the tao that can be spoken is not the tao.
Yet we do feel compelled to speak it, to show it, to explain that which is truly beyond words.
Embrace it or bury it, they make us human. Because they make us human they are out common thread.
They are past the bounds of language. All people in all places know these things.
They are the core of every story, the heart of every song.
Our stories are below.
You don't have to read them.
You can write your own.
(available paintings are listed on Gumroad.
stuff with Beyond Words images are on Cafepress.)
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Embrace it or bury it, they make us human. Because they make us human they are out common thread.
They are past the bounds of language. All people in all places know these things.
They are the core of every story, the heart of every song.
Our stories are below.
You don't have to read them.
You can write your own.
(available paintings are listed on Gumroad.
stuff with Beyond Words images are on Cafepress.)
*
*
*
Today, I worked from 9-5. Truly and incidentally, having nothing to do or in common with the tune which that phrase brings to mind, except that it involves living.
Actually, if I am to be entirely truthful, I worked from 9:15 to 4:55. I was late, this morning, but I brought doughnuts. Fifteen minutes of work is equal to twelve doughnuts by the reckoning of the guys I work with. I am a girl who happens to be one of the guys with, to, and among lads I work with. I lift and I labor to hang lights and push piano’s and do all the other things as need doing to make a performance into a show. I can’t lift as much as some guys, but some guys don’t go on ladders and I will. It evens itself, but I can lift more than you might think to look at me.
It is because training is life.
I’ll type that again: Training is life.
"What are you training for?"
Life.
Today, I lifted things that aren’t light with relative ease because yesterday I lifted things that were more than not light, things that were downright heavy. I had to move them speedily and quietly through the dusky areas just off-stage during a performance across a floor strewn with cables and wires. I did not do it with ease, but I did do it. Through two performances, book-ended by loading all those heavy things and cords and wires and more from trucks to theatre and back again into the trucks.
Between shows, I sat in a dark corner cross-legged, hands on knees, and tried to make my back straight because it ached sore. Today, after working 9-5, my belovedest taught me to sit cross-legged because all of me, it seemed, ached sore. I do not remember anyone ever teaching me to sit cross-legged. I just remember being told to sit indian-style on the floor for reading time and arranging my legs in this way and that - every way they could bend and cross. I sat like that yesterday, rearranging and switching and twitching as toes fell asleep or an ankle grew uncomfortable or a heel pushed into a thigh. Today, jk, showed me where the inside foot and where the outside foot go that they just sit without pressure so the legs can relax and be the foundation for the spine.
We work, we rest. We use these muscles we have to move this body we have to get food, to lift our glass, to lift things that are downright heavy and to carry things that aren’t light. We sit and stand and walk. We trained to do these things. We are still training to do these things. And we rest. We sleep, and in sleep we rest, but we rest without sleep, too. I am a fan of flopping into a fluffy chair, myself.
Today, after I worked from 9 - 5, I learned to sit Indian-style from an Indian (wa-wa, not dot) and relaxed. When you sit properly, your leg muscles sit unused weighting the hip bone foundation. Vertebrae sits on top of vertebrae, skull balanced atop and the back muscles and chest muscles melt like rubber bands in the sun. Hand presses against hand in a pose that looks like it takes effort and grace, but in actuality is bones balancing bones as the muscles take a sabbatical Perhaps it lasts for a second or for an hour, it is an unaccountable moment when it seems even the ever working heart muscle takes a beat to relax.
Then it is back to work: Back to standing and sitting and going from one to the other, back to stirring and walking and bending to pick up a thing I dropped feeling a little less aching sore, a little less sleepy tired, a little less worn for the wear of working. Today, I trained to rest and in training to rest, rested.
