Progress

Jake and Sandy are impressed with my progress. I'm Tai Chi Wu Style Long Form. There are two ways of performing the movements - square and round. The square, what I'm currently focusing on, includes all the movements performed in a separated or staccato manner. This means that I learn an intricate series of small movements comprising the whole. You can imagine a hip hopper or the dances by Genki Sudo. When performing the round, you begin to link together the movements to create the smooth, flowing aesthetic that we associate with Tai Chi. The main principles I am focusing on are keeping the bOdy within its natural alignments and moving the whole body together, as though it were connected like a string of pearls.

I find that Tai Chi is exposing the weaknesses I've learned to work around in dance. For years I've been working on hip action in dance, but I find so many weaknesses in my hips as I approach these unfamiliar movements. My arms and shoulders are another weak point. I like to try to move through the progression very very slowly. I find that there are stuck points in my body. Much as meditation brings up the areas that I haven't dealt with in my mind, moving slowly highlights all my stuck points. I find myself shaking and laboring in the middle of a seemingly simple maneuver. When I perform it quickly (read: poorly, blindly, naively) it seems like I can move fairly smoothly. Only when going slowly and trying to stay relaxed do all these little tensions arise.

So I'm working.

Time here has been really good. Yesterday we all went for a long walk in a big valley of BLM land. There were cows grazing and cacti. The other day I saw a mountain lion, minutes before a rancher shot him. I've been taking care of, and grooming horses. I live in a small cabin owned by Karl, Jake and Sandy's neighbor. It's got a tiny wood stove that came from the back of a caboose. It mostly keeps me warm. We eat together and I practice Tai Chi or just stare at the beauty of this place. Most days we head to town to soak in the hot springs. I've been keeping up with my meditation, and I feel very relaxed here.

Quiet (unpublished from a few days ago)

Everything is louder in Wyoming. Voices, my guitar, the stars, personalities, footsteps in the dust, a horse's snort, dinner with conversation, Tai Chi...

A car engine stands out in this land. People look up to see which of their neighbors it might be, and upon realizing, an ineveitable story follows. I always somehow thought that people living out in the country would have distant neighbors. Indeed they do, in the physical sense, but perhaps the old saying is true about neighbors and fences. Jake and Sandy have been taking care of different neighbors' horses. I've been tagging along, remembering the too short of a time that I was working with horses. Sandy says they heal - whatever ailment one might have. I'm certainly feeling a call towards them. I've got my eye on one in particular where I'm staying, bu I haven't yet worked up the guts to ask to ride. I think I'm going to ask to groom them first.

Jake and Sandy truly are Salt of the earth people. They are very giving and humble. They have taken me into their home almost entirely. They insist that I not buy any food even. Here I am with no rent and free food. Hardly anything to do with my days but go soak in the mineral springs with Jake, meditate, practice Tai Chi. There's so much to learn in Tai Chi. I was practicing the first few postures very slowly today, and I could feel all the crinks in my body. Much like meditation, I thinks I just need to work through them, which means staying present through the shaking and pain. The pain reminds me of ballet - the difference is that ballet caused that pain by stretching the the maximum, whereas Tai Chi causes it by moving slowly through a motion. One quickly realizes all the shortcuts we take in our everyday movement- how we protect certain areas by not making them move.

Alas, it's taken me about 2 days to feel comfortable here. I am quite the chameleon. Already I feel that I couldn't live out here full time, and already I don't see how I could leave.

Thermopolis, WY

Headed out of Portland, after a few months there working as a laborer with a small remodeling company. I have not spoken of certain areas of my life on this blog, and yet perhaps those very areas have had some of the largest influence on the course of my life in the past years. Two relationships ended in a year with similarities undeniable. Leaving me a writhing ball of struggles, blame, guilt, hurt. Like last year, I headed to Vipassana to find whatever it was I needed to find. And although the similarities, even the timing, seems familiar, my experience sitting was not the same. This was likely my easiest sit yet. I reached a point in the 10 days, where I thought my dedication to the practice had reached its end, and somehow in that moment a different understanding arose.

