Free Refills

That thing took no more than 45 minutes to write, and maybe another fifteen for revisions. That it was just the extra-credit section of the workbook portion of a PSIA certifying exam meant that it didn’t need to be within shouting distance of perfect. Not even within megaphone distance.

Yet I actually like it quite a lot. And it was, easily, the most fun I’ve had writing something in a long, long time.

Maybe I’ll make my fortune by taking commissions for silly little pieces like that. Anyone need a piece about the reticulated dreamcatcher of the snow-capped mountains of southwestern Borneo, or maybe something about the fearsome but beautiful euphonious zanzibar?

The extra-credit question reads, “These character names are from Dr. Seuss. Pick one and tell a story about where this creature may live and what kind of activities it likes to do.”

• Tufted Mazurka
• Grickily Gractus

It’s interesting that you mention the tufted mazurka. I actually did my doctoral dissertation (“The Semiotics of Nature as Cultural Progenitor: Inspiration and Interpretation Among the Chopé People of Western Polonia,” PhD in Musical Anthropology, Oxford, 1949) on the Chopé people, whose ancestral homeland overlaps almost exactly with the breeding range of the tufted mazurka. Chapters 3, 4, and 8 all include lengthy discussions of the importance to the Chopé people of this wondrous, beautiful, and most unusual bird.

Due to the amazing videography of nature shows like “Planet Earth,” wonders like the tufted mazurka have become much more visible to modern Americans than was the case in the years after World War II, during which I lived among the Chopé and got to see the tufted mazurka in its natural habitat.

At the time I did my primary research, however, popular knowledge of the various three-legged birds of the cloud forest region of Western Polonia (known as “Polonaise” to the Chopé), of which the tufted mazurka is pre-eminent, was scanty, to say the very least. That an otherwise exclusively tree-dwelling animal would take to the earth, putting it directly among its primary predators (the lesser grickily gractus probably the most well known among these) to engage in such marvelous songs and dances (their fascinating rhythms otherwise unseen in the animal kingdom) as part of its mating behaviors may no longer shock an observer, now used to seeing the world’s miracles every week without leaving the comfort of their TV-room couches, but at the time, I verily marveled, eyes wide and ears wider, as I came to understand that substantial elements of the Chopé’s melodious language and dexterous gestural expressioning clearly arose directly from the influence of observation of the tufted mazurka’s most remarkable qualities.

But I do prattle on so. The mere mention of the tufted mazurka always brings me back to those years, among the happiest of my life. As reflects the inspiration of the mazurka itself, the Chopé busy themselves with music and dancing (though they reverse the mazurka’s patterns, leaving the ground to take to the trees to do their art), and as an anthropologist living among them I felt obliged to lessen the distance between us by participating, as much as I was able, in the cultural acts that made the Chopé such a fascinating, heart-warming people to live among.

I’ll share one last story. One time I sat on a limb in a tree, listening to the strange, romantic harmonies of the Chopé. I was in something of a reverie, when to my shock a mazurka, its eponymous plumage bio-fluorescing in the dim under-canopy light, alighted upon my knee, looked quizzically up at my face, and vocalized its primary call, which I transcribe thus: “Yoman. Wazzup wazzup wazzup. Chillin?”

Last week, I made the following assertions:

• Djokovic and Murray are playing well off their best, which
• Leaves Nadal poised to win several of the European clay court tournaments as well as Roland Garros.

Let’s review what happened after I wrote that.

• Murray lost in the round of 16 against Albert Ramos-Vinolas.
• Djokovic lost in the quarterfinals against the Roadrunner, David Goffin.
• After his kind of shaky, three-set victory against Kyle Edmund, Rafa
  • demolished Sasha Zverev, 1 and 1, in the round of 16–the same Sasha Zverev who pushed him to five very tough sets at the Australian.
  • handled Diego Schwartzman, 4 and 4, in the quarters.
  • ended the Roadrunner’s run, 3 and 1, in the semis.
  • dispatched Ramos-Vinolas, 1 and 3, to take the championship, his tenth at Monte Carlo.

Consider this: no man in the Open era had ever won ten titles at a single tournament before. Furthermore, this title gave Rafa the 50th clay court title of his career, lifting him out of a tie with Guillermo Vilas for most in the Open era.

A victory at Roland Garros would be Rafa’s tenth title there as well. Anyone want to bet against him?

Jerry and I practiced hitting golf balls the other day. The core of our practice was to try to feel the swing as open. My practice was saying the word to myself before hitting, to get a kind of proprioceptive feel for the word, and then trying to allow that feeling to continue throughout the swing. I can report that it worked for both of us. We both hit some beautiful shots.

After we were done practicing, I noticed, and Jerry agreed, that there was something almost incantatory about the use of the word–that somehow, in using it and repeating it, we brought about within the body the feeling of the word.

That led me to wonder, what if we explored the incantatory powers of other words in this same context? And what if we considered what the implication of word-as-incantation was in regards to other words that sometimes get used around the golf swing. What might that reveal?

Here’s a list of ten words I have heard or can imagine being used to describe the swing. I’m going to list them without any context or connotative judgment, and some of them could have multiple meanings in terms of describing the swing. As you read each one, see what it evokes for you.

• hard
• powerful
• soft
• easy
• smooth
• fast
• slow
• full
• flowing
• rhythmic

I wonder what would happen, for good or bad, if we were to evoke each of those words during our practice sessions.

Because our focus this year has been less about sports and more about the energy of what’s happening in our society and in our political realm, this got me thinking about the broader social implications of the energy of words.

