The Pause Into a Solitude
For any of us who choose to use platforms for communication, they often run counter to intimate immedicacy. Even as I look at the elements preparing this substack platform I am aware of the many steps and calculations that “good” communicators synch up for maximum impact and reach. But there is something about the most elemental communicators, Pema Chodren comes to mind, that seems to dissolve those barriers and leaves me feeling the resonace of a live person, in space, with me, and the residue after, which is nourishing. Notice I did not say “comforted” because those who invite me in, regularly challenge my sense of myself and the world, into a kind of necessary uncertainty.
Can we strive to be that for each other, an invitation into necessary uncertainy that precedes liberation?
I can only speak for myself in saying, I want to limit my calculations and invite us all into presence that can live in the body and find a home there. This has been the intent of the book I have written, “365 Revolutions” which is heading toward publication, which puts every reflection, manifesto, declaration, social interrogation and prayer of resolve into the physical practive of 53 yoga poses meant to invite people into their own version of liberation and embodiment.
Like a playwright/poet I have cast each of these reflections with an identity in mind and have begun the process of casting these pieces into a diverse set of audio readers who, at best, embrace their own lived experience, into each of these poems. Those audio readings will eventually be available as a companion to the book. For now, please know that my intent has been to ask us to reconsider the very histories of the ground beneath us and the many forces that are both aid and obstacle to our personal and collective liberations.
Wth this in mind, let me introduce one of the seven poems representing, Tadasna, The Mountain Pose, a standing pose with arms extended by our sides and hands flexed in the open position:
1.
You are not a wall
nor will you
ever be.
You are not
a presentation,
an outlook,
the last word,
an opinion, or a stand.
You are an albatross,
a landing in the Arctic waters
with sheer edges
and sudden drops.
You have split the crust,
arrived
cleaved uneven,
declared your right
to elevation,
cancelled all past debts
collected,
accepted your reason
and the albatross
is 10 miles south,
closing:
you have hidden ledges
and salt water
dripping off your northern edge.
You are no one’s obstacle,
a natural homecoming,
unquiet,
far better than smooth,
two paths up
and one destination.
Name yourself.
Illustration for 365 Revolutions by Lovetta Cairo Reyes
The dismantling of oppression and all of its hierarchies will take an extended journey beyond our comfortable coasts to bracing waters and the steep sheer formation of a mountain interior that demands the best of us. I chose to evoke the flight of the albatross after I learned that this animal will literally travel the earth, often thousands of miles across open oceans to secure food for its young. When we have belonged to a hierarchy, a racial caste, a dominating culture for so long, and have gradually shed that conditioning to come to ourselves, we are heading into our own renaming.
This very standing is an anthem and the music arrives in its own time. I invite each of us to listen, to leave and return, to read and investigate, to observe how power plays out through race, gender, physical differences and abilities, and in others and consider our place(s) in these hierarchies. Let the learning drip from us, like surf against our inlets and edges. Stay in this interiority and belong there.
So here is where we will begin.