Mmm

This morning I noticed I was tired, it could have been that the smoke alarm had a false alarm at 5am, presumably pollen and dust since the windows have been open  all summer... Or was it Monday's EMDR? It's possible that one of the biggest aspects of experience in those pre-coming out years was the shear exhaustion, gradually accumulated. Or perhaps not... It's all too easy to imagine connecting with some great fear, or other such powerful emotion. But maybe what is sitting there is too tired to feel much of anything. Or perhaps not... Nice lunch with a friend then off to a personal training session followed by a bit more working out in the gym. Certainly tired now! Tiredness is all too easily seen as insufficiency of available resource but in fact it is the in breath before and after the out breath. Back in those pre-coming out years with the mind so tightly wrapped around the body, I wonder... was it possible to fully breathe? Certain triggers in the present feel like little electric shocks, weights or tiny daggers at the chest... A breath is taken and slowly puffed out through pursed lips. The body's parasympathetic impulse. In a physical workout  it's important not to restrict the breath. It wasn't so clear back in the day that putting one foot in front of the other was a workout. And how often did I feel the alarm of hyper-vigilance go off? That's edgy. Tired and unknowing. In this process is anything loosened in the present or does the finger run around the rim scoring it deeper into the groove? It feels pathetic, what am I doing.  Is this the feel of then or now? Again, knowing is out of range. The future may show. All this is but shimmer through the day, a day mostly fine and enjoyable. Like those days putting one foot in front of the other...?

The sun had burnt away the clouds by mid-morning, just about the time the bin men followed by the window cleaner had been and gone and as I sat zazen. Then I folded my zabuton and put it aside with the zafu on top. It is good to be sitting more regularly again.  There was temptation to push, to look for something, insight from Monday's EMDR... or something in the itchy scratchy feeling. Things aren't as I'd like and I'm not getting them under control... or is it me? This is zazen, just sit, if it needs to arise it will, and then pass. The clouds of thought and pushing and looking moved through, the 30 minute timer elapsed. Mmm, itchy scratchy. Maybe I'll write something playful before going out to lunch. But it wasn't happening. Time to go... Walking in the shade as much as possible- really, in the UK? Hot, but wonderful cool air. Lunch, gym, home, writing... what?

Sitting patiently with not knowing. The shape of this shifts through so many forms, the simple and the complex, the short term and the chronic, the low level and the OCD level. The bright and the shade passing through. Zazen off the cushion, the Zafu and zabuton support the empty mind which fills with not knowing.

Wow

 

This picture is from the Vivienne Westwood exhibition at the Bowes museum. It's quite different from the other items in the collection. And I found it rather striking. In the past in gay men's workshops I've been invited to find my 'inner woman'. I don't find that particularly easy to locate. But I think in that dress and a pair of heals, it would be natural to sashay through the room with an elegance sliding skilfully along the boundary of come over and don't even think about it!

It is displayed well against the blue and red framed background.

Process

How is it even possible for me, to write something here which illustrates an understanding which itself is not captured by words? And then to instil within that writing the element of formulation within that understanding which is at odds with the very understanding? Zazen seems to express it but how could I really 'know'? And of course my own experience is only that- the experience which is expressed in the paradox of apparent separation. Without digressing into solipsism, and without dictating and imposing a formulation onto everything, where is the middle ground? The term 'heart-mind' is sometimes used in respect of all this and like all words is both useful and confusing. And so yesterday DC and I revisited in new clothes an old argument we have been having off and on now for almost as long as we have been together. He is an academic and in my fantasy (for all assessments are to a greater or lesser extent fantasy) totally fused in his occupation and identity. Further, the academic process is a web of knowledge ever refined, added to and rebuilt without end in pursuit of expansion of the mind's purview. And this is good, larger than any individual and meaningful. It is not however, reality. Reality is both larger and smaller than words. Our argument comes when for me the lens of this process is placed in front of every aspect of life and I feel squeezed by it. As I push back against it he feels rejected. As my life is informed by my own fusion of Zen, Taoism, western psychology, ecstatic movement practice, work in the construction industry, etc. etc... I write to craft a lens by which the small glimpses of that which defeats capture might be seen. Seen not in itself, for it has no self, but by what it reveals. And always with the knowledge that any realisation / appreciation / whatever word fits best, that may have passed through my being is very partial whilst neither partial or whole. And the thing is that not a word of this is any different to what DC wrestles with in his writing. Where that difference lies is possibly, in the validation of the academy. I do not wish to be dictated to by that which in my school years was as much a filter of ascribed worth as it was a vehicle for growth. Nor do I wish to have every creative floret of life assessed by it. However, I too am very given to intellectual rigor and greatly value this process. It is enough for me to play with words whilst wrapping them in their own limits, trying to avoid saying nothing of value or let them generate their own sophistry. In all respects there really is very little difference between DC and me.

