LIVING BODY doesn’t have to be a burden.
Look closely. Hello, hello. Who are you? What do you do?
We pump at her as if she were a well. We tell pain, Go away! You don’t matter! You don’t exist! The body thinks She wants me gone…and tries to flee, creates a dis cord or dis ease. Or she may scatter, a diaspora. * The fearful, painful, real, uncomfortable parts of body try to depart, escape, and how can they? They are stuck in a body that feels immoveable. The brain can easily take flight though. So the living somatic experience is a body who stays— abandoned, blamed, a lump of burden. Or the body goes another way and refuses to land at all, goes with the spirit. Thinkings can sustain us for a while. We become a stiff being of bones, a small, slight thing, trying to disappear, hardly touching down. Brain pickling’s fly up or spread out like refugees until there is hardly a thing left for the magpies… The Brain body fractures.
What’s your version?
Hello, hello, What do you do?
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What I wanted to write about is this:
EMPTINESS.
Absence is a thing, like how my non-tooth is something; like the hole in the backyard, ready for the post, for the promised shrine, is a thing. It’s not the departing and abandonment. It doesn’t matter itself with duality or not duality. I can feel the non-tooth as well as the tooth. Leaves try to fill up the hole in the backyard; dirt sifts in and I look to see what has fallen there. Absence becomes a container. If the post hole gleanings are removed today then what I find is loose, siftable. Or, I can scoop up a rock or mouse without prying. Emptiness isn’t nothing. It has a sense about it. Tunnel, canal, cave…Emptiness can be small or a big not-nothing (sky). And the teachers tell us, Don’t stop there. They say, The Heart Sutra says, beyond form and emptiness..**
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A SCAR is painful. I thought scars were just ugly, or a map. The wound under the scar remains. I have this shingles scar. It bumps up. People say, Oh, when I show them. I press there. It hurts a little. In the night sometimes it throbs and I lie eyes open, and breathe.
A strange animal who does not forget.
That’s memory.
Re member.
You can’t find the place for memory in the brain anywhere.
It’s a meeting.
A member of a family or body. A part of a whole returns. And again. Each time the memory plays it becomes less real until the memory posts are dry crumbles unless the memory takes us really into it. Then we get a gift, we remember more. (It’s happening to me now as I write). The left tooth was pulled but I think it’s the right. The crown fell on floor in the hallway. Dental assistant had to pick it up. Rinse it under the fawcett. Sun touched the room through leaves. Above an ice cream shop in Boulder. The flatirons from my chair. Sitting in a treehouse getting my wisdom tooth yanked out. I laugh even though it’s mostly terrible. I remember the right tooth. My tongue proves it’s the left. The mirror proves it. Memory slogs down to the left, corrected by the tongue.
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The living body, also an absence, continuum, space, empty, moving, fluid stream of consciousness. In any one frame she may appear completely still. Dogen Zenji asks us to look closely. There is no Spring into summer. Just as there is no life into death. ***
That would mean then, no inbetween, no borders, no threshold.
“no eyes, no ears, no tongue…no object of mind…no attainment, with nothing to attain.**
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A scar reveals its context. A certain temperature and moisture in the air. I turn my face and the mist spreads on my cheek; rips me out of here and drifts me back. A shift. The absence knuckled. Different from what it is to leave.
Feel, repeat feel, repeat and as Steve Reich (happy birthday) learned from listening to Jazz, and Gertrude Stein discovered …well, by being Gertrude Stein,
“no thing as repetition only insistence.”
The melody changes as it goes round and round and round and round and round….How does it change? How does it not change? Warp of the earth, lub dub. Crooked, on its axis. Not a circle. Not a balance. Only perfect in imperfection.
Sit long enough and absence insists that it be listened to, perhaps as a friend.
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Each time a memory story comes round I am a little dumber about what it actually was unless it opens the memory gate.
Unless it is absence.
Unless it is painful, like the scar.
Then I am here. I land again— broken again.
Luckily for me, that’s what poetry is for.
Do you know, who said it?
“Poetry repairs the broken world.”
~ o ~
*10 things to understand about diaspora | OUPblog
*I AM NOT SAYING we create our own disease, by the way. The whole dinosaur is way more unknown and remarkable then our new age beliefs, thank you very much Louise Hay. (See my post on karma and intention for other threads of this weave)
**The Maha Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra
The Heart Sutra
Check out the translation by Red Pine (Bill Porter).
*** thezensite: Lecture on Dogen Zenji’s Genjo-koan by Okumura
Check out this article to blow your mind. (as we used to say, back then…)