I and other writers have used some powerful words to describe our political situation:

• partisan
• gridlocked
• dysfunctional
• corrupt
• collapsing

I found myself wondering, what if people tried to explore the energetic evocations of some other words in our dealings with each other? What if we started using different words to describe our thinking about our government, our political system, our political situation, and the dynamic forces in our society out of which our political world arises? What would happen if we explored some words with a less sharp connotation? Understand that I’m just playing with an idea here; I haven’t come to any particular conclusion.

Here’s some words from the list above:

• open
• flowing
• easy
• smooth
• full
• powerful
• flexible

Let me repeat that I’m just playing here. I don’t have a conclusion. I just noticed that as I was thinking about this idea, a question arose: how certain am I that the words I use to describe our political situation (which are, let’s face it, mostly negative in connotation) describe, and how much are they, in some way or another, evoking?

It’s not uncommon in Buddhist literature to read something along the lines of, “When the mind is still, the essential perfection of each moment reveals itself.”

Two days ago, I shared a brief story about my recent Perfect Day. But lest I inadvertently suggest that I have attained some lasting equanimity about all things as they arise and pass away, let me share this little tidbit: We’re in the final days of ski season, a season in which I got to put boards to snow on something like 65 days between December and now, yet I feel pretty cranky about it ending. It still feels much too soon.

Yes, that’s right: I am arguing with spring about its not being winter.

I watched the third set of Rafa’s victory over Kyle Edmund today. Rafa wasn’t brilliant, just good enough to win. It was his first match on clay this season, so maybe it’s premature to expect brilliant. Overall this year, he’s been the clear number two behind Federer, who isn’t playing again until Roland Garros, while his other top competitors, Murray and Djokovic, have been been well below their best all season. Now we’ve got two months of tournaments on Rafa’s best and favorite surface. It’s not crazy to think that he’s capable of winning a couple of the clay-season Masters 1000s (Monte Carlo, Madrid, and Rome), as well as the French. Given what Federer has accomplished so far, and with Wimbledon and the summer hard courts still to come; and given the possibility of a big year for Rafa on the clay, it’s not impossible to imagine that Roger, turning 36 in August, and Rafa, 31 in June, could finish the season as the two top-rated players in the world. How would that be for a storyline about resurgent seasons?

A few weeks ago, I experienced a perfect day.

It wasn’t perfect as it was happening. It was just a day. Some good stuff happened, some less-good stuff happened. I experienced moments of pleasure and moments of worry. Like I said, just a day.

It wasn’t until evening that its perfection revealed itself to me. A question arose in my mind: “Of the things actually under my control, what of this day would I have changed?” The answer hit me with pugilistic force: of that under my control, I would have changed nothing.

Perhaps happy is too complicated and tricky a word to use without some careful explanation. When we mean happy in opposition to sad, then we’re speaking of something as fleeting and changeable as any other emotion. It arises and it passes away. Many of us, myself included, try to hold on to the happy moments and push away the sad ones, a life-approach about as effective as going for a walk and trying to keep seeing the pretty flower you passed 100 yards ago and not see the ugly construction site you’re walking by right now.

But in these moments of aliveness, I have discovered a broader, less transitory sense of happiness. A true acquiescence to the present moment brings with it an equanimity that can contain the fleeting effervescence of joyful experiences as well as the passing rain-squalls (and even the occasional socked-in storm-fronts) of sad ones.

It’s like I am finding that in the face of whatever arises, I can say not just, “I am here,” but also, “Where else would I go?”

A couple of weeks ago, I went skiing at Crested Butte for a couple of days. Crested Butte has a well-deserved reputation for having some very steep runs. I have the technique to ski these runs–I get down them safely. But I can’t do it without substantial struggle. I tend to get overwhelmed by fear and cut all my momentum after every turn, so I never find rhythm or flow. Too much of the time, it’s basically what we call “survival skiing.” It gets frustrating, because I have the physical abilities to ski the run, but clearly something I do with my energy gets in the way.

Well, I’m pretty deeply devoted to this TTW stuff, so instead of just grinding through the frustration, or else giving up on skiing the steeps at all, I tried to figure out what was happening and what to do about it. So again and again and again I breathed deeply from center, connected my energy to ground, breathed my stress back into the Earth, and tried to witness what exactly was happening in my body and with my energy to make me struggle so consistently.

After enough attempts to step out of my patterns of stress and return to centered consciousness, I had a moment of insight. I discovered that when I find myself in that patterned fear response, it results from having cast my energy all the way to the bottom of the slope, essentially leaving my body to fend for itself. “I’ll meet you down here,” my energy calls back up to me. Well, it’s hard to be more out-of-center than letting your energy get 50 or 100 yards away from you. And the result is that I struggle and struggle and struggle to ski the run.

I wish I could say that I fixed the problem with that awareness, but it doesn’t work that way. What I could do, however, is come back to center. I could bring my energy back to me, and then I could be present with the fear in a different way: I could just let it be, just feel it, instead of running from it. I found that rather than sending my energy down to the bottom of the slope and leaving my body to fend for itself, I could expand my energy outward from center to create a space of awareness able to contain my body, my fear, and my next couple of turns. For a few moments, I could release the old pattern like a balloon and watch it float away.

This sensation is what we mean by a state of ease. The things that get in the way go away, even if only for a moment, and I can just be in the present moment and allow it to flow, as is its true nature.

Of course, soon enough I’ll again fall out of center and return to my habitual unconscious state, and the easy experience of my old pattern will arise again. And that’s completely okay. This is a practice, not a destination.

So I keep practicing.

In response to these moments, I find myself following a line of thinking: This thing happening is in fact my life. So my real life is not somewhere out there in the distance, and when I find it I will finally be happy. Right here and right now, I am alive. So perhaps I should choose to be happy now.