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Empty and clear

Early morning Thanksgiving in my part of the world, the sky was intensely red. The color seemed to leak into the leaves of the trees already marked by fall's color wheel, making them pop even redder. It reminded me of a morning last December. It was the morning before a friend's memorial, and I was out with the dog. The dog was engaged in his business, and I was engaged in mine. In that time before thoughts take over, I was enjoying the dawn air and light and sounds. I remarked then--and later at our friend's memorial as a way of paying tribute to times I'd spent with him and the directions our conversations would so often travel--at how the dawn light seemed to be bleeding into the trees, so much so that the color seemed to drain from the sky and into the trees' leaves right before my eyes. I wondered how science might explain this, this early morning illusion, this mystery at dawn.

This is the stuff I feel fortunate to witness. It makes me feel good. About me. You know, for having noticed. Like Jack Nicholson's character in the movie As Good As It Gets when he compliments Helen Hunt's character for her many states of grace, which he notices and others miss. He tells her that the fact that he notices makes him feel good...about himself. And why not? Why not celebrate our moments of epiphany as marks of our ability to be enlightened? Why not take credit for our occasional brushes with clarity? Why should we not admit that we are pleased or awed or humbled by the beauty we see or the acts of humanity we recognize for their goodness? Why should we not take credit for admitting wonder?

When W.S. Merwin wrote his ode to fellow poet John Berryman, Merwin was paying tribute to the lessons learned from this slightly senior mentor. In his poem, Merwin asks Berryman, "how can you ever be sure that what you write is any good at all," to which Berryman responds, basically, forget about it. "You can never be sure, you die without knowing, if you have to be sure don't write." I think what Berryman meant was that we have to lose our certainty, lose our sense of approval. If a thing is beautiful, if we recognize goodness, if we experience wonder, be happy that we did. Write the poem, the song, the novel; paint the picture; take the photograph; sculpt the marble, the iron, the stone; bake the bread; create the handiwork, and find it good. Isn't that, after all, what we've been told the Big Guy did at the close of each day of creation. He sat back, took in his labors, and proclaimed them to be good. If someone else notices--like Jack Nicholson's character was scripted to do--all the better. Kurt Vonnegut's Uncle Alex instructed his nephew to always go this one step more. When something was particularly nice, Vonnegut remembers that his uncle would stop to say, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

Tuesday after practice, I was in the market on one of my routine errands for milk or fruit or vegetables for our evening meal, when I ran into one of my fellow ashtangis. She had just been to class as well. In fact, we had practiced directly across from one another, indirectly bowing to one another in our many salutations to the sun (Surya namaskaras). And because Mysore practice does not have a set time for all yogis to start and end their session together, I do not always have the opportunity to talk with my fellow ashtangis. We might bow to one another or wave or applaud each other's efforts on the mat, but the practice does not allow for in-depth exchanges. Here, then, in the market, was a chance for introduction and conversation. We fell easily into an exchange about our practice, our teachers, our backgrounds. As sometimes will happen, we discovered plenty of mutual ground.

When we let our guard down, there's a transparency to us. Suddenly, we're real, we're genuine, we're fully present to someone else. Sometimes, then, we feel as though we have to pull this person in close for an embrace, like my fellow ashtangi did with me in the market on Tuesday. She suddenly proclaimed, "I feel like I have to hug you." The wonderful part was that she did not stop herself, and I thought, "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is."

I remember once reading about the painter Paul Cézanne and his attempt to express in his paintings first sight or what the eye first sees before it is clouded by thought. He was reaching in his art for an experience that pure, that elemental and essential. Recently I learned of two Vancouver dance choreographers, Martin Chaput and Martial Chazallon who took their art to the streets. Together they created a journey of the blind, in which seeing individuals sign up to be led around a metropolitan area by a guide while blindfolded. The choreographers' idea was to turn the tables on their spectators and plunge them into the world of the senses where they would be compelled to question our connection to the environment and others. Dance here then is presented as a voyage of emotions and sensations, encounters, discoveries and surprises. Like Cézanne's  attempt at first sight, but without the vision. One woman who had participated in Chaput and Chazallon's "dance" wondered aloud afterward how all of those sensations she experienced while blindfolded were transformed when she could see. In other words, what happened to them? Where did they go? This performance is called Tu vois ce que je veux dire? (Do you see what I mean?) And I think , yes, because I understand how what we truly see exists outside of language.

In Sanskrit, ashtanga means eight-limbed and refers to the eight limbs on the path of yoga as set forth by the ancient sage Patanjali in his Yoga Sutra. The eighth and final limb on this path is samadhi, which means enlightenment or clear seeing. Yoga teacher and author Rolf Gates writes that clear seeing must be more important than our certainty. On our mats, he says, the letting go must be that complete so that we can be very present and wholly real. In other words, according to Gates, empty and clear. The Sufi poet Rumi said it this way:

Listen, if you can stand to,
Union with the Friend means not being who you've been,
being instead silence: A place: A view
where language is inside seeing.

Namaste.

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