I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything – other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion – that standing within this otherness – the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books – can re-dignify the worst-stung heart. (Mary Oliver)
This morning as I sipped my coffee, a bank of fog came tumbling over the crest of Indian Mountain. A light wind tattered the edge, and then the fog thickened again. It was as if the clouds and the wind were playing, conversing. Below, the swamp maples are dressed for fall.
Today I am interested in the edges of things. The edge of my cup as the sun carves an arc of light onto its surface. The warm edges of my body meeting the coolness of the air. The way we experience one moment (sipping coffee) falling, edging into the next (taking out the trash). The way summer is falling.
Just now, as you are sitting, what edges are you aware of? Can you let that feeling become clearer? And then can you soften that edge, so that your body and whatever you are touching dissolve into each other – like the fog and the wind in the picture?
What I love here is the way that each bird expresses a specific piece of the complexity of flying. Not one is the same. It reminds me of the wonderful Eadweard Muybridge “freeze frame” photographs of human and animal locomotion – each image capturing a specific phrase of motion. The birds flying is a whole cloth of flight, even though that whole is fractured into a hundred parts.
What I was aware of when I took this picture was not any of that, but the sudden whirrrrrr of their ascent, and the heart-lifting feeling as they flew off. Looking at the picture made me want to investigate the parts of my own movement. Our friend, the artist Peggy Kauffman describes seeing fawns walking as a kind of stop action movement that dissolves into fluid motion as they leap and run.
How do you experience your movement?
After I wrote the post on Nelson, talking about the “basic, homogenized body”, I thought about the other side of that coin: the separate and distinct flavors of the body. A little like the difference between Western cuisine, which strives for combinations of flavors, and Japan, where there is more of an emphasis on meals consisting of distinct foods, each retaining their own individual taste and appearance.
When I first started to ride, I was overwhelmed by all of the sensory information from my own body and the horse’s body – like trying to listen to about five hundred radio stations at once. After about fifteen years of sifting and sorting, I can (often, not always) selectively tune into one channel at a time. It happens quickly – like a momentary check in: my hips, my legs, his mouth (I feel that in my hands through the reins), each of his legs, my spine, and so on. This requires a light, quick body-mind, one that doesn’t bear down or get stuck in one place. No over-thinking, no aggressive fixing. Corrections happen in a flow, awareness is dextrous and global. That is the goal.
I can feel my lovely trainer, Brandi Rivera, smiling as she reads this. She has seen me get very stuck, heavy-handed and frustrated. When that happens, I am usually not tasting or feeling much of anything. The parts have gotten thick and mushy, like a bad soup. At that moment, I find it helps to tune into the fluid base of the breath, and from there let the mind bloom out to the feast of flavors once again. It’s the same when dancing – sensing the whole while feeling the relationships and qualities of the parts.