I largely wrote the above before walking over to an EMDR session. What follows in this paragraph is post session, recalled as best I can remember. The focus of today's session was the period between about 16 and 24 years of age where it seems there is still unprocessed fear informing the emotional landscape of the present. Initially the images, memories and feelings are diffuse, vague and not readily available. There is probably a lot of numbing out in it. That after all is the function of compartmentalisation, set aside, don't fully go there, not feeling this, we have to keep this ship sailing. But sticking with the EMDR process images come, felt sense and meaning surface. I seem unable to meet the only available script, I'm not enough, small, isolated, rooms and others disappear to be replaced with black. My head brightly illuminated remains. The pen I'm following with my eyes stops, 'what do you notice?' I describe as above and the feelings of fear and of tiredness, about a 30/70 split. 'Stick with that.' The pen moves and I follow with my eyes. Images across this period of time come and go, a sense of younger to the left, older to the right, the black clears, left to right. The rooms return the people return but I've been erased. The pen I'm following with my eyes stops, 'what do you notice?' I describe as above. 'Stick with that.' The pen moves and I follow with my eyes. I reappear interacting with others, thin, sparse lines of connection form, there's a brittle feeling. The enormity of the task of surviving starts to penetrate, there is fear, tiredness, there's no option but to keep going. I do not know that it is ok not to be enough for the script, there's no other available. The pen I'm following with my eyes stops, 'what do you notice?' I describe the brittle connections, feeling not enough. I add '...and I wasn't enough, I couldn't inhabit the available script'. The sequence and timings written here may be slightly muddled, but the tone is close enough. Somewhere in the process the split of fear and tiredness shifted towards 50/50. The aloneness, heavy and dark shifts with lighter periods of connection and progress and threaded through all of it is determination. As the session draws to a close after similar cycles I'm aware that the erasure, from today's vantage point where so many other scripts are available including the transpersonal, resonates less with fear and more with liberation. But this vantage point was only reached after traveling in the boat of the erased. At the time it was out of range. I'm sure the coming weeks will see the process continue.

Saturday, DC and I visited the Bowes museum to see the Vivienne Westwood and the Norman Cornish exhibitions. Both vibrant with the wider creative life force yet very different. The Westwood I notice is mainly of clothes for women and I note that there are more opportunities for women to dress up in more different ways. Dressing up hasn't really ever featured large in my style. The Cornish exhibition is virtually alive- the sketched figures seem almost in motion and totally at one with the culture and environs in which they resonate. I casually wandered past resident exhibitions wondering vaguely about aliveness, the wider erotic and sensuality just short of sexuality. Later I would play about with this territory in 'conversation' with an AI. Setting up the scene with it and feeding it previous posts it did generate some interesting depictions of what I was circling. I particularly liked this:

The beautiful is the appearance of harmonious vitality within a relational field. The erotic is that same harmonious vitality experienced as participatory and generative. Sexuality is one possible flowering of that participatory vitality.

I think it was probably my poem, 'Returning' from the 7th July that put it on the map! What I think is at the root of this is life's deepest desire to express. And how can we as human beings be the conduit for the richest expression? Illuminated and illuminating. What is it that remains after the erasure? What resolves in the synthesis of the diversity depicted in the above paragraphs? What remains to be resolved? What flowers in both the resolved and the unresolved?

Ecology

I experimented with asking various AI's to review some recent posts. Here is a distillation of some of the observations:

The ecology - there is a conviction—not so much argued as repeatedly discovered—that reality is relational rather than made of isolated things.

Time isn't linear.

The past is not "back there."

The self isn't an object. It's an ongoing process.

The body becomes a way of knowing.

Desire isn't simply wanting. It is life's movement towards expression.

Fear constricts.

Desire flowers.

Fear isn't the enemy, it is part of the unfolding. It has developmental roots but also existential ones.

Practice isn't eliminating fear. It's learning not to organise one's life around it.

Relationship is central. Nothing important happens alone. Even enlightenment is relational.

Mirrors appear constantly. Reflection appears constantly.

Holding appears constantly.

Beauty is evidence of alignment. Beauty is where form expresses life well.

Ethics are not rule-based. Nor are they simply consequentialist. They seem to ask:

"What allows life to flower?"

The criterion isn't abstract morality. It's aliveness.

The Red Thread. This may actually be the organising principle.

Because it asks:

What keeps appearing?

The writing doesn't seem to be asking "What is enlightenment?"

Nor even "Who am I?"

The question that keeps reappearing underneath almost everything is:

How does life become more fully alive through this particular human being, in this particular moment?

