We called Monday a moonday and went up north. Unreal.
Four hours in a line north-west to Empire, on the edge of Lake Michigan/Leelanau Peninsula. Slanty equinox light, halfway between the north pole and the equator, and Indian Summer – 79 degrees. Second week of October, still no leaves on the ground. But the whole highway was torch-lit! The maples were going up: lime on the bottom, orange flame on top. Such a precise a turningpoint that it couldn’t last more than a day. I thought: fall will end tomorrow and the leaves will be dust.
That was just the way up. Inside, the place feels like Narnia, and like pillow-forts in the sun when I was two. I don’t know why, but the precipice of Sleeping Bear Dunes dusted up flashbacks of reading To The Lighthouse at the ruins of Copan while strung out on giardia. The thin light and thin water of the Crystal River Rorschaced a random moment in 1999: ducking under a palmtree-clothesline on a volcanic sandbar out in Lake Ometepe. But by the time we got to the vineyard peninsula called Old Mission, where the sun set over green islands and a sea with no salt, my system was finally registering this zone as something new under said sun. Not an analogue. Not a replacement. Not a consolation.
This place is also not Middle America. Michigan has not reduced it to brochures, or looked for tourists, or even picked up the beautiful narrative. It’s an Ottawa and Chippewa myth about a bereft mother bear who is the dunes. What we experience on the lake/shore is just part of her dream. We are made by her and exist in her. I guess this bear is something between Brahman and the butterfly who dreams he’s a man.
We drove home down the spine of the state, speeding south with the full moon on the left and a stupid-perfect sunset on the right. I read aloud about TS Eliot, whose poetry gives away carnal knowledge of classical enlightenment, and whose politics were gleefully evil. We were halfway through Libra and halfway between solstices, halfway from Arctic to Equator, down state-spines, between sun-moon….
Incidentally, this is the fastest way I know to engineer a state-shift: meditate on a boundary. Pure antinomy is enough to stop the logical mind; emptiness is enough to stop the sensory one. For legitimation quotations, see Derrida (1979), Dogen (1243). I was spiritually retarded, so had to do the following homework before the trick worked: (1) toxic sludge removal from the emotional and physical bodies, (2) thousands of hours of disciplined concentration practice. If you’re beyond that, cheers. Just feel the boundary between the skin and the air, or between the body and the floor; or study the line between us/not us, or me/not me. Or drop the awareness into the canyon between the hemispheres of the brain. Get superfascinated by some arbitrary boundary, and the moment it fully surfaces it’ll pulverize the objects on either side. Tat tvam asi.
Poof. Or whatever sound it makes when one hand is clapping. Richard Freeman says that sound is “Aaahhh!” Aah is 960 Hz of dumbstruck. It’s shushumna spouting a leak. Maybe RF used an epiphanous sound because yoga—like, actual, fucking, yoga—used to be harder to figure out. For 2011, the sound of one hand clapping is more like “Duuuuuhhhhhhhh.” As in (Homer Simpson voice): moolabanduuuuuhh!
Anyway. I’m on the Colorado grandparent loop right now, feeling two grandmothers from 40,000 feet. Same ritual as every year, including the annual blog-time here on the plane between Denver and DTW. Before boarding, I re-read beautiful emails from longtime bloggers. Karen and me talking about the accidental periods of not thinking, which are caught by the thought “Woah, this here is the first thought in 20 minutes.” Kind of a butterfly-net situation. It used to be that mental notes like that only surfaced in a different sort of stream – the discursive-defensive-narrative-argumentative diaharrea that was my mind. Also, email from Rebecca talking about the relationship of rose-essence to blocks in the solar plexus, and about the honesty and creepy depth of our time – that is, of the decaying ghost-weeks when November’s incoming. Air and ashes. Thank you, internet.
Today on Washington Park, I sat next to my grandfather and watched a Methodist minister pry the iron lid off a hole in the ground. He used his Hushpuppy shoes and a two-by-four. Down the hole is where they pour the church body in the form of crematory ash, all mingled together the past hundred years under the flowerbed. There’s only room for 16 ounces of each congregant: the remaining remains scatter elsewhere. I reacted to the prying-open the same way I did the pit-toilet at the Grand Traverse Bay lighthouse on Monday – peering down because fascinated, but wincing against the updraft. (Don’t all humans peer down pit toilets, having first tensed up against them?)
