Yoga and Discord In The Choir

Renaissance

I journeyed east in the morning.

My eyes strained, battling against the sunrise.

Tears welled and I blinked them away

as the world was lit on fire.

That shining and stunning morn

That majestic and breathtaking dawn

A spark of awareness within me rose with ever increasing force

until my entire being was joyously consumed.

Crying out, I raised my voice in discord to the choir of dust

and turned west in harmony and alignment with all that mattered.

The sun, the earth, and the direction of the future

I have become a rider upon the primal pulse.

-JB 06/25/2012

I often find myself walking down the same mental roads.  I don’t think it is a habit so much as a lack of ability to discern alternate possibilities.  I’ve been told that my sense of humor suggests at a creative mind and maybe that is true on one level or another, but in terms of the habitual problem solving that we all undertake as part of daily life… I’m far more boring and analytical than that.  There are just so many things that I would never consider until they are brought to my attention and, usually, such answers stun me in their simplicity.  I think it is this reason, my penchant for thinking too linearly, that abstract concepts seem to hold so much meaning.

I was doing yoga last night, and the meditative portion caught me off-guard despite that I had heard it before.  In Jamal’s world, one relaxes the mind and the body… though this is easier said than done.  Telling me to relax my mouth, my throat, or my fingers is likely to blow my little mind.  Who thinks of their fingers as tensed?  I don’t, and yet imagining my fingers releasing pressure that I don’t feel somehow serves to inspire the creative thought I associate with the relaxing of the mind.

Left to my own devises, I would likely try to focus intently on not focusing, in the hopes that somehow it works and my mind relaxes in the same way that focusing radiation (poison) at cancer somehow manages to permanently kill the cancer (for a slim few) before it kills the person with cancer.  It’s like I am plugged into myself and can’t stop the electrical flow as it inexorably cycles round and round in a perpetual loop.  It isn’t until a concept comes along that is completely unlike anything I could ever independently conjure, and it serves to capture my attention long enough for the flow to ebb and release me.

The meditation from this yoga video is nothing special.  It isn’t long.  It isn’t grand.  It probably isn’t even very unique.  I don’t think it is profound; so much as the specific angle it assumes as it departs from a more traditional train of thought is somehow well-aligned for me.  Like a switch in the track, it changes my direction and, once released, my brain can wander for a brief time in the vastness of possibility.

“Feel the pulse of the earth,” it said. “Be that pulse.  Be the earth.”
 
I don’t know or even care if there isn’t a single other person alive who feels moved by those words, but they take my level of thinking and sink it deeper.  I long for that depth of thought.  I need that depth of thought. 

“I would rather be ashes than dust! 

I would rather that my spark should burn out 

    in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. 

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom 

    of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. 

The function of man is to live, not to exist. 

I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. 

I shall use my time.”
-Jack London

I’ve written before that there are some people who are electric. They serve much the same purpose as meditation in that they sink my thinking deeper. I suspect that I do a decent job of recognizing such people, but I do a downright poor job of connecting with them, of emulating them, and of taking advantage of the fortune of knowing them.

I once knew a man and whenever I spoke with him there was a sense of magnetism, like the feel of the air as it gets chased across the country by a storm. I think of him often, and how his mother described him as a renaissance man when he died. I don’t yet think of myself as old, but I’ve lived longer than many who deserved it more. Sometimes I wonder if it is not those who do the least that survive, if we are not the embers, slowly cooling long after the fire passed.

Some may feel that’s a sobering concept full of morose tendencies. I don’t. I think it’s empowering. The fact is, if you get your thinking down deep enough, every ember longs to be renewed in flames.

We could all use a renaissance in our lives.