Harmonizing the Body Electric

At Willow Monastic Academy, I lead chanting every day. My voice begins to break, cracking from the effort.

The head monk, Virabahdra, draws me aside in the afternoon to give me feedback. He tells me: “ I want to hear your voice and energy more. Remember – chant like you’re about to have an existential crisis.”

Before Completion, Stillness

My gaze often returns to the willow tree in the backyard of the Willow Monastic Academy. Seeing the arms branch upwards makes me sit up straighter; my body relaxes and sways with the silvery tendrils of leaves lifted by the wind. 

The summer teachers

Following this loose, unfurling structure of a self(soul)-directed masters, I’ve given myself a “summer break” by tasting the sun-soaked madeleine of school-age youth, the familiar stretch and restless boredom of it. Languid laziness pierced through with the nagging feeling that I need to do something with my time, make important memories.

a spider’s weaving

When she crawls under her bed, she finds a dusty sticker collection and an ancient well. 

Fragments of Whole Time

“April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.”

The Strange Soulfulness of Presence

Disclaimer: It was the worm moon over the weekend, and as per usual, I notice the lunar cycles tracking with the “too-muchness” of the intensity I’ve been holding – the subtlety of which seems to be diminished by words in ways that feel both profound and vaguely irritating. Be forewarned that this is an excessively long and meandering journal post of trying to metabolize and play with new ideas that I still don’t quite understand, as an effort to integrate what’s been alive in me.

Making and Leaving the Sanctuary

“What remains of the dream of human autonomy once the subject has experienced itself as a penetrable hollow body?”

Alien Mutation

I feel weird right now. 

I’ve been bouncing between different frequencies of vibrational intensity, that shake and move me. These surges of intensity might build gradually, or furiously overtake me: when a friend shares devastating news (and I’m trembling with the thwarted desire to hold them), when I’m reading a book and a random line strikes me as utterly alive, when I’m riding the undulating waves of collective presencing, or when I walk by two people slowly kissing on the street, oblivious to the world around them. Sometimes, they are bright and high-pitch, filling me with so much energy and pleasure that I suddenly skip on the street.  Other times, it’s deep, sacred and primordial, like a gong is vibrating through me. My dreams, both during the day and at night are also acquiring a kind of vivid intensity. I hesitate to say this, but sometimes, they have a numinous quality to them: I’m starting to get these recurring images that fill my head, and they stay until I draw or write them out.  

the soul

“It is as if consciousness rests upon a self-sustaining and imagining substrate – an inner place or deeper person or ongoing presence – that is simply there even when all our subjectivity, ego, and consciousness go into eclipse.”

Pointy Poetics

Pointy Poetics: A House for Emergent Terms

“I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

― Gaston Bachelard , The Poetics of Space