about getting to know a great museum that way, visiting for a few hours every week. There was never a sense of needing to see it all at once, which is always an impossibility at every great museum. Try to see too much and you might effectively see nothing at all.

I wouldn't get to have weekly visits this time around, and so I went walking through the halls with a certain focus, looking to find my old favorites.

I made my first stop at Velázquez' Las Meninas. All these years later, and it still struck me as amazing, even radical, almost post-modern in its treatment of subject and object and its relationship with the viewer.

And El Bosco's Jardín de las Delicias had only become more surreal, both in its treatment of subject and in its very existence. It's like 400 years ahead of its time, as though El Bosco and Salvador Dalí had been contemporaries, influencing each other.

I went to the far south end of the museum to see Goya's Pinturas Negras. They display them a bit differently now, to the paintings' detriment I think (or is that just the resistance to change that comes with nostalgia?), but I had forgotten just how somber and haunting they really are. They feel more mysterious to me now than they did back then, for I have lived many more years, and I no longer have my whole life ahead of me, and so I can somewhat better comprehend the mind that chose to create works like this.

But it was perhaps Velázquez' "Cristo Crucificado" that moved me the most. I'd forgotten about it completely. It is both a genius' study of the human form and a profound spiritual meditation. Christ, crucified, glows as though from within, and there's nothing in the painting but the man and the cross against a black background. It projects from within itself a vast silence, a story of suffering, and the end of suffering.

Welcome back, old friend, the paintings said. We've been waiting for you.

It's good to be back, my friends. Oh how I have missed you.

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Links to some of the works I mention:

Las Meninas
Jardín de Las Delicias
Pinturas Negras: El Gran Cabrón
Pinturas Negras: Saturno
Cristo Crucificado