How to Carve our Space for Your Self

We can widen the soles and soften the knees, our first gateways of earth energy into the thighs and pelvic floor- our home of fertility and rootedness and identity. If the ground beneath you is coarse you extend the tail to soften the femurs into their true home, deep in the hip socket, and allow the Psoas to release. The Psoas is the only muscle in our body which connects the bottom to the top and the front to the back. For this reason, and I suppose for many others, it has been called the Spirit Muscle. Thus the whole lower half of the body softens, opening to a funneling of energy from the elegant arch of the heels all the way behind the sacrum, unwinding like kite tails that stream and cross each other as they reach the nexus of energy that is base of spine. Then fingers of fascia ask for space, allow the top of the body to release, the diaphragm has more room to breathe you, it's only desire to spread and wing. The shoulder girdle stops trying to breathe for you and instead descends. The heart yawns awake. The floating ribs gasp delight and you widen even from the nipple line. You breathe out all the way to the pinkies.

On femurs and the 4 Train

Spent a month in the city of subways and rush. Framed in a time that's built on transit. We live in a room that fights for elbows. All the Heads stay down to count the steps taken in a day. Oh but what beauty in the constant of flux.... To the chaos there is a response of tremendous calm, a subtle kindness. Framed in a time that is infinite- beyond the realm of our first layers of recognition, foresight, prodding. And when you live in a room that begs for space, you have to find it on your own; your elbows must protrude and the shoulder blades wing, I'll give you one guess what happens, then, dear one, to the ribcage, and the lungs it frames and protects. Expansion. And when the head sinks down the chin floats toward the chest in reverence. A grounding in descent. And it's loud everywhere outside of ourselves so we lean in closer to find the quiet, to listen to what the heart has to say.
And a corner becomes your world, and the streets sing to you, and your boots mold to you. You become inconsequential and yet everything all at once. When you finally make your way home at the end of each day a new meaning to ceremony is born. You bend as if in prayer to wash the city off your face, you let the coat drape across the back of a chair. The warmth of you wafts away, out the window you've propped open with cedar block, your scent curls around the streetlamp. You welcome this chill because the kettle is steaming, tea is already on its way. When you lift your cup, you may breathe in the aroma. Here fragrant plants are worshipped. Somehow you know that you are drinking a cloud; you are drinking the rain. The tea contains the whole universe. This is how, dear one, you have come to understand the Tao. You learn to exist in the undercurrents of what it means to lengthen energetically, to settle the heads of the thigh bones deep into their home of the hip socket. There is a deep peace when a joint can realize it's full depth and how that feels to rest comfortably in our own architecture. The skeletal structural shift: how to adapt to the city. How you start to look like the building you are living in, the chair that holds your coat, the sink you lean over- with cupped palms, an offering. There are skeletal subtleties to softness. The inherent etching of ease, right there in the indentations of the collar, the curved lip of the iliac crest.

Sometime in September

The mala I've been waiting for are skulls wrapped around my wrist, and I watch them circle bone and wonder why Cusco sometimes seems to chew me up like no place ever has.

I sit most of the day on the cold stairs outside my bedroom wrapped in the wisdom blanket, learning new words from an ancient tongue. Here strange meteors are embedded with geometric patterns of molten rock, begging you to think outside the confines of this earth. At night I sprint home from Plaza de Armas, through the only city I've ever truly lived in. Under the balcony of the devil I dry my ankles, where the staggering cold has lapped up against my calves.

Time and again, though with wide spaces in between, I sink hips into frog squat: malasana, and pull hands into heart center, plug the thumbs into the chest and feel the ruddy, rounded red woman I sometimes can be, the soft give of the pelvic floor and the roots and the raw and the real.

There is still so much I care to release, to make way for the things and the people I crave to learn about, for the things I will one day tell only them, and no one else.

On Sundays I think about dinner for the first time all week and cook for the travelers who have become part of my home. Each of them an offering on my Sadhana. We play Rising Appalachia and shuck Choclo, like cartoon corn, and pick through wilted offerings of basil. Sweet potatoes rounded in the palm to hold you here, cabbage curling upward, and small, bright hot peppers that long to be dropped from the tree outside the kitchen. With pestle and mortar I crack peppercorn that beg boldly, bay leaves that chant crisply, and tender shoots of garlic. We are rounded and well women and here we sway with spices.

On Mancora

In Mancora I am soft about the shoulders, lilted in my speech. Here I tell them all about anchoring the tailbone in a language that is not my own, in words that I use to construct a semblance of what fully occupying the body means to me.  Instructing a bound twist in Spanish becomes a yoga of it's own, and I'm finding potency in my fingerpads- to use the spread of collarbones or the grounding of ankles in a correspondence that floats far above didactic. I've become laconic. I'm the intimate stranger sprinting spans of beach between each cue. Together we move away from the clench behind the jawline through an unspoken release of hips. In just one day, I've generated more cooling in the space below the navel than I've felt in the deep lakes of the past three lifetimes I skip stones across.