Sometimes, I stand on one foot for a while. I slowly move my balance to one leg and lift the other and hold the other up. I bend the supporting leg in plie and I raise myself on the ball of my foot slowly and straighten the other leg, reaching out with it until it finally touches ground and I let my weight balance between the leg that is sore from holding me up to the leg that is sore from holding itself up. I move my arms, pushing an imaginary log through air made viscous by the mind. Sometimes, I shuffle my feet shoulder width apart and lock my knees and let my head drop down, down, pulling my spine with it. I let my torso hang - pulled by gravity toward the center of the earth - from my hips and I feel my muscles stretching and they are fabric, my muscles, the weave defined by the stretching and the woof made by the working.
These things, the stretching and the working and the balancing and the resting, they trained me so I could carry heavy things quickly and quietly through the wire fields yesterday, and the heavy things yesterday trained me so I could easily lift the not-light things today and still have energy to walk around in a hand-stand (thus making it a hand-walk) and do a caper across the floor (not once but three times) and to laugh and laugh well. And the caper and the hand-stand and the laughter were training too.
Harmony is a word that refers, specifically, to concepts in music, in literature, in religion, and in relations between people. It also means the attribute of forming a pleasing and consistent whole. I am a whole, within my own skin. I am a whole and I am a part of the whole universe. Musicians train to hit the right note and writers train to interweave stories. I train to be harmonious.
Actually, if I am to be entirely truthful, I worked from 9:15 to 4:55. I was late, this morning, but I brought doughnuts. Fifteen minutes of work is equal to twelve doughnuts by the reckoning of the guys I work with. I am a girl who happens to be one of the guys with, to, and among lads I work with. I lift and I labor to hang lights and push piano’s and do all the other things as need doing to make a performance into a show. I can’t lift as much as some guys, but some guys don’t go on ladders and I will. It evens itself, but I can lift more than you might think to look at me.
It is because training is life.
I’ll type that again: Training is life.
"What are you training for?"
Life.
Today, I lifted things that aren’t light with relative ease because yesterday I lifted things that were more than not light, things that were downright heavy. I had to move them speedily and quietly through the dusky areas just off-stage during a performance across a floor strewn with cables and wires. I did not do it with ease, but I did do it. Through two performances, book-ended by loading all those heavy things and cords and wires and more from trucks to theatre and back again into the trucks.
Between shows, I sat in a dark corner cross-legged, hands on knees, and tried to make my back straight because it ached sore. Today, after working 9-5, my belovedest taught me to sit cross-legged because all of me, it seemed, ached sore. I do not remember anyone ever teaching me to sit cross-legged. I just remember being told to sit indian-style on the floor for reading time and arranging my legs in this way and that - every way they could bend and cross. I sat like that yesterday, rearranging and switching and twitching as toes fell asleep or an ankle grew uncomfortable or a heel pushed into a thigh. Today, jk, showed me where the inside foot and where the outside foot go that they just sit without pressure so the legs can relax and be the foundation for the spine.
We work, we rest. We use these muscles we have to move this body we have to get food, to lift our glass, to lift things that are downright heavy and to carry things that aren’t light. We sit and stand and walk. We trained to do these things. We are still training to do these things. And we rest. We sleep, and in sleep we rest, but we rest without sleep, too. I am a fan of flopping into a fluffy chair, myself.
Today, after I worked from 9 - 5, I learned to sit Indian-style from an Indian (wa-wa, not dot) and relaxed. When you sit properly, your leg muscles sit unused weighting the hip bone foundation. Vertebrae sits on top of vertebrae, skull balanced atop and the back muscles and chest muscles melt like rubber bands in the sun. Hand presses against hand in a pose that looks like it takes effort and grace, but in actuality is bones balancing bones as the muscles take a sabbatical Perhaps it lasts for a second or for an hour, it is an unaccountable moment when it seems even the ever working heart muscle takes a beat to relax.
Then it is back to work: Back to standing and sitting and going from one to the other, back to stirring and walking and bending to pick up a thing I dropped feeling a little less aching sore, a little less sleepy tired, a little less worn for the wear of working. Today, I trained to rest and in training to rest, rested.
