I had written about
the hapless tenor player Tina Brooks last month and I shared one of his discs
with my brother who enjoyed it. It got
me listening to his album “True Blue” again this morning. Who is that piano player? It sounds just like Horace Silver. Check the notes: Duke Jordan.
I see. Who is that? Born in Brooklyn in 1922, died in Denmark
eighty-four years later, he played with Bird during 1947 in the “classic
quintet” and has about 10 albums that Rdio has for my consideration. Wonderful.
This is like getting a visa to a new country, every day.
Meditation works better when you aren’t exhausted, hung over,
or distracted. I like doing it early, before
dawn. And I try, as a friend suggested,
to do the body check during the process.
It’s a bit silly but then again, not silly at all to try to actually consider
each of your senses and feel the fullness of your body. Sense your fat, wet brain sitting there in
your head and its ability to see, even though your eyes are closed, and hear
even though its comparatively silent outside and all the countless nerve
endings that allow you to consider corporality and the faint taste of
grapefruit juice that still lingers on your tongue. The anchor is the breathing through your
nose, that brings you back to smell, of which there is little to note.
Breathing gets you down into your lungs. Trying to imagine the inconceivable alchemy
wherein oxygen is withdrawn from the air converted to energy and CO2 is then
passed back out. How does this possibly happen?
I can look on line later and remind myself that I move my diaphragm to
allow air in and then flatten it out, opening a space between the thorax and
the abdomen for the spent air to pass back out.
Breathe in and breathe out yourself.
Now do it again and try to feel such a thing. It doesn’t feel like that’s what’s
happening. Somehow the air is
continuously harvested. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathing
I try to imagine the wash of grapefruit juice in my gut,
sloshing around with the digestive juices that break it down elementally so
that the useful bits can be withdrawn as it makes its way along my large and
then small intestine. I recently saw a
friend who’d had an operation on his large intestine. He needed a second operation and, for now,
the intestine emptied in into a bag, which he showed me. There it was.
It isn’t hard to imagine that coil and coil and coil that would stretch
out for some twenty-five feet. The
grapefruit juice is in there sloshing along, till its ready to collect,
depleted of what’s useful, reduced to urine that fills and presses at my
bladder, right around the time I finish with my sitting.
The heart is easier to imagine. I can actually feel the big fella beating. And the miraculous thrusts of blood that rush
throughout my body providing all the myriad processes the fuel they need to
continue. With a bit of imagination I
can approximately feel where my kidney is, because I know where a “kidney
punch” would hit. And I know it is doing
some filtering, but the liver is doing that as well. I’m not really sure I feel either of them,
nor the pancreas, whatever it does, but I know they’re all in there. Perhaps it is best that we can’t feel all
these vital bits.
The spine is rather easier to feel, of course. Sit up straight! Feel the architecture that holds you up and
can sense its fragile majesty, linking up your legs there in your hips and your
arms up there in your shoulders. I
breathe out and imagine the sensation pushing out to my toes and then, out to
my fingers. If I try I can sense the big
thigh muscle and then the calf, relaxed, latent, sprawled, and repeat the
muscular examination for my arms. And I
would be disingenuous and something other than a man, I suppose, if I didn’t
pause and allow myself to feel that incessantly demanding organ, waiting there
between my legs, as always, for attention.
I know that Hindu mystics and Buddhist monks have these
pieces all mapped out from time immemorial.
I could revisit just how it is that “shakras” are supposed to work and
consider all the sentient points on the body that the Daoists have mapped
out. And I can dust off my biology chops,
and go organ by organ on Wiki and reacquaint myself with what, scientifically at
least, is actually at work there inside me.
But sitting quietly without gurus or professors, or doctors, with only
myself and my awareness, in the quiet, it is fascinating to simply try to
feel. What can you feel? What can you sense?
I took the time to relate this, this morning because I’m
awfully thankful for the fact that here, for one more day, knock-on-wood, it
all works. So many infinite pieces that
could break down sputter out, submit to attack.
And someday they will. But today
I can go to the bathroom, tie my sneakers, go to the gym. It all works.
Friends have shared health news that shakes me. A family member feels ill and we visit the
doctor over at the clinic nearby, next to my local Shunyi Starbucks. Everything is all right. Everything’s fine. Sitting there quietly, I marvel at this
complicated, hard working body that I take for granted. How grand and mutual reinforcing it is to
enjoy 精神焕发[1] for another day.
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