Yoga
“Being Balinese //
is
so
much
upacara.
From being born,
until
you
die,
Mas!"
is what he said.
With a surprised grin on his wrinkled, spotted face, when he said it, light-hearted, calm, and satisfied to be heard, or not heard. He was sitting in the bale, at the sangga on top of the banjar building, leaning on a post. In front of him was a box-shaped table with offerings, flowers in woven grass dishes, sticky rice jaje, and a spiral-bound notebook, slightly weathered, on the pages of which were words, in the Balinese language, to a song or prayer. He had just been singing into a microphone without looking at that notebook. He had finished the song, switched off the microphone, and set it carefully on the table-box. His face glowed as it dawned on him.
“Being Balinese is a lot of upacara. From when you’re born, until you die, Mas!”
(“Upacara” is ceremony. “Mas” is a polite form of address for my Javanese husband. He looked back and forth between us, when he said it.) We laughed, and my interpretation was that we laughed because the look on his face was so joyous, it must be a joke. E. agreed, making sure I understood, that this great-great-grandfather had just shared with us a really good joke.
I had been thinking about what I wanted to be writing. Sometimes I dissociate at upacara, especially when there’s something unsettling. This one had begun with a nice conversation, while sitting on a mat next to a young Balinese girl with the roundest, deepest eyes, in matching pink sarung and kebaya, who touched her toes with mine, wiggling. As if by accident. But the conversation was with a man from the next village over. He articulately was exchanging acquaintance with E., in a way I could mostly understand, which always comes across as extra considerate. The man was holding a slender white goose. As he listened to my husband, he examined the goose. With two touching fingers, he smoothed a stray feather on its head. He stroked the length of the goose’s body, to calm it, as it shifted with fear.
The goose would momentarily be sacrificed.
I never know what to do with my face, in these situations. What I deeply wish I could do is look into the goose’s eyes and talk to it. To tell it, I see you. I don’t care how that sounds, it’s what I really want to do. But I am a guest. It wouldn’t be right, to my hosts. It wouldn’t be fair, to my husband. So in fact, I am hiding. I don’t want anyone to notice how hard it is, for me, to look anywhere but at the goose. (The discipline of eyes is an essential part of dancing, here.) So I shut off my face. The little girl’s toes are still casually touching my own. But the goose is wrapped in a piece of fabric, around its middle, and the friendly man is re-wrapping it, securing it, as if with care. The wrapped piece of fabric is the sarung of the goose, it is dressed respectfully in sarung, just like me.
Just like all of us.
I bring it up with my husband later, the goose, I cry a little, and we talk about the words of the great-great-grandfather. He is the oldest man in our village, he is ninety-eight, we have sat with him before and nongkrong(ed) as he was holding and caring for his newborn great-great-granddaughter, a very cute and fat baby with diamond studs in her milk caramel ears. E. is impressed that the old man told the joke, and we were the only ones who laughed, not the Balinese people sitting nearby. Me, too. But the spritely old man had addressed it to us, and other people nearby had been distracted, eating. So it didn’t really seem spoken for them.
I keep thinking about the old man’s words, and bringing them up with E., to hear him tell me again. “Being Balinese is a lot of upacara. From when you’re born… until you die, Mas!” E. says, with the right expression. And we laugh. It reminds me of the look on his face, the suspense and the gesture. How, when he said it, he referred to all this, and he referred also to himself. “Upacara, from birth, until death.”
Eveningtime in the sawah, the last night of Odalan, and a sliver of almond light hangs in the east, against periwinkle into deep lavender haze. Chill air floods from the highlands and mist spills out from ravines. The voices of elders carry, again from the banjar, across cloudswept rice fields, and coconut palms are sighing, tidal, in the shifting breeze. They’ve been singing every night, for more than a week. That’s his voice, I know it now.