Sometimes, I stand on one foot for a while. I slowly move my balance to one leg and lift the other and hold the other up. I bend the supporting leg in plie and I raise myself on the ball of my foot slowly and straighten the other leg, reaching out with it until it finally touches ground and I let my weight balance between the leg that is sore from holding me up to the leg that is sore from holding itself up. I move my arms, pushing an imaginary log through air made viscous by the mind. Sometimes, I shuffle my feet shoulder width apart and lock my knees and let my head drop down, down, pulling my spine with it. I let my torso hang - pulled by gravity toward the center of the earth - from my hips and I feel my muscles stretching and they are fabric, my muscles, the weave defined by the stretching and the woof made by the working.
These things, the stretching and the working and the balancing and the resting, they trained me so I could carry heavy things quickly and quietly through the wire fields yesterday, and the heavy things yesterday trained me so I could easily lift the not-light things today and still have energy to walk around in a hand-stand (thus making it a hand-walk) and do a caper across the floor (not once but three times) and to laugh and laugh well. And the caper and the hand-stand and the laughter were training too.
Harmony is a word that refers, specifically, to concepts in music, in literature, in religion, and in relations between people. It also means the attribute of forming a pleasing and consistent whole. I am a whole, within my own skin. I am a whole and I am a part of the whole universe. Musicians train to hit the right note and writers train to interweave stories. I train to be harmonious.
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Our barn-loft home is filled with paintings. Not hung well spaced and individually lit as one man suggested for the greatest appreciation of art, but tacked up, draped over chairs, and leaning against dressers. Particularly now, when we are a month from a big AmarA*jk collaborative exhibit, pieces in various states of completion sit, hang, and lean about conspicuously, silently whispering “What comes next? What completes me?”
Emotion #?, which represents grief is hung in a strange place in our strange barn home, hung in a narrow strange tunnel of shelves and 200 year old structural beams that leads to the furnace and storage room, that houses odd bits of an old man’s collected life-objects, left-over materials from the 30 year renovation of the barn, my cardboard box collection, and my acrylic paints. You might think such a room with such a strange and difficult egress would not see us very often. I have cause to go in there at least twice a day.
The thought came to me one day: I pass grief every day. It struck me as profound. I pass grief every day. True in many ways. I am not part of the news culture, but news is all around - on tongues and on the hour on the mini-mart radio and in headlines on the newspaper in the rack. I maintain awareness and I pass grief. Ebola and shootings and famine and war and murders. But it is a far away sort of grief most of the time, except those flashes of comprehension, of seeing through the eyes of one regular person living there. Now.
People are generally unfathomable to me in person, in the grocery story, smiling and touching the brim of my hat (yes, I truly do wear a hat and touch the brim) to strangers on the street. Smiles and nods are automatic and habitual gestures for them as, smile and nod, most walk by without a glance. Each in a play within their head where they are the main character and I, with my jaunty hat, am only an extra. They are Greek masks, blank, and I am sure some of them are in a land of grief, where every brush of the soul and reminder hurts. I pass them by and never know.
I do not have griefs that are raw and ever present. I have griefs that are mostly scabbed over, and only crack painfully and bleed every now and again. Some of them I share with others, like the grief of people that have died. Those moments, years after they are gone and you remember for a moment that you won’t ever run into that individual again. Some are griefs that haven’t happened yet. The moment when you realize and really know that someday your parents, your sister, your friend, your beloved, yourself is going to die. Some sound really inconsequential when put into words, like the kimono we gave to a thrift store when we left Seattle, but are still real moments of grief when they come upon.
Charlie Brown says, “Good grief!” as his exclamation. What a strange thing to say: Good grief. But it is true, really, as true as the statement that I pass grief every day. Where we pass by grief, where it comes to us of its own accord, as Frank Herbert put it in Dune - where it comes as the adab, the demanding memory - we brush by it, we feel it through us like a physical thing, we tip our hat to it and pass it. Good grief.
