Category: Uncategorized (So Far)

So how great an idea is it?

A similarly great idea was the invention of breathing.

How great an idea is it?

Let’s put this great idea into the context of great ideas. The Internet was a great idea, but this is a far better idea than the Internet. Recorded music was a great idea, but this is a far better idea than recorded music. Quantum mechanics was a great idea, but this is a far better idea than quantum mechanics.

How about the bicycle? Pizza? Written language?

Great ideas all, but this idea far transcends them.

It all started with a great idea.

Sometimes I find myself thinking that it’s kind of silly how seriously I take the deadlines I give myself. The day I finished this piece, I got up at 3:30am to make sure that I’d get all my writing done ahead of my little sabbatical. The deadline is wholly self-created. Perhaps I’m taking myself a little too seriously?

I thought about it more and, while I’m willing to consider that my time-management skills need a little work, it hit me: it’s not silly to take the promises I make to myself and myself alone seriously. That has a name. It’s called integrity.

Our lives are very short. I don’t want to get too pie-in-the-sky here but our lives are very short. Recently I was talking with my little sister and she was saying that she’s soon to turn forty. My kid sister will soon turn forty. It was a big enough deal when I hit forty, but shouldn’t my baby sister still be, like, sixteen? Like, forever?

I remember lying on the grass in the park on sunny summer afternoons when I was a kid, lying in the shade and staring up at the fluffy white clouds with a friend and describing what we saw there, telling stories about monsters and dragons floating above us, cottony white within that magnificent azure expanse. We felt like those afternoons would last forever. Each day was a year.

And now we are much older, and sometimes it feels like each year is merely a day.

Constriction is appealing because…well, because it keeps us safe, in a sense. We know these boundaries. We know this place with all its clutter. And sure, we are not fully happy, not fully realized, and we know it, but to let go of the things that we use to hold us back–and that’s what it is, holding ourselves back, clutching these things, grasping–it scares us. It scares us because we identify these things as ourselves.

I remember from the early days of my working with Jerry the feeling of a huge energy flow as I began to let go of things, and I finally understood the proscription often stated in texts on kundalini or tantra, that you should not undertake these practices without a teacher, because you might go crazy. I always read that stuff and said, “Yeah, sure,” while at the same time wondering, “Really? Is that possible?” But then I had the experience of an energetic awakening and I remember vividly going to Jerry one day and responding to his question of, “How are things?” by saying, “They’re going well. I mean, I feel like I’m dissolving, but besides that, they’re going really well.”

In opening–in spaciousness–things that you took as part and parcel of yourself turn out not to be. You are something else than you thought you were. What, then, are you?

It’s the experience so many of us have on vacation. I know I’m not alone in this. Where you go some place far away, sunny and pleasant, and you bring a bunch of books with you and you sit there and read and that’s most of what you do. Why did you have to travel to experience that? Well, because it’s a path to spaciousness.

You couldn’t stay home because then you are there with all your things, and all your demands that press on you, and you cannot escape them, even if you say, “During these weeks on my staycation I’m just going to read.” You’ll know that stuff is there. You can’t escape it. And it’ll feel like that, like trying to escape, rather than creating spaciousness. It’ll feel like procrastination. Like avoidance.

Whereas you throw some books in the suitcase and head off to Jamaica and sit on the beach all day and read, and it feels spacious, because all that stuff that you left behind that’s been yelling at you, “Hey! You gotta paint the bathroom and fix the chain on your bike and reorganize your toolbench.” NOT RIGHT NOW YOU DON’T. ALL THAT STUFF IS IN ANOTHER COUNTRY.

A child is born: we’ve attached the solstice day’s symbolism to a day not the solstice. (Sometimes, we believe too much in the things we create. What is “December 25th,” really, but a name?) I’ve already celebrated, in my own way, the day of (re)birth. But I’ll play along today. Strip away the ugly consumerism we’ve attached to this day, and what do you have? Reflection on a silent night. Celebration of a birth of things. Quiet and joy: a worthy ritual. Yes, I’ll play along.

Merry Christmas.

I woke one recent morning to feelings of stress in the body. I went to the cushion and I sat and I tried a few things, but the best of them was trying to find a spaciousness for my energy, and it worked for a few breaths and then disappeared, and then I did it again and it worked for a few breaths and then disappeared. I was very in my head and kept coming into my head and when I’m in my head the energy tends to be very contained and not in a good way. It’s just this tight little ball of energy, and the body kind of disappears, and little energy flows even when I try and I can’t try for long.

So I was beginning to explore spaciousness, and I realized that this is exactly what I am trying to encourage throughout my life.

A couple of weeks ago I was hitting golf balls with Jerry and I noticed a certain constriction in his body and I told him to put some energy in between his shoulder blades, to draw them back with energy. Doing so allowed him to balance the energy at his front and with the energies in balance his chest opened, became spacious, and once he did so, he hit the ball far better than he had all day. Suddenly, all at once, he found an extra twenty or more yards. How did that happen? It happened because it allowed him to bring spaciousness to the chest, which brought spaciousness to the whole swing.

This is spaciousness in action.

I have been trying to simplify things in my life, and that’s the word I’ve been using, simplify, but I see suddenly that simplify is just part of a path, but spaciousness is the actual destination.

And, doubtless, a path all its own.

Clutter in my world and in my mind. Too many things. I’m seeking a new balance. I’m seeking spaciousness.

We live in cycles. We tend to think of our lives as linear: yesterday, today, tomorrow. Last year, this year, next. Points on a line. But seen properly, our motion through time is more a traversing of a spiral. There is forward motion, yes, but seen from a certain perspective, our life unfolds along circles. Think of it. We cycle through our days: we wake up, we work and we play, we eat and we drink, we sleep. Every lived day is different of course, but it is different the way the weather is different: today warm, tomorrow colder, no wind or windy, no clouds, a few clouds, cloudy–and so though different every day is much like the one before it. The sun sets a little earlier or a little later. I remember this summer, out on the road, when I watched nightly in the hours after sunset the dance of Jupiter and Venus in the Western sky. Every day a little different. Every day, not much different. Cycles.

Some of our cycles are human-made: our seven-day weeks, our divorced-from-the-moon months. Some of them have a deeper reality. The earth travels around the sun. Winter turns to spring, spring turns to summer, summer to autumn, autumn back to winter.

Fall is the time of consolidation. It is the time of harvest. A certain type of reflection. A looking back on what worked and what didn’t. Gathering seeds. Cleaning the tools and putting them away for a while.

On the winter solstice the old year dies and at that moment the new year is born. Birth, death and rebirth: another cycle.

Within that perspective, the first two weeks of the new year–the true New Year, as defined by the sun rather than our silly calendars, could be seen to represent infanthood. (The intersection between our calendar and the Earth’s explains, in part, my choice of this time for sabbatical.)

The first days of winter: Dark. Quiet. Cold. A time of rest. Like babes who sleep in their earliest days, we are meant to sleep, too. We are meant to stay close. It is a quiet time. This is not the time for brashness.

Soon enough we’ll already feel the days growing longer. This will be the time for beginning. Beginning, as a child begins. Those first stumbling steps.