Saturday, July 31, 2010

Day 37: Liminality and anticipation

rain wakens currents.
navigating erosion
to a homecoming?


About to embark on a retreat into the New Mexico mountains.  A retreat from all daily things...to forest, to clouds.  To a “consecrated” Sangha, where Ram Dass wrote his first book. Sleeping on the land, though downpours expected.  I have little indication of what the week will bring, except a revealing.  And wetness.  Given the "off-the-gridness" of the center, blog postings will be short.  Haikus, images….perhaps of little "art projects" should I be so lucky.

Perhaps I will be so saturated in Sangha, I will be full, inside and out.  Or, perhaps I will just be cold.  Perhaps everything will change.  Perhaps nothing at all.


Day 36: Always, tension in the inbetween sun and moon

in the interval
meanwhile, wearing away







Thursday, July 29, 2010

Day 35: Desire

A pathway to Sangha through the pores of the mouth?  Deep tongue kisses.  And chocolate lavender wedded in ground almonds.  Though, an idealization.  That only breeds longing and a pain in the bowels.  


a moment of joy 
essentially divulges 
a lock in deep trance





Day 34: Spontaneous iPhone haiku #3

been waiting to be seen...


Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Day 32: Homecoming

Cogitation.  Weight.  The anticipation of flight.  Many different homes mingling.  Oldness. Newness.  And the fury of preparation.  

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Day 31: Mourning

a voiceless lament
for edges, for lines,  for those
close by and long gone



The souls of Aunt Saretta and Grandpa are possibly skipping together in the ether at this moment.  Lillian, my grandmother, her sister, his wife, grieves, contemplates, reflects, makes peace. She is good at that these days. Markers of change, so many lately.  Infusing my being.  Soon, nothing will be as it was.
  

Friday, July 23, 2010

Day 30: Satiated

Like limbs indulging in long deep stretches, the creeping jenny creeps away, into muddy spaces.  Proliferating into wholeness.  They are fond of the home I’ve offered them.  Acceptance.  













Thursday, July 22, 2010

Day 29: Watering

A bird escaped from a fern this evening.  I inadvertently watered its house.






















I understand this bird's nature. The desire for forest.


Likely it is the same bird that made a home in this sweet potato vine, 
until it too was watered. 





Though a genuine birdhouse sits empty next door...




















I think I too would prefer soil over pre-fab.



Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Day 28: Wu wei

Acquiescing, while gently asserting.  Gently asserting, while acquiescing.  

Moving fluidly. Upright, poised, limber, malleable.  Strong.  A beautiful thing, a surprise. Moments emerge here and there like little fish.  Flecks of gold swimming around me.  


A memory from Costa Rica... of white herons:

tributaries, green
buttressing ghosts that hover
amid light shadows



Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Monday, July 19, 2010

Sunday, July 18, 2010

Day 25: Swimming

Swaddled in blue.  The paint found its way home.  Each day I will swim while I eat.  (The paint color name, incidentally, is Chartered Voyage).





















With plunger in hand
I unleash steady waters.
Sustenance for heart




Saturday, July 17, 2010

Day 24: Swimming

Floating in imaginary waters.  The lagoon in Akumal.  The pools from my childhood.  A bath?  No....  It doesn’t matter.  What matters is feeling space beyond head, beyond fingers, toes.  And being held by warm atoms. 

Outside thunder crashes and the rains surge.  It is a nestling.  A forest of water.  My feet swim in the air.

The full day of rain leaves such a lushness in its wake.  Reminiscent of Costa Rica in summer–bird calls and yellow.  Behind a wash of grey, colors pop.  I swim in a cool quiet and inhale soothing wetness.  Though the tree in the corner of the yard remains dead. Naked branches among full green.

Day 23: more hokkuing

a divine abode
awaits beyond white spacesuits
distance lessening

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Monday, July 12, 2010

Day 19: Trying my hand

A haiku is not a poem, it is not literature; it is a hand becoming, 
a door half-opened, a mirror wiped clean.  It is a way of returning
to nature, to our moon nature, our cherry blossom nature, our 
falling leaf nature, in short, to our Buddha nature.  It is a way in
which the cold winter rain, the swallows of evening, even the very
day in its hotness, and the length of the night, become truly 
alive, share in our humanity, speak their own silent 
and expressive language.
 -Reginald H. Blyth


***
sipping salt water
mind contracts body tenses
narrow wants rule life

Still contemplating that article, this island.


Day 18: Hokkuing

storm water current
casts shadows in waterways
blemishing island

Newsday article link:  Long Island's Environmental Concerns


Sunday, July 11, 2010

Day 17: The Great South Bay

Sylvia and I fill buckets with wet sand.  Past and present communing.

This morning water carried abandoned seaweed, clear plastic, and assorted opalescent jewels onto the shore.  I rescued two crab claws and a hot pink balloon.



Walking through sand today felt different than my memory of it.  
I invited the inevitable slowness in process, preventing me from getting ahead of myself.  The earth was merely pulling me closer in after all, so I let it.  

I left this place behind over ten years ago.  Traded it in for ferns and tall trees and rivers where I could disappear. Despite the hurt of discarded cigarette butts and other refuse dotting the sandscape, I think I could inhabit this place again.  Today my bones were not unsettled at all by the exposure, by the absence of bark.  The sea calms.


