Process and practice

Creating habit, changing course, all is process and process is slow.  Slow is a tireless teacher.

It is now 146 days since I began a practice of wheelchair yoga, inspired by and following this book:

Available at amazon.com.

When I first ordered the book, I showed it to the nurse practitioner who sees me at home.  A second floor apartment, very steep outside stairs and greatly diminished mobility have me, for now, playing the part of Rapunzel.  The NP was enthusiastic and encouraged starting to work with the book, "Ten minutes a week," she suggested.  For a time I resisted, claiming that I had a prior commitment to art every day, "or so help me."  And then one day it changed, as absolutes do.  And now, for more than the stated One Hundred Days, I have begun to build a practice of 35 to 40 minutes a day which equals about four hours a week and I am not the same as when I started.

A friend with whom I Skype from time to time, told me well before I reached the hundred days, that I had been "youthified," appeared thinner, she heard more life in my voice, more strength, she complimented my complexion and my consistence.  I feel that, other than in supernatural heat, my sleep is better, my desire to overeat compulsively is diminished, and an enhanced state that I will call balance of mind has crept up on me.  I am able to complete tasks in whatever increments they require, however long they take, making space for them with room for the unexpected.  If I will not make a deadline, I call and reschedule.  Process.

In a recent donation of books to a thrift store, I set a maximum number of grocery bags that would be included in this round of clearing. That allowed me to stop when the number was reached, knowing I could call them again for a return trip - or several.  I've pictured creating a map of what I want to accomplish in nest fluffing and may go ahead and draw it.  There may be "before" and "after" scenes with no life-or-death dates for completion of anything.  Rather than my old way of creating needless stress for my son and me, I have become more caring of our time, our physical resources and, much as I still have pipe dreams of being turned into House Lovely by some magic hand, a very gradual, wary acceptance of who I am and how I do things.

As I am still a newbie to such a practice, I know what has been revealed, what has been altered, is only the beginning.  Under life's umbrella of process in the act of surrender, over and over and over.  I simply await direction.  The best description I can give is that I show up every day for the series of poses and movements, complete them, and let go of everything else until the next indicated thing becomes clear, which it always does.  There are days with drawing and coloring, days of sorting and sifting, days of lifting and, after a fashion, muscling things about.  I remain seriously committed to a daily sharing of what I find beautiful, inspiring and encouraging on Facebook.  That assignment is clear.  I've gotten over the notion that such an intention is trivial, lightweight.  It is part of my work and part of my joy.  Beauty and love, optimism and humor are the antidotes to every pox and toxin that would knock us to our knees.

Being in touch with friends makes me happy, though I have yet to master being a timely and reliable correspondent.  Always process.  I trust what I do manage to send forth will be adequate, possibly welcome and not seen as falling horribly short of expectations.  Process is where we learn to major in patience.  Along with possibly quantifiable gifts of beginning a practice, I think I am finding those aspects of human existence which cannot be counted, which may not have any name beyond spirit.  For some years now I've felt that all life is an act of faith.  That feeling grows stronger.  Peace and trust help diminish the deadly stress-produced chemicals that claimed me for so long.  Because I have seen so many movies based on samurai and kung fu warriors, it is a metaphor that springs easily to mind, tremendous inner strength to withstand relentless outer forces.  I would like to be strong in every sense of the word, to be quiet and calm, reasonable, healthy (heaven knows!), resilient, clear and kind.  I would like to be steady, firm in mind and body, not practicing juggling in the way I once did.  Not teetering, no fancy footwork, yet flexible.  Some of you may be familiar with one of my RubberMoon stamps, "Impossible Things Happen."  Yes, yes they do.

Word of the Week - 139

Word of the Week:  CHOREOGRAPHY

First, credit to Jerome Robbins for conception and choreography of WEST SIDE STORY.  The opening sequence has never lost its appeal, likely never will.

This week's word came to me while watching the Golden State Warriors play the New Orleans Pelicans the other night.  Having seen the Warriors throughout last season, including the playoffs and championship, I had a picture of what the court looked like during a game.  With the addition of Kevin Durant to the equation, it appeared to me that a new configuration was being eased into, one with which those concerned had not yet become fully fluent.  Where there had once been two principles, now there were three.  As one of the color commentators seemed ready to declare a team misfire part-way into the second game of the season, I saw the working out of new choreography.  When you go here, then you go there and you'll be ready for this.   Places, everyone.  Rehearsals have just begun.

I find that flux influences my days, flexibility and improvisation are required if one is to keep on one's feet, even figuratively.  It is still choreography, whether or not one is actively mobile.  Colliding with other dancers, with fixed objects, with change, happens.  Would that it happened less rather than more.  We have our routines, our expectations, the pieces of the production on which we depend - our own strength, our wits, our capabilities, all of them mutable.  Aging may bring these variations, this need to regroup regularly, into sharper focus, yet I know they've always been there for me.  A more youthful elasticity may have masked their constancy, whereas they now step boldly from the wings and demand a place on the stage.  The other dancers rearrange themselves with as much grace as they can muster.  They are learning not to grumble.