We had a pound of grandma’s ashes in a flower vase from Ikea. The sun showed curliques of dust or energy playing in the empty part of the vase. I held it a while. I sensed bacon, the colors white and purple, my navel, and the back of my heart. (Sorry about the bacon, Grandma.) My dad was on his knees by the hole in the ground, palming the iron door and my grandpa’s fake knee. He dropped into a preacherly octave and said some things about Abraham, eternity, and love. My aunt reached a hand around my belly and rested her cheek on my scapula, and we cried. Then Grandpa poured the ashes down the hole. A poof of wind blew them into my jeans, tanktop, hair, arms and neck. They felt dusty, purple, and hot.
I’ve never not breezed through airport security, but today the alarms tripped. When they dusted my body by hand and put the gloves in the machine, a red screen blinked EXPLOSIVES DETECTED. They called the head of security and took me to a tiny room with a 6-foot ceiling. A large woman put her hands everywhere as if making a ritual apology, with me saying I take these things impersonally for a living. Then I imagined myself as different bodies under her hands: Grandma, my father, my aunt, and a series of big men with dark skin. Commingled.
The second screening showed the ash was not explosive. Poof.
18 Comments
Highlight of my day when you decide to post. Better than the movies.
Love this; it’s brilliant. Thanks.
I’ve been thinking about the discursive-defensive-narrative-argumentative stream this week — actually, I’ve been caught in it because of a couple of dramas at work. I can really hear it during practice — it sucks up all of the silence. Bleh.
Love to all of your grandparents.
Delicious, thank you. This feels more sophisticated, dense and conceptual than the last few blogs, and I feel I must ‘have seconds’ (reread).
I have memories of michigan dunes; i still feel my ancestors presence when i read about your sense of the midwest/west, and i shed some tears with you and your family up there.
I have sara’s ashes in a mini vase from a shop known as material culture, she sits on the sill of the jefferson window in the living room. she is beside a ganesh and an original work of art from a good friend who loves me.
Sara is my mom. Our last phone convo before she drowned in the Atlantic while skinny dipping on Hammock’s Beach, NC—a sea turtle sanctuary—she said she wanted a Viking Funeral. Weird huh?
It’s been 16 years. I still need to obtain a model ship, and do the deed for her. It is going to be a thing of beauty when it comes together. . . . bighug
Katherine, this calls for a trip to Iceland and possibly special hats. Your mother sounds tragic and white magic.
Maria, Carol, thank you. I miss doing this more often.
Karen, okay. That’s weird. I went through the same thing last week – like a radio channel broadcast by SOMEONE ELSE was ringing in my head. I acutally think it was that – my own internally-generated interference with someone’s very very loud inner talk. Kind of like Radio Free Europe broadcasting behind the iron curtain during the cold war? But now, because I’m not just practicing for myself, I don’t get to have as strong of an iron curtain anymore.
Last Wednesday, while suffering through sarvangasana, I turned my thoughts to excitement/gratitude for the next trip to Mysore, where I can just turn the jammers to full blast and ride the silence. Finally! Practice that’s all MINE MINE MINE. That’s when I fucking realized that this was not different from pining for the next pose. Waiting for conditions to be different so that I can practice. Instead of practicing NOW. Needing an experience that isn’t this one. Because this isn’t TRUE.
Haha! I was doing spiritual materialism in the extreme, just a shade more subtle than expected. Hilariously, what was right in my face at that moment WAS the next pose: being okay with everyday mind instead of pining for hyperbliss mind.
When I realized that this was the next pose, I seriously said, inside my head: Duuuuuuuuuuuuhhhh. And did the pose. Equanimized the mental static. About a minute later, the volume on my inner discourse turned way down. Which was weird but should not have been surprising. Then it stopped. In the 4 asana practices since then, there’s been a bit of inner talk (this is really unusual for me). When it surfaces, what I’ve been doing is blasting it with the same equanimity laser. Equanimity lasers don’t change objects, so there is no poof. What they do is just create conditions for relaxation to happen. Aaaah.
BTW, the eyes of the giant blue horse outside Denver airport were glowing red yesterday. I thought this was just because the Broncos have been losing. But turns out the whole airport is a haunted, Illuminati conspiracy! There is a whole city of apocalypse-safe tunnels built under it, and covert penis statues scattered throughout to make visitors think of death. Here is full documentation.
Best airport ever.
Just realized that I didn’t see KS, Kaz, Wombat, ESJ, S, Rebecca on last post. Textpattern has started closing comments, but not as early as I thought.
Rebecca, DG White is a great prof? That’s nice. Someone whose writing and research are so involved might not have equal passion for the classroom. I was hoping to bump in to him when I taught in SB this summer, but maybe better in an academic context than over downward facing dog? Anyway, I’d like to spend more time with The Alchemical Body. It’s long. Seminar treatment might be best: something like dedicating several multi-hour blocks to reading it over a week or two, not just digesting from the bedside table for a month. Um… would anyone besides me actually want to nerd up to that level?