East to West, West to East.


Friday, July 9, 2010

Day 16: Returning?

Sylvia chases a bag that is chased by wind.
I watch the same wind blow clouds in cake-like layers that move at speckled speeds. Accepting the grass beneath me, despite itself.
I have been infused.  Baby Tyler's stillness passes through skin. 

Familial, that?  The scope of it all metamorphoses into something unrecognizable.  Only time will tell.

By me, the titanic collides with an iceberg and water rushes in.

Day 15: Brave new world

Returning to the place of birth.  Severe lights, no blanket.  And the hands of strangers.  The birth of a baby is a funny thing anymore.  My own mother was also sedated while I was pulled out by metal and then brought to the nursery where I spent my first twelve hours in a plastic bed.  My father told me he was able to look at me through glass.  A callous entry, though a common occurrence: placenta to plastic, dark to light, warm to cold, blood to air.  Science.  

My sister’s baby was born today, July 8, at 4:53 PM in North Shore LIJ hospital in Manhasset, NY.  Tyler Thomas.  Sun in Cancer in the 8th house conjunct the south node, and Pluto on the north.  Gemini moon.  A Scorpio rising by the skin of his teeth.  And thus another plutonian being enters the world.

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

Day 14: Unveiling

familial that
And with typing those ironic pair of FB security words, it goes public.  Slightly.
Feel free to comment on threads, share anything you want here... or not.


Namaste.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Day 13: Breathing

Written the other day in haste and stream of consciousness, while listening to the story of the Buddha's awakening under the Bodhi tree.  I don't know what to make of it, but I don't judge it.  Today it feels like a nice mantra. 


May I know my elemental being as awareness and love
Essential self, a self that is essential
A mound of petals
Not reacting, staying in presence
Sipping tea with Mara





Day 12: Coming back

I tend to hurl myself toward ends.  In the last two houses I tried to grow gardens.  I would throw my mania into the ground, with little regard. Hastily reaching out to an end-ideal held in the mind.  In love with the idea of the garden, despising the inbetween.  A reflection of the interior hollow. So often in love with ideas of things.  But I have visited those gardens, wild and tall, and have suddenly felt time moved too fast.  A loss at what I missed. The longing for completeness replaced by a longing for the inbetween.

A balance here in the big green house.  Moving beyond longing to simply what is.  Sangha is being in the now.


Sunday, July 4, 2010

Day 11: Tea

Suffering.  Stop.  Separate.  Self-ness.  

Staying.  a Sanctuary.   

Recorded words.  Words that breathe into my ears as basil comes to me in a warm wind.  A scent.  And then pine cones tumble.  A piano, a woman’s voice, drifts through the open door. I ponder my essential self, but through skin, not mind.

What is missing?  A mound of petals.

***
This commitment to daily writing is both guiding and restricting.  Very Saturn in that way. On one hand, I cannot flee.  I am forced to cultivate mindful moments from which to draw upon.  On the other, in moments of opportunity, I run ahead of myself, seeking words to describe and form product, which inhibits.  The blog both invites process and denies it.  

But I notice.  And invite Mara to tea, embracing what he brings me today.  Frustration does not lift, but it moves aside to make room for other things.  

Wholeness is both light and dark.


Listening to: Tara Brach: Longing to Belong today



The lightness punctuating










Saturday, July 3, 2010

Day 10: Lethargy

A haze.  A relinquishment to not doing.  But a delicate boredom persists.
I paint a swash of blue.  Swirl it with glaze.
Too much drama. 
Now… bathing in yellow.  There is quiet even amidst the many hums.
I get up to cut vegetables.
And notice the lightness punctuating.



Friday, July 2, 2010

Interlude

Borrowed from my dear friend Nik's blog:

Art represents a continuing condition not a moment of time or an arrested action. The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all. This puts one in accord with nature in her manner of operation. - John Cage



Day 9: Sensating

A commitment to ten minutes of sitting. I monitor the breath. I count. I come to stillness. Then sensation. Tingling in hands and the feeling of floating. A capacity on one hand to keep going, on the other, an anticipation. For the sound of the bell, of the call for “mommy” to yank me back.

Though stillness does carry through further into the morning, into the garden, where I measure.

Until friends pass by without words and stillness turns into uncertainty. Suppleness in muscles becomes ache. Though I am aware of the second arrow. Of the mind’s tendency to interpret. But this is a heart hurt. That transcends today and yesterday.

Many have come and gone, still come and go. Leaving a gorge that cuts into my middle.

But this evening, perhaps a new beginning.

The out there and the in here… How to marry them?

Thursday, July 1, 2010

Day 8: A pain in the belly

Sangha does not include wheat.

But it does include a garden. And blue. And breath – in and out.

And an unraveling of breasts.

And air and movement.

And water. But a coolness.

My legs, my belly, my hips, shoulders, and neck softened. Unbothered.


Day 7: Towards lightness (reflections on yoga class)

I’m a Lacanian cliché. Seeking the real. The stage of the imaginary, in infancy, when we experience a whole, undivided self, is disrupted by the acquisition of language. A new birth... into duality. This that, you me, us them. Lightness, weight. The symbolic pulls us towards the earth.

I have memories of floating, upside down, no gravity. Weightless.

My inversion practice is a kind of retraining. Back towards a buoyancy. I handstand my way to Sangha.