Okay, now for the more thoughtful birthday post. Who has the wherewithal to write a cohesive essay in a day these days? So, you'll find below a few gathered thoughts. Come on, let's get confused together.
As many of you know of me, I tend to make my birthday part of this celebration and reflective season by looking back not only on the year passed, but years past. Last night I spent some intimate time looking through old journals. One in particular, from my very first years at Wheaton, broke my heart a bit. I read the woes of a boy so in love with a God who'd created him to live, he'd forgotten to live and to love beyond the godself. We was enraptured in performance and intangible perfection, he had no sight of the fullness, the bounty within.
Bounty remains intangible in the present pandemic era. But, I am not limited to the reach of this body. Our bodies have been forced upon a 6-foot-distanced grid this year, and they will continue to be separated into the foreseeable future, until we reach true ecological healing and resilient health. So, I look back to this younger Self, and I ask him to shed his self-hatred, but lend me his faith. I want to remain spacious in my thinking, in my loving.
In my Facebook post yesterday, I promised you paradox.
So, here is the paradox for the year: stillness in flow, flow in stillness.
Or, simply:
bounty in STILLNESS and in FLOW
This past week, I made a little escape to my parent's rural home in Connecticut. Yes, a touch irresponsible, but empowered by a recent COVID test and the reality that I was not traveling too far outside of my current health ecology, I went! I saw only close family while home, but I also got to visit my Other Mother, Nature, in her sleepy winter bounty. I miss her.
My parents currently live in a tiny house on a reservoir, a house which is typically used as a summer cabin by its owner, on a body of water which forbids (but entices!) human contact due to it being a source of regional drinking water. All that said, it was quaint and serene. There, I was able to experience winter in the way the earth knows it: slowness, crispness, purposeful death, and the rolling-over-in-bed sort of cycles of life.
I went on at least one daily walk by the water. The weather was quite moody - even to the point of turning off our electric power for a day. With the temperature’s dance, the water cycled between its solid and liquid states, even within a day. In doing so, the lake's shore accumulated these thin shards of ice which would percuss when the wind carried a breeze over the surface, sounding something like applause or a very clumsy bartender. But, this chorus was an interesting concussion of difference: the once solid frozen plane of the lake's water, and the movement of its deep, fluid body in response to the wind and wildlife.
: : STILLNESS and FLOW
Water as a concept is riven with parables: manifold spiritual, or otherwise sexual, emotional. One that came to mind when observing the lake on a particularly icy day was: still waters freeze more readily.
Oh, so wise. Sounds nice, too, - pithy, right? Physically true, seemingly spiritually also. Yet, in this statement, one is setting up freezing as morally negative. For instance, think about it another way: an inattentive mind loses interest, an unmoving machine gathers dust, a complacent heart cannot grow, and inactive body gains weight.
But, don't we also have such wisdom as: haste makes waste? So, wisdom (or intuition), would have us move, but not too fast, and perhaps not freeze. Unfortunately, a closer look at the cycles of our shared Mother reveal that freezing, too has its purpose: to protect, to slow, to preserve, to eradicate.
stillness FOR flow | flow FROM stillness
: : making + TIME
Since moving to NYC for grad school - two significant actions for the exorbitant price of one! - my established routine, my life's style has been overturned. Oh yah, then a pandemic happened. So, this particular year has been a real struggle with balance. I used to walk miles a day to commute, moving my body through the city space. But, the pandemic brought everything home. My body no longer had its flow, and stillness started to manifest its fruit on my butt and my belly. (More to hug once we're able!)
My coping mechanisms became escape through entertainment and food. Joys whose pleasures decreased with time. I was not flowing, I was freezing. Just like the lake, I needed to be broken up to let a chorus percuss on the shores, waking the depths again.
... a time to be ___
and a time to be ___
During one particular bout of irritation, I returned to my age-old pastime and healing mechanism: art! Some of you might be surprised that I wasn't doing this more often, but I've got a weird relationship between work and play - that's for another time. Art is my life partner, of sorts. Sometimes sexy, sometimes just there, but generally reliable.
In my making, I found that joyous current once again, where time - and concern for using, investing, passing, wasting it - disappears, flowing directly into the physical task at hand: creation. "Flow" is a concept which entire books have been written on, so I won't go that far, but it philosophically derives from Daoism, a school of thought devoted to balance.
As I think about stillness and flow, their relationship with time becomes more interesting. We all experienced an estranged relationship with time this year as our routines were upturned, our home spaces were used for work-related tasks, and every "day" (you know, that time when the sun is up) turned to Blursday. Thus, the pandemic made time matter differently, even disappear. Were we in flow? Probably not. But, it did make for a common experience of a different relationship with time.
