Monday morning at 4 again. Candlelight, cat, windchimes, wood stove. Moonpie purrs into my thigh like a little tiger.
This space has opened up in my life, because the architecture of everyday mind is in flux. Witnessing a man die, at the height of his life. It’s the Mother of all rug-pulls. The top layer of my unconscious got whisked right out, and now there’s none of the usual automaticity and half-presence holding the whole thing together. I feel everything.
The furniture of my life is still here, but what is gone is the scrim of dissociation between that furniture, and the ground of being. I was comforted by the scrim. It was made up of podcasts, comfort food, and the wetware that every screen activity installs in the mind. Media isn’t addictive because we love screens; it’s addictive because it monopolizes huge amounts of our personal working memory and cognitive circuitry. It’s wetware. Malware, sometimes.
When I recoiled from Netflix my partner joked: Ahhh that’s just the grief. True, but it’s also the ecstasy. Death has given my deep mind this craving for presence, even if all I’m going to do with it is feel the cat purr, and sit with some feelings, and try to create.
In response to Death, I am deliberately, naturally, sacrificing some of my copes. The cynicism, the little loops of media addiction, a basic unconsciousness of my own wounds and fears. These copes have been functional! For a long time they buffered my mind from the fact of death, and the super-charged crackling presence that bursts into flame when you face it.
Now feels like a time of stitching a reality back together. Based on some combination of intention and accident. This is a big topic, but in brief what’s different is a total lack of the old protective cynicism. How dangerous. Huge clarity on my own areas of denial and wounding, and how they have conditioned my mind unconsciously in the past. Plus a weird bias towards action, rather than the previous habitual action of taking no action. And, also strange, an increased appreciation for materiality. Like, once I stitch the new rug of everyday mind together, I think I’ll stake it down a little bit.
This fall, after 15 years in our shala, I put a shingle on the street. For 15 years it’s been hyper-minimalist, a huge blank canvas on Main Street that I can share with artists and dancers in the evenings. But I felt called, weirdly, and finally hung a little sign, then the certification that Sharath told me seven years ago to display. Last weekend, a student helped me put up curtains, and now the place is cozy for the first time.
For those first 15 years, the shala existed in non-material, non-conceptual space. Just a flame, a rave, a flash mob, lots of flowers, a movable altar, and really good floors. A shala made up of breath and movement and relationship. Effervescent.
That’s always been important to me, to not materialize it over much, not build our house of breath on the sand of material things, or illusions of identity, or personality. If you know, you know. That’s why we were fine in 2017; why the crew is fine now. Avoiding the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
But curtains. A sign. Plants. A tiger on the threshold of our fairy door. They make sense now. My remit is to run this shala. For my students yes as always, but also now and for a long time for my teacher, for the method, for the community. I already knew that, but now I really know it. Tent stakes are called for.