Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Turning

vines and gold

"When I was dancing” said Yves, our bio-dynamic builder who danced and was friends with Margot Fonteyn “I would start turning, and I would keep turning until I was simply ‘tournant’ - a thing turning in space. Now I am a builder and that is still how I work.”

The house is in chaos. There is packaging all over the living room floor, newly gessoed boards on jam jars on the kitchen table, invoices all over the room-with-an-identity-crisis (office cum bedroom cum bathroom cum meditation cum practice cum writing room cum cats’ killing room cum mouse morgue - whatever). There are piles of laundry serving as cat-nests and there is no space for lil’ ol’ me.

“Can you pick C up from the station? That way I can have some space for myself in the house” ; “ I need to get to my yoga class I simply have to have some space!” ; “”Today is the hundredth day of our hundred days of meditation and there’s nowhere to sit and besides I will be in the car if you don’t pick C up from the station” ; “Could you move your packaging out of the living room, I can’t breathe” ; “I can’t move my bow in this room which used to be my space” etc.

I started thinking about this ‘self’ and this ‘space’ this ‘self’ apparently needs. I started wondering how it is that people remain spacious and live as a family of nine in a shack. Gradually (with the help of meditation and yoga, admittedly) I began to catch a glimpse. I was supposed to be in my yoga class, and meditating along with my virtual sangha for our two hundredth day, and practicing, but I was driving to the station to pick up C. I started to think about where I wasn’t and how everyone around me had forced me into this corner of where I didn’t want to be (why couldn’t he post his painting later, she catch the bus…). I began concentrating on my breathing, becoming aware of my fingers touching the wheel, bearing my fellow meditators in heart and mind when suddenly it happened – I was simply where I was. The world kept turning. I kept turning with it and there was so much space!

I met C at the station with open arms.

7 Comments:

Blogger Jean said...

Oh, this made me tremble with recognition! I'm so happy for you that you found this feeling. And for me that you shared it so eloquently. There are many different kinds of cramping and clutter, material and less material, but as it happens I may find myself living in a building site one of these days...

1:29 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

At one with the Universe... those fleeting glimpses, so rare and so precious. It's always so: the iron grip we like to have, the control we believe we need, the anxious place this always takes us to.
:-)

3:04 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Now this is a post to be truly joyful about! I'm not always successful either, but it's so wonderful when we DO remember and the space opens, wherever we are.

12:28 AM  
Blogger Patry Francis said...

How beautifully you describe this--the near miraculous transition from grumbling over what we think should be to being struck dumb by what IS.

5:12 AM  
Blogger Dale said...

These moments are what I live for. They won't come on demand, not for me anyway -- but when I meditate there's as likely as not to be one or two of them. I think what that means is not that I'm inducing them somehow, but that I'm just not impeding them so industriously with all my fretting and planning.

Lovely post. Thank you, Ruth.

4:10 PM  
Blogger Zhoen said...

Lois McMaster Bujold gives her main character one of these moments in Memory. Once experienced, that space can be found again and again.

9:17 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

being busy with loved ones is love....enjoy it!

3:49 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home