To catch up my readers a little more, after spending 4 months in meditation centers last year, I took a vow of sila, or simple morality, setting myself in a position to continue meditating two hours per day. I kept that up for a number of months, yet was unable to find balance with full time work and dance. So as I sat this year, I started to see what has changed within myself. I find less militancy in myself, and it is replaced by a firmer conviction in my views - a dedication that finds less satisfaction in proclamations and more in action. This has been a large part of the reason I have not been blogging.

The most significant change for the upcoming year symbolically occurred on the last night of the meditation course. I finally integrated all the scattered pieces of dreams I have been collecting over the past 2-3 years. I arrived in Portland with a vague desire to follow Brenda's footsteps and become a great dancer. That blind ambition lead me to question what my actual purpose has been. It has sometimes felt like a purposeless or selfish path - to be disregarding societal pressures. But as I now believe, I could not live my life as called without determining these desires.

I don't know what's going to happen now. I see a vision, and I have no idea how to accomplish it. I often feel like I'm headed in all the wrong directions. Currently I'm headed to Thermopolis, WY to study Tai Chi with someone I met last March. I am trying to put faith and confidence in the fact that I feel called here. The one thing I can say about the progress of my life over the past 5 years is that I feel myself on a path that feels right. I feel like I have been putting more and more trust in this path - living my life as I'm being called to live it. And now, leaving Portland with a little money and no plans made further than a few weeks out, I feel a sense of abandon and adventure in which faith and trust are my only supports.

deferral

God says,

"By deferring my generosity I am helping him.

His need dragged him by the hair into my presence.

If I satisfy that, he'll go back to being absorbed

in some idle amusement. Listen how passionate he is!

That torn-open cry is the way he should live."

-Rumi

Vulnerability

There is a new vulnerability within me. I think it's really a strength. Whatever the case, Rumi makes me laugh. Merton makes me cry.

"It took me time to find out: but I write down what I have found out at last, so that anyone who is now in the position that I was in then may read it and know what to do to save himself from great peril and unhappiness. And to such a one I would say: Whoever you are, the land to which God has brought you is not like the land of Egypt from which you came out. You can no longer live here as you lived there. Your old life and your former ways are crucified now, and you must not seek to live any more for your own gratification, but give up your own judgment into the hands of a wise director, and sacrifice your pleasures and comforts for the love of God and give the money you no longer spend on those things, to the poor."

-Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

a nine pound hammer or a woman like you

Point 1) I've been studying addiction. Really, I'm studying the symptoms. I know addiction occurs when I want something, seemingly out of the blue. My mind tells me that I just want it, as though I were fulfilling some random craving, as though anything were random. This is how my addictions play out. Suddenly I want coffee (out of the blue), and ignoring the craving, a headache arises. I ask myself where this headache came from, missing the causation.

When I took the five precepts, I was instantly filled with intense craving for these very things. I thought this was a strange sort of reaction, being that these intense desires were nonexistent a few days earlier. Then it started to become clear - I am addicted to these pleasures. As (most of) these five desires begin to die down, I notice similar reactions towards other things. Coffee, meat, sugar, self-loathing, fear, Taylor Swift... I have nothing to do but keep observing these symptoms. The strangeness of it all is that I'm no longer sure what isn't an addiction.

Point 2) When sitting, my mind wanders. There comes a certain point in every sitting where there is a strong "kick" from within. Something inside me wants to stop meditating. Like the addiction, however, I have no causal awareness. I have always attributed this to an outside cause. It's my legs hurting, the need to check the clock, the five bugs scouting my neck and ears, that dog seemingly barking at me. The list is as beautifully diverse as one would expect. Lately though, I noticed that it happens the same amount of time into the hour...

Oddly, as faith in mind dissolves, I feel relieved.

Spiritual children

Whenever two are linked this way, there comes another
from the unseen world. It may be through birth,
if nothing prevents conception,
but a third does come, when two unite in love,
or in hate. The intense qualities born
of such joining appear in the spiritual world.

You will recognize them when you go there.
Your associations bear progeny.
Be careful, therefore. Wait, and be conscious,
before you go to meet anyone.
Remember there are children to consider!

Children you must live with and tend to,
born of your emotions with another, entities
with a form, and speech, and a place to live.
They are crying to you even now.
You have forgotten us. Come back.
Be aware of this. A man and a woman together
always have a spiritual result.

-Rumi