During my making, as other makers often attest, this flow - when endeavors feel effortless - is not so much that "time" does not matter, nor does it disappear, it is more that one can marry time, partnering their endeavors into time itself as a medium for making, rather than a method for tracking. We often get trapped into rubricked thinking, blocking out "time" on a calendar, but this, I argue, is actually misuse of "time."
There is time, then there is Time.
There is chronology, then there is cosmos.
The cosmos does not count things - we count, creating spaces small and large to dissect Time, to examine it, to dominate it. This is not wrong, per se, but it is a simple relationship, where Time offers complexity.
Perhaps imagine it as this: an astronaut, who has spent her whole career (schooling, working) on the formulas of space-time: gravity, technics, mechanics, physics, only to have all that fade into the background on her first space walk, when the Real becomes salient. Or, the first time she sees our blue orb sit on the fabric of the universe, just so - no shape, no form, no forces are seen, only fullness. Astronauts often exclaim this is an overwhelmingly pacifying experience.
: : PRACTICE and MASTERY
Inevitably, the respect, the experience, the ecstasy of Flow does demand some level of mastery. Alas, the astronaut had to tackle many a theorem to make it to her zero G walk. Personally, I think about the times I have spent in Adobe InDesign these past months working to organize and visualize concepts I have thought much about and want to have a better handle on, but my lack of practice is in this particular computer program keep me from accessing true Flow. The rubric gets in the way of the real.
If we want to pick this apart even further (you're in the wrong place if you don't), perhaps we can think of our experienced reality as braid or chord of knowledges. "Knowledges" as opposed to "knowledge" is a way we talk about perspective in my program. It helps one to see the layers of experience one has, as a more involved critique. Think of a knowledge as a role or story you know: mother, son, queer, Colombian, artist, Earthling, 50-something.
Through our various knowledges we access different depths of the Real. We we practice a set of knowledge, we roll these fiber between our attentive fingers, firming these strengths or aspects of the self, allowing them to be taught. (Yes, my art above is actually a diagram. Here, see the purple nodes. But, I leave the rest up to your own imagination.)
But, when we face a new task or challenge in a new medium, category, field, relationship, what was simply known through practice is complicated by new "hows." How do I color this block? How do I say this to mean that? How to I attend to this feeling? Here the medium-message friction that artists know so well comes to burn our in our senses.
And this addressing new "hows" is how all Time is spent, passed, invested, experienced - through learning; through, and by practice. Again, my mantra hums: Practice makes Presence.
Presence, then, is Time experienced in one place, one field, category, relationship, to the point where if you were not in it, or if it were not in/around you, there would be imbalance. You would be missed.
: : on being STILL
Now, let's return to our titular consideration: stillness, and its benevolent form. Alas, Presence, our recently featured virtue, is invariably connected to steadiness, a form still-ness. Stillness now only has the nature to knot and fold - think those tucked away Christmas lights - but the nature to facilitate, to gather. Interestingly to knot and to gather are two verbs with different feelings, but very similar ends: the creation of a center. Stillness, as any yogi, prayer warrior, or meditative person will tell you, brings centering.
center-ING
But, stillness, without flow makes for complacency. These two phases of the Real must be paired. Considering knowledges, we must know in order to practice, but we must practice to support our knowing.
Alternatively, flow without stillness makes for an escapist Self. There are certain infiltrators into our rhythms which keep a strand of our knowledges isolated from the fullness of our knowing. This is not necessarily good or bad, but a strained focus can certainly be unbalancing. Think if you only worked on your left quadriceps, or only your Portuguese verbs and not nouns, or your self-care and not your Other-care…
This strand becomes focal point and perhaps a false center. You cannot gather one thing; that we call myopia. All of life is not this thing, but we make our life about and around this thing for a time - intentionally (i.e. grad school), necessarily (i.e. care for a beloved), or abusively (i.e. chemical dependency). Within myopia, we develop an internalized belief that this is all of me, for now. Again, this focus can be deeply strengthening: devotion, commitment, healing of a damaged strand. Or, it can be fixation on a wound, a picking of a scab, a turning of the knife.
: : stillness AND flow
How then, do we balance the forces of stillness and flow to take a more centered approach to our time here? How then do we move with and in time, rather than simply parceling it out? What moves, actions, practices help you into the flow? What forms of stillness help you center the energy within?
: :
This was an odd little collection of thoughts, huh? Well, today it allowed me to practice both in stillness and flow, so that's all I needed. To sit, to reflect. Then, to let the words crash a chorus of fracture against my keyboard's surface. Again, to reflect, refactor. I even took some time to dive into Illustrator to make the weird conceptual x-ray of this odd little paper.
We all celebrate in different ways. :)
Hopefully some phrase knotted herein was of some help in your own centering.
Be well, friend. We've got a new year ahead of us.
Jason