Sweet smoke-smudged, broken flowers in hair, rice pressed on third eye and throat, sacred water splashed, with mark of goddess on your arm. So many words for how it hurts to let go. The same way it hurts to watch a goose be soothed by a man who’s about to slit its breast and spill its blood, in service to powers that will chase away bad spirits. Compassion is the key to sacrifice, this is what you say, and you hate it. And you are supposed to hate it. And you will wonder at that, but you will do it anyway, you will let yourself be given. Because your life doesn’t belong to you, at all, in the way you believe. Not in a way that will ever make you happy, or good. Not the part of you that hurts like that. And it was a joke, spoken by a man with only a few teeth left. And in his smile, it was an explanation. For both of you, but especially, the stranger.
Tiresias, back and forth between man and woman, gains inner sight through the cruel magic of mutilation. Again and again, verse after verse, the great-great-grandfather sings. There’s something I was, and something I am becoming, he is singing with a grandmother, her voice, trembling, his voice, alive. A steady, alternating song, words weaving between hidden constellations. Nobody who can hear him is as old as he is. I have seen him now, on the roof of the banjar, and I imagine him there, both hands holding the microphone, his eyes half-closed, not needing the book. I say to E., we will go to his funeral. E. says, yes, of course we will.
What I actually want, is that we go to his one-hundredth birthday party. I believe that we will make it there, first. But I don’t know at all, what to bring, that will be an appropriate gift.
Thoughts fallen into all the wrong places, as if settled into gutters, now stuck there glaring back with soapy sachets of synthetic perfume, no solutions, and a lot of bitter complaints. Taking shelter in small wrongs, lost perspective, petty despair. Needing reasons to laugh, get turned on one’s head, reset. (Monkeys? Maybe. And just literally standing on my head. Being literally upside-down is being upside-down!)
Awake, not yet twilight, cats causing chaos. I cover eyes, determined to go back. (Wow, it worked.) Hours later, waking as digging out from under concrete. It seems more likely I never woke up.
(The invention of prayer. Begin with sleep and the way it/you works. Body is not machine. Simple acts are a negotiation, while the deepest consist of letting go. Make yourself an offering and the infinite becomes kind. Practice savasana, learn how to fly. Īśvarapraṇidhāna.)
As if death were the missing half of wonder.
It’s like this: being of your body, and sensing (with) the ghost of past body, and sensing (with) the ghost of possible body, there is a constant negotiation between these (differing perspectives), each “one” claiming to be “the one”. Then, the analogy (between ghost bodies) is (what we call) time.
There’s something I have to write about but it’s giving me a hard time. It feels like this writhing thing inside of me that wants to get out, (you know, the usual feeling), but if I try to write about it, the words trail off, my fingers stop moving. It’s not that I’m scared of sharing this with you, (I love you but/and you’re really nobody, to me), I have a block just putting it down in written sentences. The words aren’t there to summarize.
Writing down is an alchemical treatment that some things resist. For different reasons, maybe, that I have yet to understand. The frustrating thing is, (why this of all things?), how simple it should be to put down. And at the same time, how alien the words will be from the experience, because the experience is (was) confusing and, well, terrifying in ways I maybe don’t want to share, or “externalize”, (it strikes me, what dubious complexity is hidden inside that word), or let go of.
Something precious (to me) that I don’t want to let go of.
(Working on it.)
Blood on my hands at the start of the day, nothing to worry, just small cat drama, but the flood of sensation (in the webbing of the left thumb) wakes everything up, puts it on edge. I have to write sometime about my relationship with pain.
I wonder if in retrospect this time in my life, this period in my practice, I will understand not as being about muscles or even fascia transformation, but about me and my “nervous system”, re-organizing my entire relationship with pain. There seems to have been a lot of it stored inside here (inside this body?) without me realizing it, or it improvised its own realization, and all this was the result, a nest of pain. As I was ignorant of myself. (I do not enjoy this, but it seems one of those burdens in life, you have no option but to accept. This is your suffering. This is you.) Daily excavation, disentangling the threads of—what is it, once freed?
What does pain become when it has been brought to the light of day, felt fully, and released, does it dissolve? Will it become nothing? A memory? Will it be forgotten as part of the overall motion, absorbed into a new organization? It really hurts. I cry on the mat, I want to remember, I don’t want to forget.
