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Wednesday, August 21, 2002
Santa Fe, NM PRACTICE:
Fluid Yoga: 50 minutes Journal
In Celeste's massage room. Feeling the altitude a bit but the lack of humidity helps my joints feel looser. I was very involved in the practice this morning. It unfolded so creatively, sequences coming to me I had never done. Amazing. Am feeling the effects of the journey now. The practice is solid. It gives me the centering I need to relax into the newness of my day-to-day experience. So many influences wash through me I cannot catch them. I am letting them come and go like breathing. I love that I love being alive. And no one outside me is the source. The generosity and beauty of my friends astonishes me. Each person I stay with is so unique. I learn from each one and feel blessed to know them. I am inspired by their learnings and strivings, or perhaps simply by their inherent attributes of which they think nothing but to me seem like miracles. Thursday, August 22, 2002
Santa Fe, NM PRACTICE:
Continuous Flow: 40minutes Journal
In Celeste's massage room. I felt perfectly balanced. For the first time in weeks. I think I am adjusting. And opening to my experience now. Not forcing anything but just seeing how I feel today. Doing what I need within the parameters offered. The practice was easy. I can tell I have been doing arm strengthening things which have gotten better without really having to expend much effort. I just do a few extras a few days in a row and I get a result easily. I can suddenly move in and out of arm-support positions without trembling or struggle. Friday, August 23, 2002
Santa Fe, NM (La Cienega) PRACTICE:
Workshop: 7 hours. Fluid yoga, open movement, writing, circle dance, deep rest, witness dance, open dance Journal
At Ana's holography studio which is out of town a little ways. A huge room that manages to also feel intimate. The workshop was gorgeous. All I can say is that I am blessed to be doing my dharma. I felt not only the pleasure of having so much time to go into the practices myself but also the pleasure of being masterful in my skills as 'teacher'. I feel absolutely solid within the work itself which I attribute to my daily practice. I know how well it works. I am intimate with how it both fits to me and molds me simultaneously. It takes care of me if I attend to doing it. This generosity towards self allows me to feel completely confident in opening beautiful realms to others, or providing support for them to continue deeper into a path with which they are already familiar. I get more developed people in the workshop these days. It is testimony to the efforts people are making with their time and consciousness. So today I taught the physical practices at a pretty good clip. Not my full range but close enough to give me plenty of release and personal satisfaction. I have always had this obsessive drone accompanying my meditative work. The individual to whom I address it changes but the act of saying impressive, deep, erudite things to an absolutely enthralled listener has been a long running theme. These days the unstoppable unreality of these drones mystifies me. I seem to have so little influence over them. I try to let them go. Let them go. Escort them, out of town if only for a brief time. I would love for them to simply drop away and leave me in peace. Because they are not real. The person is not here, not listening. I am here. And I don't really need to hear all that. I really need to be simply here in what just is. Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Santa Fe, NM PRACTICE:
Fluid Yoga: walk the ridge. 90 minutes Journal
It is always true that land is metaphor for inner journey. I have walked many roads alone this summer and the more I do it the more I find meaning in the reflective nature of inner unfolding with outer landscape. Today I set out behind Ana's house into the arid back land spotted with scrubby chimisa, dust eddying around my ankles. The mud land is caked into phantasmagoric shapes. They look restfully eternal but crumble if pushed or stepped upon. I head down to the creek bed. It must be crossed in order to ascend to the top of the ridge at which I've longingly gazed for the past three days. Though the creek is nearly dry, crossing is difficult - the embankments are steep and fragile. I wind my way through a thicket of close-knit Russian Olive forming an almost impenetrable wall - a thorny and rather Sleeping Beauty-like tangle. An eerie enchantment hangs there in the dim shade amongst this motionless host of guardians, silent except for me snapping the brittle branches. The messages begin now. I struggle through brambles, find an uncomfortable passage through a discouraging land. Once across the creek I clamor up and up feeling my heart wrap hard and fast against my chest wall from the high altitude. I stop to catch my breath, look over my shoulder. I nearly slide into vertigo at the enormity of the valley spreading wide. Ana's house is a small dot. At the edges of what is usually a spotless blue firmament by day is hazy with smoke from the fires burning at Jemez. I begin to anticipate seeing the reputed petroglyphs at the top. Ahhhhh - messengers from an ancient world! It will be like seeing a kernel of knowledge: where I should go next; who I should be; or some other blinding yet subtle epiphany. I reach the flat mesa at the top and walk endlessly along without seeing anything resembling a petroglyph. I have no idea how to recognize one. They may be everywhere but not to my eyes. I don’t really know how to see what I am looking for. I cannot return the way I came up so how to get down? I search for a road. A shiny new truck is parked alongside the shack at the edge of the mesa. I head there and indeed a road snakes away, but in the opposite direction from my destination. I don't know where I'm going but walking, walking feels right. Feels good. The descent continues to wind me away from my home port. My anxiety rises up - fears of never getting to a safe landing. Of being alone and sad. It gurgles and bubbles and froths in me. Then the road swerves, yawning over a sheer cliff face dropping below to a cavernous rift. Small animal prints criss-cross the road. What are they? I