Sometimes when I start writing stuff like this I wonder if it is too out there to make public. I wonder if it will put off more people than anything. But then I remember that this is my blog. Fuck it.
Things are happening.
I woke up this morning feeling really soft and squishy about the world. As I was driving to midtown, I suddenly got it, in a very visceral way, that the only way to experience the world is with complete vulnerability, totally open, totally willing to have my heart broken every moment, otherwise, what is the point? I could no more see things completely with my eyes half-closed than I could really experience anything with my heart half shadowed. I was on Falls Road and there was mist, and leaves, and sun, and branches, and it was so beautiful that I thought I was going to fall apart.
This has been happening a lot lately. I get very emotional about minor things – the pattern of rust on a gas cap, trees, etc. It is not in a bad, bipolar kind of way, it is more of a softening. Every day is a swim in the ocean, and I am getting pushed down into the sand and sticks and shells over and over, getting scraped up, skin stinging, and it feels so damn good. I am a spiny little shell being broken down into sand, moving toward entropy, chaos, dissolving into uniformity, part of the whole. The world has opened in a way that I could not have expected.
I think this may be why I’ve been into the crazy ridiculous power classes lately, or maybe this is partly the result of them. Right now I need the practice to beat me up a little, I need to practice surrender, and I need to finally let go.
I never thought I would lose my edge and be happy about it. It is not even so much that I’m happy about it, it is that it just doesn’t matter, because what is happening in place of the edge is so much better. (“Sell your cleverness. Purchase wonder.” -Rumi) I still have my moments, but mostly I just want to let go and let life happen.
Tonight my car was towed while I was in class at Midtown, and the experience of tracking down my car, waiting for Scott to pick me up, and bailing out my car was completely different from what it would have been even a few months ago. I did not realize it until I got home, but there was no running commentary in my head about how much it sucked, no narrative about supporting the local economy with my inability to read a street sign, none of it. Maybe it was because I had just come out of a class (and it was one of those weird, clumsy ones, too. I fell a bunch of times.), but when I was waiting outside of Midtown I was just waiting outside of Midtown, and the only issue I had through the whole process was that I was kind of hungry. Even when we got to the lot, the only thought that I had about the whole thing was that it must suck to work there and deal with angry people all day. There was even a sign on the window that said something like, “We are not the ones who towed your car. Please do not yell at us.” It was very zen, and now I’m sitting here, out $262.00, and I really don’t care. I know I need to do some work to make back that money (it was the Christmas money), but I would have to try pretty hard to get wrapped up in a story about it.
On and on I go, but as always, Rumi says it much better.
Chickpea to Cook
RumiA chickpea leaps almost over the rim of the pot
where it is being boiled.“Why are you doing this to me?”
The cook knocks him down with the ladle.
“Don’t you try to jump out.
You think I’m torturing you.
I’m giving you flavor
so you can mix with spices and rice
and be the lovely vitality of a human being.Remember when you drank rain in the garden.
That was for this.”Grace first. Sexual pleasure,
then a boiling new life begins,
and the Friend has something good to eat.Eventually the chickpea
will say to the cook,
“Boil me some more.
Hit me with the skimming spoon.
I can’t do this by myself.I’m like an elephant that dreams of gardens
back in Hindustan and doesn’t pay attention
to his driver. You’re my cook, my driver,
my way into existence. I love your cooking.”The cook says,
“I was once like you,
fresh from the ground. Then I boiled in time,
and boiled in the body, two fierce boilings.My animal soul grew powerful.
I controlled it with practices,
and boiled some more, and boiled
once beyond that,
and became your teacher.”
