I am a rock, I am an “I”-sland

~when the seas are rougher than you planned. You hail yourself a life-raft and get down to the business of finding yourself an island. In this case a rock island on the shore of Lake of Bays on a Sunday afternoon on a November day warmed by Chinook-like swirl and drenched in sunlight too-bright-for mid November. You walk along the shore, trespassing if you need to, making your way through brambles and branches. You step your agile feet upon rust coloured leaf strewn ground, intuitively scurry around any gnarled roots and find a place of solidity upon which to perch. There you sit in worship, thankful for the gift of this warm november day, thankful for the wisdom from you Sisters and thankful for the opportunity to really test your practice. Your head a cacophony of swirly theories about him and you, about love and almost love, about deliberate absence and the clever ways your imagination weaves.
So you sit and you chant, you call upon something bigger than what it might feel like to imagine a wounded heart. You give it up to a force outside the landmine(d) laden landscape of your drama-hungry mind. Above you blue sky, is curtained by striations of white clouds that weave a canopy in front of the vastness. You close your eyes and chant, singing loud enough for the boaters across the water to hear, baying loud enough for the straggling Canadian Geese to notice and with enough intention to will a smooth canvas into reality.
The fruit of your practice arrives as silky clarity that has distilled itself into stillness. You open your eyes and tip back to look above. Blue sky, a breadth as wide as it is infinite stretches itself from tree-topped edge to tree-topped edge. Back in your body, you hear her call to movement, and so you do. You bend and preen, swoon and morph, reminding yourself again and again of this constant that is impermanence. Tree pose turns into standing splits and then rises into warrior three and back to downward dog. This home, your body, a flexible inspiration to a mind which seeks the illusion of un-changeable. Change only is, you remind your Self, the constant upon which to rest. You look out into the water, from the safe-seeming perch of your mini-rock island and watch as the wake of the boat’s waves makes it way closer to your tiny shore-line. You follow the wake’s ebb towards your boots on the beach, telling yourself arrogantly, no need to move them, it won’t come in that far. But it does and you have to come down off your perch and move your boots away from the incoming furrows of the water’s stir. You finish your moving practice and fold your scarf into a purple square upon where you’ll sit. You cozy up to “in-breath”, form a root-ful connection with “out-breath” and make friends with the pause who inserts herself in between the two. You keep doing this, feeling a bit of the chill that lands as sunlight pulls herself Westward. When you open your eyes again, the sky looks like finger-painted rills of amber, rouge and terra-cotta. Briefly, you remember what you felt like when you first stepped out the door.   Not long ago, you would have re-created that drama-driven heat, re-fashioned the licks of flames, wound up a few fire-balls to launch toward some imagined place of blame. Today though, you went to that island, who’s shore-line is bordered only by refuge. The hot of your craving lulled into liquid by the sweet fuel of practice.

~ by lusciousoul on November 10, 2009.