Emotion #?, which represents grief is hung in a strange place in our strange barn home, hung in a narrow strange tunnel of shelves and 200 year old structural beams that leads to the furnace and storage room, that houses odd bits of an old man’s collected life-objects, left-over materials from the 30 year renovation of the barn, my cardboard box collection, and my acrylic paints. You might think such a room with such a strange and difficult egress would not see us very often. I have cause to go in there at least twice a day.
The thought came to me one day: I pass grief every day. It struck me as profound. I pass grief every day. True in many ways. I am not part of the news culture, but news is all around - on tongues and on the hour on the mini-mart radio and in headlines on the newspaper in the rack. I maintain awareness and I pass grief. Ebola and shootings and famine and war and murders. But it is a far away sort of grief most of the time, except those flashes of comprehension, of seeing through the eyes of one regular person living there. Now.
People are generally unfathomable to me in person, in the grocery story, smiling and touching the brim of my hat (yes, I truly do wear a hat and touch the brim) to strangers on the street. Smiles and nods are automatic and habitual gestures for them as, smile and nod, most walk by without a glance. Each in a play within their head where they are the main character and I, with my jaunty hat, am only an extra. They are Greek masks, blank, and I am sure some of them are in a land of grief, where every brush of the soul and reminder hurts. I pass them by and never know.
I do not have griefs that are raw and ever present. I have griefs that are mostly scabbed over, and only crack painfully and bleed every now and again. Some of them I share with others, like the grief of people that have died. Those moments, years after they are gone and you remember for a moment that you won’t ever run into that individual again. Some are griefs that haven’t happened yet. The moment when you realize and really know that someday your parents, your sister, your friend, your beloved, yourself is going to die. Some sound really inconsequential when put into words, like the kimono we gave to a thrift store when we left Seattle, but are still real moments of grief when they come upon.
Charlie Brown says, “Good grief!” as his exclamation. What a strange thing to say: Good grief. But it is true, really, as true as the statement that I pass grief every day. Where we pass by grief, where it comes to us of its own accord, as Frank Herbert put it in Dune - where it comes as the adab, the demanding memory - we brush by it, we feel it through us like a physical thing, we tip our hat to it and pass it. Good grief.
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Longing never lives in the past, nor can it exist in the future.
It is now, always now. A moment truly alive, truly feeling. Feeling bursting within, explosions of joy and of despair, both.
Distance.
Standing right beside and a million miles away. Reaching out for the touch of skin against skin, lips against lips, soul touching soul. Bound in between the worlds Mind and Universe, seeking to meld: For the dream and the day to be as one.
The desire is not one of construct.
It does not reside in place or time. Life is filled with those moments of sensing another, a beloved within one’s heart and feeling the distance between. Bittersweet.
Bound within a single moment of wanting.
Being unable to say words because no words exist. Capturing within the lens, within the paint, within the canvas a spark that can not be described, a beauty beyond any skin or bone.
Heighten sense of self.
Know what is within. Feel the storm within, feel every fiber. Every hair on end, every sense on edge waiting, waiting, waiting, longing….
It is now, always now. A moment truly alive, truly feeling. Feeling bursting within, explosions of joy and of despair, both.
Distance.
Standing right beside and a million miles away. Reaching out for the touch of skin against skin, lips against lips, soul touching soul. Bound in between the worlds Mind and Universe, seeking to meld: For the dream and the day to be as one.
The desire is not one of construct.
It does not reside in place or time. Life is filled with those moments of sensing another, a beloved within one’s heart and feeling the distance between. Bittersweet.
Bound within a single moment of wanting.
Being unable to say words because no words exist. Capturing within the lens, within the paint, within the canvas a spark that can not be described, a beauty beyond any skin or bone.
Heighten sense of self.
Know what is within. Feel the storm within, feel every fiber. Every hair on end, every sense on edge waiting, waiting, waiting, longing….
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