It seems my actions are all variations on working to make peace with uncertainty.  The phrase, "What fresh hell is this?" is one I utter often.  Not hell, exactly, but still surprising, unexpected.  I think of walls, the bricks hold their integrity while the mortar crumbles.  How to keep it all from falling down.

As words escape me, awareness seems easier to access.  It may be the product of greater stillness or the brain teaching itself new tricks.  A definition of evolution refers to, "the gradual development of something, especially from a simple to a more complex form."  I don't believe it was ever truly easy, we just let ourselves be fooled into thinking it so.  My wish:  the ability to evolve as the situation requires.  There will be new steps to learn tomorrow.

Word of the Week - 17

Link here, uncertain of artist's name.

Word of the Week:  CIRCLES

Duality continues to muscle us this way and that.  As we cross thresholds of age, the circles expand and the circles narrow.  The spirals coil tighter.  In widening, influences create ripples that reach farther from the center, they encompass and include more.  We exceed our imagined limitations, find our shells not the rigid corrals that kept us in and the world out.  Not shells at all but sheer encasings akin to jelly fish, billowing and pliant like crepe paper though entirely waterproof, stretched into cupped shapes.  They are meant to contain.  We open to and accommodate the simple, the rare, the true in manifestations we could not even name as recently as yesterday.  The universe becomes a child seated in the shopping cart, pulling exotic treats off the shelves while we try to stick to our meticulous and budget-minded lists.

As we reach detente with what remains unanswerable or unresolvable within, we require a smaller spool upon which to wind our ribbons.  Earlier lack of clarity that insisted upon swirling acreage to navigate within finds altered interpretations.  Furor hogs the bed, fills the room, spills into the yard and floods the fields.  Harmony, without fidgeting, sits on a footstool and keeps its hands to itself.

The soul as a bellows, air drawn in, air expelled.  Within our circles we are enlarged and reduced.

“Be infinitely flexible and constantly amazed.”
― Jason Kravitz

“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
― Albert Einstein

Art, Juan Romero.

Pass the potato salad at the Picnic of Chaos

It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis.

Henry Miller in Of Art and the Future

Once again, Brain Pickings and Literary Jukebox boil it down to the bones.  Flux, we keep meeting like this.

My dreaming last night/this morning was of an estate on a river.  At first the river seemed slow and narrow but I walked with dream companions to other points where it was waterfalls, deep still pools and wide expanses with swift currents.  I thought about rivers when I woke up.  Water - flowing, changing, moving - and the closest I can come to a connection is that the river equals all of this, life as we live it out here in the world and inside, the universe(s) we contain and constant, continual metamorphosis.

I think at least some of our peace comes from letting go of the oars or tiller, acknowledging that we are of and with the flow of things much more vast than we.  In looking over our shoulders to be certain that whatever we just left is still there, fixed and unchanging, we find instead that the water is too fast, the point is much too far behind us and even if we could see it, it would be different than we expect.

This is not information I grew up knowing or even imagining.  Yet what I suspect is on a level of deeper awareness, this is not really news.  I have tried for much of my life to nail everything down, each corner, all the sides.  I've held the image of the picnic tablecloth spread on the ground, pegged down every two inches to keep any corner from lifting or the whole thing from taking flight.  The combination of denial and wishful thinking that I constructed has been evaporating until now only the memory of it remains, along with the reasonably enjoyable Picnic of Chaos, not really all that bad once you admit it is what we have, it is all we have.

"More questions are on their way."

If the palm readers are of divided minds on which hand tells the story, how do we begin?




The life line in my left palm has a faint and tentative beginning.  Along its journey it becomes shallow, a washed out road, the sort for which warnings are posted about the force of running water.   As this is taking place, tracks from the north appear, run parallel and then merge to form a more emphatic crease which grows deeper as it nears my wrist.  The corresponding line on my right hand is more uniformly deep.

How is it that neither blares, at least to my untrained vision, the events that became crossroads, the fissures where life broke away from itself?  There are no islands I can find that say this is where the temblors struck, setting portions of the land adrift in a sequence of time best identified by change and loss.  Fewer than six years have produced a transformation I can only liken to entering hibernation as a bear and waking up as a collection of parts from three Volkswagens, uncertain if we have what we need to produce, with tools and skills not provided,  one semi-reliable vehicle.

We have, we are, it is all mystery, seeming as unknowable at the heart as around the perimeter.   We trail the poets and gather clues, artifacts of self that we tie up in our hems or handkerchiefs.  At night, the knots undone, we look for meaning in the potsherds.