I find this quite a lovely list. The interplay of 'what keeps appearing' and 'how does life become more fully alive through this particular human being, in this particular moment?' is intriguing. Patterns do repeat and this human being is sustaining. There is an intention towards what might be called expansion or at least not getting in the way. Broadly, the epistemology is Zen Buddhist of course, the blog takes its title from Case 5 Mumonkan, but it's equally important to include western psychology. Whilst each post is a function of the muse in the moment, the overarching inspiration is illustration of some of a response to the koan. This interplay is both the arising of and response to the koan. I'd not say the Red Thread koan was the organising principle although it's plain that there is no koan or anything outside of our embodied lives beyond speculation. And speculation is within our lives. Whichever way you cut it the cat is always One. But can we get out of our way and see a picture large enough to hold it? That is an ecological process.

 

Returning

Seen by the eye and felt by the root

Each line and curving plane, enlivened by animation

Eye to eye, eye to root, eye to eye

Mirrored the fire rises

The mind supplies fuel, the fire rises

Fast is the mind's desire, slow is the heart's

Quick now, first contact

The hands reach out to read the enlivened curving planes

Eye to eye, mouth to mouth, say not a word.

Root's firm stalk taken in hand winks

Slide the reading pressing hand round nape to draw the head closer

Then curved planes to each other full length and wrapped around

Fast heartbeat feeds the glowing shifting tangents

Pressed they shift to expand outwards and inwards

Smell and taste fuse the warm and shifting landscape

Each root pressed against the other, winks

The end beckons the journey be fast but breath fuels it

The wave passes, the mind's fuel dwindles

Motion signals, weight signals, the dance picks up pace

Fast they melt, slow they melt, rhythmic

The space between each body is electric

Cleaved open to and by this field they close

Close unto one shimmering field, then open

The shifting heat illuminates the liminal

Each pulse drives deeper the fluid planes

Mind's work done it rests

Each pulse melts the fluid planes

Liquid they drip into each other

Heat bathes the electric field and soothes the tension

Being savours the woven silken field

Then waves of their own depth surface

Rising and falling, rising and falling

Contract, open, contract open

Deeper the liquid liminal falling

Falling, falling, rising ever higher

The field's ear hears the small call of death

And answers, liquid

Pulses, liquid

Shimmering liquid light on the ocean, liquid

Liquid, slowly fades...

And the room returns, to hold the spent 

 

  

Flash!

In each spark the lark ascending

Flesh of stardust betwixt heaven and earth

Separation and Oneness pretend to be opposites

Child of the Tao and father of the mind yet seen only in its eye

Circle of becoming and maker of time

Expelled from the womb, briefest flash

Who is the dweller and who is the home?

Mind in body or body in mind?

Fed by the earth and the mind's penetration

With each thing this body-mind mingles, to reach for tomorrow, tomorrow, today

Desire's kaleidoscope throws out its colours: come, expand

Eros in his manifold ways mingles in our mind, mingles in our body

Come tomorrow be with me today

The path shapes the foot and the foot shapes the path

Come tomorrow be with me today

Flesh grants love's majesty through all its forms

Come, come be with me in so many ways

Spark! I hear thee calling, who is the dweller who is the home?

Spark, you are the dweller you are the home

The wave in the water the light in the moon

Yet we are suspended, oh majesty in our firmament

Suspended yet rolling: each turn of the wheel

Sing lark, sing! Each turn of the wheel

Circle of becoming and maker of time

In each heart-mind bright moonlight dances on the ocean

Love

If Whitman sings the body electric

I might say smooth creamy vibrant

Grounded and flying, still and whiplash fast

Sharp and flowing gentle as good night or morning

And a day full, all liminal in fullness

Then fear is tight, constricted, like fragile glass

The very breath feels heavy

As if to weigh down the too light body

Where it should float the vibrant smoothness

And breathe... Tight, foothills of panic, tension

Cheeks blow

Mind notes parasympathetic

Bright mind where aligned is flowing

Like Whitman's choir singing

But here stalled and waiting

Fear drives each slow step, twilight

Cheeks blow

Mind notes parasympathetic

Breathe

The smoke of his once-ness, in the beginningless now

This is not the liminal of fullness

Past comes into present

Present orchestral in hues of vibrant smoothness

Though yes, still shot with fear of broken glass

And so another turn around the spiral

Yet tomorrow

The very air sings the body electric

Liminal in fullness, bright mind dances

Joy as it turns the diamond, in Indra's net it sparkles

Sharpest thoughts, the fastest flowing

Liminal in fullness, body whiplash fast

Then earth and sea too sparkle

Gentle flowing as fire rises

The body breathes

The smoke of his once-ness lost in its embers

In each body our embers sparkle

Glow in each other's light and turn the diamond

And so another turn around the spiral