head steeply down, zigzagging back and forth into the ravine until landing once again at base level. I'm far up the valley. I see from the sun's position where I need to be. Two men in a truck slow down. They ask in lilting New-Mexican-Spanish-tinged English if I am all right and point me to the proper road to cross the creek. I pass houses scattered at odd angles and set packs of resident dogs to barking as reliably as roaring Harleys ignite the car alarms in NYC. All this while my heart feels bruised. It's along way - much longer than the dramatic ascent. Home - some place where I am known, where I belong, safe - is a long way away. I'm hungry and thirsty. At the next bend, a scattering of apples dots the dust - a fortuitous gift right on cue. Golden Delicious, from the tree in the Montoya's - the gate declared the owners - yard. I gather four, eat three, tuck the remaining one in my sweatshirt pocket. There is really nothing better than an apple right off a tree. Or, as in this case, newly fallen on the ground under a tree. Farther along a white mare nibbles by a fence, eyeing at me circumspectly but not running off. I am broken by this sudden contact. I've felt so much of pariah in recent times. As if my love, my presence is unbearble for others. It hurts my heart not to be gathered in. She stands there. Dark liquid eyes. Watching and breathing. I find myself unable to approach for fear that she will turn away. Here is my essential despair - loneliness and sadness. It is not hopelessness sensation but instead a great daunting weight. Humbling. I really do not know how to escape this sadness - how to change or divert it. It comes in great roaring waves. I feel myself giving up the struggle and coming to accept the deep treacherous darkness of separateness, as one would see a thunderhead finally eating away the space between there and here, engulfing, submerging in its drenching chaos. The road is dusty now. I finally get to Ana's gate without further incident or information. Home is not really home. It is merely where I am staying for tonight. And then I am off again. Thursday, August 29, 2002
Santa Fe, NM PRACTICE:
Fluid Yoga: 10 minutes
Unwinding Dance: 2 hours Journal
In Ana's studio. I am letting my body sort out the rear-ending and whiplash from the other day. The opening Fluid Yoga is therefor very short. Feels draining so I let is go and then the world open ups. I find myself easily ensconced in process. Movement unfolds effortlessly and in many patches joyously. I found that during the weekend workshop I felt more than my usual share of joy in dancing. So different than in all the months since 9/11 during which dance was usually fraught with pain. Over this past weekend a lot of joy poked through. Yesterday, post workshop, I had an enormous melt down. Crying and terror. I finally felt directly, not through dreams or inference, the horror of having the World Trade Center demolished. Of having the air full of pollution and all the people incinerated just a few blocks from me. Of having something so huge that has always been part of the view from my front window be taken out by a human action. I felt the power of violent decision and how it breathed its rancid breath all over my idealistic life. The destruction is from nature, but some small person about my size with way too much technology in their grasp. I felt how war should probably be hand to hand combat to make it real again. Too much technological proxy. How I live in a world of techno-proxy where people's bodies barely touch their reality. I felt how my practice - to live in my body - has made the world real to me and then made 9/11 all the more obscene. (Of course no more obscene than American horrors everywhere). This all dumped out of me. And today I feel pretty good. Strong and energized. So the unwinding dance kept going. I was dreaming in body and mind today. Day-dreaming. All the things I would love to do. My body played, cruised around to the music. I slid into sweet drop-out - the mental and emotional chatter suspended and I was inwardly still, though in motion. I felt that 9/11 is a true thing and all I know from it is true and that I am still full of joy as well and pain and uncertainty. I am really so able to be aware. The price of awareness is awareness. The pay-off of awareness is awareness. What a lovely way to finish my time in Santa Fe. Saturday, August 31, 2002
Escalante, Utah PRACTICE:
Fluid Yoga: 40 minutes Journal
Camped at Escalante National Park last night on BLM campgrounds in my car. I woke and to see the massive canyon walls ascending around me, a running creek making music. Though I am in desert, it is lush green here. Chimisa blooming yellow, aspens arching over. It was 100 degrees in Arches where I spent the day yesterday. But 85 in the shade. Behemoth rock edifaces rose in unimaginable shapes and coloration. I took off my clothes under a juniper tree and rested in the fragrant scent of the tree. Besides illuminating the visual magnificence the soft, hot desert air was sensuous, evoking an intense eroticism. I got a National Park pass and drove down into canyon lands in southern Utah. I am still here. Amazed. Ensconced and nurtured by the mythic magnitude of beauty and life-force. I put my mat down on the picnic table - a level concrete slab just bigger than the mat. (The ground is dusty.) I feel incredible chi in my body. Charged. All the asanas seem easy. I have a strength flowing through me I haven’t had in months. I feel delighted over nothing. Just to be here doing this this morning. And why not? Whatever stops me? Mostly my tangled mind. I could be living this enchantment far more than I do. This natural magnificence is nutrition. I am here at this moment, in this August morning. I have decided to do it. Not to miss it. To drive where my heart said 'yes'. To follow the suggestions of those I meet along the way. To hear a good tip. To let go of previous plans. All these are the luck of the world but that luck is always there. It is the abundance of reality I have resisted until now… The practice is such an essential touch-base for me. A way to recognize myself. I am going to go hike up on a ridge and look out!!!!!!!!!!!!
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