There's an eloquence unspoken of my sentiment towards the red sarong; it's become the scarf to keep ropy hair, brushed only by wind's fingers, in tow. The makeshift dress I wrap around the crease of hips and float across a sunken terrace. Should I ever decide to shower again, it will be my towel (but this is unlikely). Tying coins to the corners an
d slinging it across a sand speckled shoulder it becomes my knapsack. It's the yoga strap I weave across the the crook of elbows to spread open the back ridges and rounded pleats of heart. At night when I fling open the window to welcome in the waves, the sarong becomes my bedspread. In a world where everything is so new in it's presence and persistence, it has become my home.

Someone here told me he couldn't remember where he had left his shoes, and how happy that made him. We haven't felt anything but sand and waxed wood beneath our feet for days.

And what of coconuts? I consider any other form of prayer, save for the yearning and fulfillment of this most precious fruit, sacrilege. My most meditative experiences in the past week have been on the present moment awareness felt by savoring the curled flesh of a coconut, raised to my lips on a cold silver spoon that reminds me of tasting someone else. Alone, I laugh out loud because I don't believe I've ever felt such gratitude towards nourishment before; never knew something to be so whole in it's offering.

 I've said it several times, and think it even more, I count coconuts and blessings to be of one and the same. My time here has been the most blessed I can remember, both from this lifetime and the ones that came before it.

proper prosperous

My bones are cobblestone and I drip red wine. I think nothing of it when I take the stairs two at a time, I breach worlds between each step and I count the lifetimes it's taken me to get right here, I am right now. Here the indigenous place clay figurines on their rooftops to welcome in prosperity. I sleep across a mirror I never noticed until now that reflects the rounded humbros, the painted white, the silhouette of abundance. We attract what we convey. Red clay sculpted and stacked underneath me, tasks mount high and souls bridge across and on the top rung of the ladder I glide my fingers across the wooden beams and think, remember when this defined my ceiling? 

What does it mean to be limitless, I asked in all the languages I can express myself in.

On Familiarity

Call it continuity; recognizing that the meaning of a place will continue to deepen for you. That's what it feels like here. Every time I light the sage, or pass that corner, or the way I felt the angle of the high sun on my breastbone. You know the feeling when you come to an understanding with the path that's been underneath your feet, and all of a sudden it rises to meet you. And for a glimpse of 4:00 when you take your first bite of solid food all day, because you're running strong and haven't had the time to be weighted down, or the dawn that breaks overs your skylight because lonesome mornings excite you now, or knowing exactly which key to use and pushing the heavy door open against a dark and pulsing night. For a moment a slice of your life is extracted from the stream of consciousness and you get to hold it in your hands, and turn it over and sigh and say, oh yes- this is a fragment of the flow.... this is when that stone deepens significance in the stairway, and now that door, this key, the stick of sage, is even more a part of me, and this story, than it ever was before-
and the world turns slightly so the kitchen never really was facing east, we've always been bound westward it may suddenly seem, and you're never quite the same again.

Each glance of this city's story adds another layer of what I will someday recall.
I can't describe it more directly than this.

I was sitting on the stone in the courtyard at my first weekly Wednesday potluck when I thought, oh yes, this will continue, and I'll sit here again someday soon, and the stone will look even more familiar. And one loose fray curled around the outside of my understanding will now be cut away, a clarity seeps in, and I'll remember how I felt the first time, and I may even know when the next time will be.

Each room we occupy, and each thought that contains us, and each person we are retained within, we leave a part of ourselves there waiting for us, only to swing by unexpectedly at some point near or far down the line (that is inconsequential), and oh yes, here I was, and pick ourselves up from the schoolyard, to be more richly defined by the places we once were, and the places we are, and the places we will be again....

on airport chapels, throat chakra, and coming home again

Back to the Lima airport chapel; I can't tell you how many chapels and corners and cafes in how many different airports I've been to in the past nine months. I always find such serenity in these nexus points- maybe all the travelers that have invested their energy, taking a pause between transit, have infused these spaces with so much potential energy, so much charge, it's like I can sit in lotus in freezeframe and watch the electronic pulse, the comings and the goings, the salient journeys.

Peru has always done something so right to my energy body; the breath is round- not two dimensional but a sensual and voluptuous being, and she is soft and deep and wants to play.

In this particular airport chapel meditation, in which there have been many, I lifted my chin and felt my neck open wide. At once I could see these charged ripples being released from underneath my chin, and I've never been this sense-aware of the throat chakra- she is lovely energy and open and heightened and alert- she sent these charged ripples out from her center like geometric waves, like tendrils, that I could feel were sending themselves out in front of me, making the connections with the language  and the people and the sensations that await me.