Here is some information about the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline White House sit-in. I am not prepared at this time in my life to get arrested, but I have participated by raising my voice and donating money to organizations more actively engaged than I think I can be. Please participate at the level you believe is appropriate for your current life and how much you care. I hope you care.
Last weekend, I went with a friend to see The Steins Collect at the Metropolitan Museum. I made a special effort to see the exhibit because of the incredible impact on art and culture that the Steins had by virtue of their collecting. Many of the paintings in the exhibit were familiar; I’d seen them before either at the Met for those from its own collection, at other museums, or in books. Some, which have ended up in other private collections or in the collections of museums that I have not visited, were completely new to me.
Among the paintings in the exhibit is Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse (which, as you can see from the link, the MOMA website currently indicates as “not on view”). I’ve seen the painting many times before at MOMA. The shift of location and context shook up my perceptions of the painting, and I indicated that to my friend. Another woman who was looking at the painting too engaged in the conversation. “It seems wrong here,” she said. “It’s a different view,” I replied. “It is disconcerting, but seeing it in different light, context, and company is enabling me to see new things in the painting and to find a more enhanced appreciation.”
I have been thinking this week, and talking about it in my classes, how a change of context can bring us new vision. How often, when things just keep going in a set pattern, do they collect dust and cobwebs (literally or figuratively)? I asked my therapeutic students whether they had preconceived notions about various challenges of embodiment, especially the chonic ones. Do you see them as part of your identity, something that causes you pain instead of giving you the joy of movement? What if you embraced being ever more conscious of alignment instead of being conscious of pain and limitation (and learning better and sooner when you cannot get out of injury without outside help)?
What of it? What of the change of perspective? After all, things get rearranged for us and the dissolution can be gradual or violent or something of both and be something of greater or lesser magnitude. Times of flux and dissoluti9on are the perpect time for questioning, for new vision, for discovering new ways to experience what had become too familiar, for seeing how one might wish to shift one’s own perspective for the good, to know and take responsibility for one’s own place and piece of this relationship to whatever it is that is shifting, dispersing, or dissolving., to seek to become unbound from the habitual binds of whatever invisible clothing we might be wearing.
Garden greens with baby carrots and sprouted beluga lentils, with Dijon mustard vinaigrette; spring onion and quinoa torte with eggs from my friend’s hens. Black olives, roasted soy nuts for salad as diners choose, tarragon and mint to refresh palate. Cool herbal infusion (peppermint, spearmint, anise hyssop, and lemon balm). Wine and dessert not shown.
When we can connect to the essence of the element of akasha, space, within ourselves, we feel less crowded by things pressing in on the outside, whether it be actual confinement or overcrowdedness or the sense of crowding from having too many pressing things to do. For those of us who live in the District of Columbia, this weekend, with the extra million or two or three people in our neighborhoods and using our transportation systems is a great opportunity to discover the spaciousness within.
Practice dwelling in a supremely spacious place in your heart when you meditate this week. Start by visualizing a vast space just beyond your third eye (the point between the eye brows). Once you can visualize that space, the chidakasha, draw the space into your heart and rest there. Then, when you go out onto to the Mall or onto the metro or onto crowded streets, bring enough of your consciousness into the vast inner space that you can feel comfortable with the crowding outside. When dwelling in the inner and outer at the same time, it will be easier to marvel at the outside crowds.
For those of you who are extroverts who get exhilarated by crowds, of course, this practice would seem less critical. I invite you to give it a try anyway.
May his spirit continue to inspire action.
