Refuge / The capacity to love arising from savasana (the corpse pose)

(Source for the above quote)

This morning I woke up at 2 a.m. feeling some grief and PTSD-related emotional distress and then chose to enter into what turned out to be a three-hour meditation, mostly positioned in variations of the yoga pose named savasana, with some drifting back into sleep as well as trying to stay with body sensations and mental imagery, not the thoughts that had disturbed my sleep and stirred up my emotions. There were shifts in and out of distress, some tears, some moments of joy. Whenever I would become aware that I was thinking, I would focus my attention on body sensations and the imagery that arises from them. I found refuge in the capacity to love that arose from the savasana practice.

At 5 a.m. as I got up from the savasana meditation I noticed my copy of Gentle Wilderness: Sierra Nevada where it leans with its book cover facing my bed, on the bookshelf next to my bed.

I remembered sitting side-by-side on a couch with Richard, looking through his brother's copy of the book, page by page, reading John Muir's words and looking at the splendid photos. It was not long after he had returned from Vietnam. Richard had brought me to his brother and sister-in-law's apartment to look at that book. Richard had said, "I know you will love this book, too. You are a poet and an artist."

I remembered driving from Modesto to Yosemite with Richard on my 52nd birthday, after not having seen him since 1986, the year before my recovery from bulimia and anorexia began. It was the day before his 52nd birthday. He was not feeling well but wanted to drive up to Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada. As we approached the gates of Yosemite on Highway 120, Richard quietly said, "Amanda, I have suffered enough today. Let's go back to Modesto."

I remembered driving alone from Manteca to Yosemite on my birthday in 2008, a little more than five months after I had spent four days with Richard in the ICU at the Palo Alto VA Hospital during the week before he died. As I passed through the gates of Yosemite on Highway 120, I knew that this delayed and long-awaited experience would be an ongoing gift from Richard, and it has been just that. As I took in the landscape that John Muir and so many before and after him have loved, I experienced the capacity to love that I had first felt at the ocean, even before I met Richard. It was no coincidence that I met Richard while walking next to the ocean when we were both 17 years old. It was no coincidence that I felt love as I entered Yosemite that clear sunny day in October 2008.

It is always my hope that sharing my experience by telling these stories can benefit others.

I've been in the studio for about three hours today working on this post, grateful for the renewal of creative energy that comes with blogging and the recent desire to do other art work as well.

"You will always, for the rest of your life, feel some grief over this death. It will no longer dominate your life, but it will always be there, in the background, reminding you of the love you had for the person who died."
(Alan D. Wolfelt, from Understanding Your Grief)

Oboe selects a stone from Yosemite Valley

"And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth. "
— Raymond Carver

New Year's Day 1/1/11

You and Art

Your exact errors make a music
that nobody hears.
Your straying feet find the great dance,
walking alone.
And you live on a world where stumbling
always leads home.

Year after year fits over your face--
when there was youth, your talent
was youth;
later, you find your way by touch
where moss redeems the stone;

And you discover where music begins
before it makes any sound,
far in the mountains where canyons go
still as the always-falling, ever-new flakes of snow.

(from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems by William Stafford)






















A wolf? A coyote? A dog? From one of the Yosemite webcams on December 25, 2010.

Dear Blog Friends,

Looking forward to another fruitful year of reading your blogs and blogging! Here is where I started in 2006. My 4th blog birthday was December 8.

Kind wishes for 2011 and always,
am

P.S. At the top of this post is "Boy with Amaryllis and Orion," one of my trackpad drawings from January 2008.

Talking Karmic Debt Blues / Like The Moon And The Stars And The Sun

Listen.

This morning I was listening to Jakob Dylan's CD "Seeing Things" in my car just before 9 a.m. He was singing "Everybody Pays As They Go":

Look up and see the men returning
In their winter coats
Some of them in one piece
Some of them got rolled
Some less than others
Some right through the nose
But everybody pays as they go
Young old rich and poor
Your mother she too owes
Cuz everybody pays as they go.

I thought of John Lennon's song "Instant Karma":

Instant Karma's gonna get you,
Gonna look you right in the face,
Better get yourself together darlin',
Join the human race,
How in the world you gonna see,
Laughin' at fools like me,
Who on earth d'you think you are,
A super star,
Well, right you are.

When I woke up this morning and turned the calender next to my bed to August 1, I found a wonderful woodblock print by Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). Above is a detail from "The Hanging-Cloud Bridge at Mount Gyodo, near Ashikaga," which can be seen at Museo Chiossone in Genoa, Italy.

Well we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Well we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Well we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.
Yeah we all shine on,
Like the moon and the stars and the sun.

(Recorded by John Lennon on 27 January 1970 and released on 6 February 1970, it ranks as one of the fastest-released songs in pop music history, recorded (at London's Abbey Road Studios) the same day it was written, and coming out only ten days later. Lennon remarked to the press, he "wrote it for breakfast, recorded it for lunch, and we're putting it out for dinner.")
















Thanks to the Turtleback Dome webcam for the sunlight of the spirit image from Yosemite Valley.