Planetary dust bunny graduate speaks

I was too quick to say the tiny movement exploration I did this morning was so different from what I do in yoga. In class today Jen started us standing, "feel your feet more like sponges" she said (love that), and we shifted our weight quietly from foot to foot and then made subtle circles. Connections pop up when you look for them, of course, but this extension from my solitary impulse to the beginning of class was unlooked for, and welcome.

I think it is a kind of meditation, a slowing down and focusing in of awareness, mindfulness. I have no idea what my breath was doing though! But I did gain some insight, so I'll call it passing for vipassana . . .

I noticed too that Jen's studio ceiling looks different to me than it used to. It is a knotty wood paneled ceiling, and when I was having such a dark time for the past two winters it appeared to be covered with smiles. This sounds a bit unhinged, I admit it! The knots, the swirls and connecting grain marks in the wood formed themselves into smiling, sometimes winking faces wherever I looked, whichever part of the room I happened to be in. Lying in savasana I would feel the breath roll back in forth in me like a lava lamp and wonder how I could possibly find a way out of the deep hole I felt stuck in. I would feel the warmth of the heat lamps and take in the crooked yet graceful smiles of the inanimate yoga room and wonder what it said about me that I needed to see smiles in the ceiling.

Now the ceiling is calm. I don't see the smiling faces anymore, even when I look for them. It still strangely feels like a presence to me, but it is neutral, waiting, obliging, listening even. hmmm . . .

I heard Dr. Curtis Ebbesmeyer on the radio this morning, he's the Flotsametrics guy, saying that the gyres in the ocean occur beneath high air pressure areas, which are pretty constant. So there is the place, the doldrums, where there is very little wind and the gyres buoy up there, and the garbage collects there, like a "planetary dust bunny." Oh my. How many of us feel that, for whatever reason, for stretches of time in our lives, we have been riding around in a slow-moving gyre, part of an accumulation of lost and seemingly worthless junk? But this Dr. Ebbesmeyer, is he cool! He knows all that junk has a story to tell.