But the thing I study has to be the absolute wonder, an empty-like feeling, at the very possibility of study. I have no right to the intelligibility of this. And yet. I touch it, I feel it, I am felt. And in incommensurate increments, it happens, is let go, and something is becoming. I (willfully) imagine it as, a new kind of self-sense, but I can’t see it yet. The eyes are too new, an infant’s eyes. Looking, without sight, and wanting (hush, hush) to see.
One really cool thing about an ashtanga vinyasa practice is that you can experience dynamic tipping points in your own body.
Sometimes I feel like I know how the earth’s climate feels, as it’s being changed, because of the changes I put my body through. But my changes are toward balance, and Earth’s changes are away from balance. I try to understand the karmic accounting of that, how it could possibly be allowed, how it makes sense. This has been a big part of my yoga practice the past five years. Persuading my body that it’s ok for it to get better, in the cosmic scheme of things, it’s ok to be healthy. I can be an expression of strength and joy in a disintegrating landscape. It’s allowed. It might even be my final orders, so to speak.
Through the breath the parts of the body become whole. To this end, the strong must learn to follow the soft. The biggest and beefiest muscles yes, but also the loudest voices and most urgent compulsions, the ones in reaction to deep fears and sharp pains, surrender to the weightlessness of air.
Your body is an expression of ancient intelligence to which you have literally psychic access!
The first day back after convalescence is like Mercurial sunrise, the inner landscape a chiaroscuro of white-on-black sensation. Limits touching, resolutions in release, the lost body regains shape in a polyphony of pain. The clarity is mesmerizing but cruel. It’s easier to injure unpracticed flesh.
Let go of what? The frozen-shut psoas and illiacus, the clenched-fist side of my diaphragm, which hold everything else hostage, being unable to exhale for possibly forty years has been an adventure, yes and, I’m glad its almost over. Let go of what? The need to name the thing that must be let go of.
Didn’t practice yoga for almost a week because I got sick after our return from Java, again, a body rebells against exposure and exertion. Now my nerves and tissues feel foreign inside me, insolent and funky-twisted. Preparing mentally to resume tomorrow. The hardest thing (as always) is to let go.
Never let anybody tell you where your breath should go. It doesn’t matter what famous gurus say. Yoga yamas, niyamas, asana are preparation for the revolutionary lesson of pranayama. There is no outside authority for the breath.
Yoga days 5 and 6 completed, I wanted to let you know, although family demands have temporarily disenabled writing. I was thinking how writing is a luxury, you can only do it if you have extra time. What that means is a mystery though. Extra means more than enough. Who has more than enough time?
Was gently reminded by yoga day 4 that progress sometimes feels like confusion. Then Ish caught a baby monitor lizard right before headstand. Dangerous if they bite, I (sweaty) gingerly separated cats from lizard, wrangled lizard (alive) into a towel and deposited in the ravine. Savasana deserved.
Woke at 2, big loud soaking rain, couldn’t sleep. Too many thoughts and edits of thoughts too fast. Ah, hormonal insomnia. Best to let it go and soothe the nerves. Did light reading, a little writing, sipping coffee in the dark. Ish came to cuddle. Summoning courage for day 3 yoga. Then a nap. Yes.
Felt a little progress in my yoga practice today, unusual for day 2.
Progress: finding a new way into an old problem.
Slept late, woken at 6 by Ish. Small rain overnight, overcast now. Less flu-y because didn’t use ac? Jeki was almost sweet about eardrops this morning, only a few growls. Then wanted cuddle. Everyone ate breakfast (except me). Saw Blih, brief chat. Day 2 of 6-day yoga week. I’m ready.
Woke up at 4, coffee. Felt flu-y, probably from mold. Gave Jeki ear mite drops, barely. Ish didn’t want breakfast. Startled by centipede in kitchen sink. Liberated centipede. Made amends with Jeki, she tried to drink my coffee. Hope she’s ok. I miss E. Time for yoga.