Molten core
It’s hard for me to write about normal things that are actually happening. My brain skips to the deepest possible meaning it can conjure - it craves the earth, the layers, the molten core of what makes it all move.
I sit on the rowing machine and row, surrounded by the gym's other machines or avenues for action. Movement is medicine for the mind, body, and spirit. Sun rays cascade around the impenetrable earth peaks. The mountains, wherever I am, are always seemingly untouchable. Even when I’m traversing ravines and rivers at their base. Even when I’m sashaying their flanks, mounting earth dirt and rock - crunch.. Even when I absorb them in pure awareness at the top. Why do things sometimes feel so far? So out there when I am right here?
Some say I think too much. I can’t help it. I need more time to think about it. I crave conversation that cracks through all that stacked and layered dirt. Things are too abstract for me to go too long without writing about them in abstract ways.
It’s only when my body, mind, and spirit move as one to surf space and time. When the rhythm of breath becomes connected to the breeze. I forget I live in a body of joints, ligaments, and connective tissue that emulates nature … because it is.
Artists absorb this fact. When I venture into a single-room gallery situated on the only street in nether Nederland, I connect to the art created by the human spirit. Colors combine with expressions to emit emotions my body immediately understands needless of words. It’s something felt - not spoken; it transpires like rain does unseen. Just like how the artist opens the gallery only on Saturdays and leaves her entire key ring in the door all day when she does.
“Normal” is easy to fake, but creativity is not, and I think this dance with the two is so beautiful. It’s all a part of how we connect.
What’s odd is that the words enable me to get there. A dance with some underlying rules as scaffolding for whatever it is you’re building. Yoga requires some guidance through poses or ways of physical molding to allow a deeper dive. Being human requires words to connect as a way to seek a similar wavelength within one another.
It used to make me nervous to introduce my yoga theme at the beginning of class. I learned to sometimes close my eyes to speak as faces revealed expressions of confusion initially. I connect ideas such as pottery to molding your body into shapes, Rome not being built in a day to postures one by one, and trail building as a comparison to the yoga pose sequence into my practitioner’s physical asana practice. If these words land, students’ faces light up with realization and appreciation: the metaphor transpires into something commonly felt and understood. My abstract themes take patience and confidence in execution, but for me and people like me, it can be food for the soul (another one of my themes) for all of us. Especially someone like me who has all these ideas brewing underneath the surface - seemingly too strange to often say.
A teacher once said to me: You’re a deep thinker, aren’t you? Then it all clicked. No wonder. And how was I supposed to know not everyone thinks this way?
That’s why we absorb art: poetry, pottery, architecture, watercolor, etc. Even some things you or I wouldn’t even consider art at all, like a paint splatter that sells for five grand, a strange structure, or very odd comedy. To bask in awe and wonder of the mountains we will never truly know, or reach, because we cannot grasp their core - even though we kind of know what it is without truly seeing it. I think that makes up some pieces of creativity, which can elicit all sorts of feelings in people. That can be beautiful. All these emotions felt and expressed unsaid fused into the creation of it.
