Utilities

Today is the new moon.  A time for seeding what will come to pass in the fullness of the moon two weeks from now.  As we enter autumn, this is also a time to relish the end of summer and look ahead to the darkness of approaching winter.  Cycles upon cycles from micro to macro whisper ends and beginnings in this moment.  I wax poetic, and laugh hysterically at myself in the same moment...

Recently I went to visit a Native American elder of the Chippewa Tribe.  We discussed many things including parenting, the society and politics, ceremonial means and ends, and individual lifeways.  At this life juncture, when I am finishing my PhD writing, looking back on a year of intense travel and activism, burning with desire to create the work and life which is most beautiful to me, the ways of the Red Road are marvellously useful.   

The Red Road is the way of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas.  They have an enormous and rich set of cosmologies and lifeways.  Their storytelling tradition is one of the best living oral traditions on the planet.  And their dances are bold and direct.  They advocate a practical path and tend not to mess around with platitudes, they are grounded and very real.  And for me, this is invaluable to balancing a personality that is opulent, artistic, emotional, privileged, and generally western.  It gives to me sense, as in mindfulness, to balance the natural strength of my other seven senses*.  And so I am at peace.  I drink coffee, I sleep in, but I also meditate, and I've quit smoking, and I take enormous amounts of time to listen to my children.  Our ideas can bind us, and in the red road we ask not whether an idea fits into our doctrines or philosophies or spiritual conformities, we ask whether it helps us to live a beautiful and honest life of love.  We look directly at ourselves, and as we are honest with what we see, we laugh, take courage, and laugh again, for we are the most paradoxical creatures in 622 galaxies at least!  And the most celebrated as well, for we are very beautiful when we come to.  And grounded in the earth, love finds a nesting place.  I am thankful for the red road.  I am thankful for the sacrifices this path would have me make, for the clear mind that it brings to me, for the shining star that I am next to the billions here... 

And in linking things up, there is an important Mevlevi teaching which is also about 'staying awake'.  As we whirl within the ceremony we constantly attend to the circumstances which surround us: the space between ourselves and the other semazens, the timing and quality of the musical selection, the sensation of our robes/atmospheres/floor surfaces etc, the directions of the sheikh and semazenbashi, the images and workings of our own hearts.  In attending to these details we choose to stay present and awake to the moment at hand.  The opportunity is there to bliss out, to trance deeply, to fly, and yet we ride the wave of opportunity within the world around us.  We walk with two feet, in two worlds at once.  We walk this way, the people of the red road walk this way, and people have been walking thus since time immemorial.  Aho.  

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My experience of the senses thus far includes sight, sound, touch, taste, hearing, kinesthesia, and intuition.  What we consider to be senses will likely expand greatly over the next 10-20 years, in which case it will be impossible to name and number them.  At the current moment my understanding of the senses are changing and expanding rapidly....