I read some message boards on Sivananda Buried Yoga. Lots of people have me the author on his bizarre book tour / successor search. Dude sounds like he’s packing around a case of serious PTSD along with his siddhis. Also, unlike most enlightened people, he has a boring personality. Is that superficial of me?
Mirror of Yoga. Yes. I’d read it groupwise any time. Short, highly relevant, fun opportunities to explore the wings of the kidneys and the floppy fish of the pelvic floor. Who’s interested, and when? Thanksgiving-time might be good.
I’d be down with The Alchemical Body. Mirror, alternatively, if people prefer.
Somebody better inform the Yoga Alliance that their membership needs to cross register with the Ascetics’ Society.
Haha! What’s the Yoga Alliance?
I’ll do my “certification” with institutions that require 10,000 (or in my case, 15,000) hours of teacher training. Not 500. What a joke.
Karen, let’s sweeten the deal on The Alchemical Body. Discussion groups will take place weekly during the month of January. We will convene on my rooftop at 13th Cross, or poolside at the hotel formerly known as the Southern Star. Members may join clothed, non-clothed, or by Skype vid. Tantric rituals not included.
Waiting for conditions to change. If I could just hold out until…. no. Must keep breathing.
All the cool kids are going to play on the roof. pfft.
Woohoo! January sounds great!!!!!
Best place to run into DG White is actually at the Santa Monica Farmers Market on Wednesdays. Either that or randomly walking down Beverly Boulevard on the way to Kinkos. Either way, he won’t remember you, you’ll blather on for a full minute before you lose wind and get embarrassed and that’ll be that.
But I’ll nerd up (is this like a cowboy up?), via Skype or astral body. Especially in Seminar form.
Rebecca, we’ll count on you for further commentary on the character of the author, and- more interestingly- for your purely no-BS woo woo. Can I put it that way? Since you already know the rooftop, you’ll fit right in. Preferably in body. I’M SERIOUS ABOUT THAT.
Wombat and Owl have oddly intersecting orbits in this life. We just haven’t get made the times intersect. If they did, WoOw ease would ensue. We might not even have to speak. Except for about The Alchemical Body.
A reader Karen, Susananda and I know just responded to the paragraph on boundaries, what he called “liminal spaces as dyhana,” by sending this !!!! I will shut up now…
You can put it that way. I like it. Might put it on my business cards.
I miss Pushpa, I miss coconuts, I miss the sound of chanting and catarrh hacking in the morning. I miss all the colours and the dust. I don’t miss being flicked with sweat and vrittis. We’ll see.
Yoga Alliance – holy fucking siddha shit. Kudos to them for duping a whole new generation of yoga-idiots. OK, kind of harsh, but what they are doing is IMHO flat out wrong. The dollars they charge to starving posture teachers puts them at the top of the list of Yoga Criminals.
(BTW, overheard at screening of yet another narcissistic BS yoga movie “yoga is” while waiting for film to start by two young yoga damsels when talking about a teacher who probably has been teaching longer than they have been breathing: “Can you believe that ‘so and so’ is not yoga alliance certified?”
“no really? like OMG”
“yes, really but he is still a good teacher I think, don’t you?”
“aw-ha, but he really should get certified”.
I have one thing to say (which I didn’t – damn yamas!): cert-i-FUCK-it…
Is the mirror of yoga different from the bathroom mirror?
The image of you awash in your grandma’s ashes is another kind of boundary to meditate on…the liminal Olympics— life chasing its own tail—
I have heard a few stories of ashes being taken by wind right back to the beings who have just tossed them. Not so much dust to dust, but dust to the robust…
I would love to come to the roof naked and bookish—not that we’re supposed to have favorites, but it is probably my favorite asana of all, liberasana. Totally made up and therefore perfect…
I’m so happy when you tromp in these spheres, Owl.
Rebecca, you miss the 3am catarrh chorus? Really? (Clears throat…)
E&SJ, I didn’t even realize that this Yoga Alliance charged people money. When The Editor first encountered my childhood church, the First Alliance (big on missions in the South Pacific, incidentally…), he said, Is that like the Imperial Alliance? Do they ever declare war? I can see it now…
Sara! You had a Mysore near-miss the year before last, when you overshot and landed in Bali. The asana achievers there might seem like somewhat bizarre, boring life forms… but the same things Rebecca misses (kind of everything) would delight you.