the Meaning of FLOW

Forgive my soapbox speech, my pulpit pounding. I've a lot to say.
Flowtoys hosted a recent video challenge to members of the spinning arts community to describe the meaning of 'flow.' Flow describes a state when the basic skills of a craft have been mastered and can be applied with some fluency to express the artist's whim. After a run, spinners might say "Nice flow" and mean nothing more than the smooth linkage of basic concepts to form words, sentences, paragraphs in a language that laps the air with tongues of flame. A superficial connection, but a necessary precursor to the real deal. For fire spinners and performers, the term flow can also be used to reference a state of synchronistic performance, when rote drills and muscle memory meet inspiration. In the state where the well-honed artist wields himself as the tool, the lag time between thought and deed disappears, and the resulting cosmic dance within a human vessel leaves sizzling trails burned into the back wall of the audiences' skulls. This may happen never, once in a lifetime, or, for some people, every other week; but if you ask even years later they will recall the sensation of everything clicking into place and streaming through them as if from somewhere else, from divine inspiration, one could argue. Elizabeth Gilbert describes the relationship of the psychologically healthy artist with a creative muse in similar terms in her TED talk. And in general, artists have taken this experience of creative flow and run with it, pushing all the limits of human expression past known horizons.

I privately approach fire twirling not so differently from the religious ceremonies of Sufi mysticism, especially those of the people colloquially referred to as the whirling dervishes. The Sufi mystic poet Rumi began the practice of turning in circles to attempt to reach a state of divine ecstasy. To be more precise, Rumi turned in circles to attempt to return to a state of divine ecstasy, to echo his previous, direct experience of a very intense, transpersonal and ecstatic nature that occurred in the presence of Shams of Tabriz, whom he referred to as Friend in many of his poems. Sometimes you can believe that the Friend is God, and sometimes the Friend seems to be Rumi himself, perfectly mirrored in the eyes of another, but the underlying friendship, loyalty, and love within the poetry are almost tangible. For Rumi, being with that man, talking with him, was like looking into the heart of a fire. Really magnetic, and with no chance to turn away. This experience was so important that Rumi ceased teaching his followers, and only conversed with Shams. His students, angered and jealous, had Shams murdered. And in Rumi's ensuing grief, he began to walk in circles around the pole in his garden, speaking free form poetry for dictation. He began turning and turning and turning to try to recapture the original state of that experience, and he left blazing poetry to trail behind him, about love and infinity and experiencing windows into the divine. Not so different from the aim of the fire spinner: turning on an axis can become a prayer. In motion, there is stillness, a stilling of the will, and in that silent space there is room for conversation with something greater. And that conversation might be about the human condition, what it's like to be a human, to rise to meet challenges, to feel, to suffer, to be inspired, to triumph.

Poi spinning (to me) describes the same experience, it's an inward journey of reflection when you work things out and put ideas into practice, but the art is also about how you bring your revelations to the world, and how you express the fruits of your inner journey. It's one thing to experience the meaning of life, it's another to convey that experience to another so that it lives inside them too, making them want to leap to join the dance.

"Those cursed/blessed with a Psychedelic view of the world have some condition or have some extraordinary experience in their history that changed their basic perceptions of the world. Which is why a lot of them gravitate towards the arts, it's the only way they can express the ineffable," said Christopher Knowles, posting on The Secret Sun blogspot early this month. To paraphrase, experiences may be classified as psychedelic, as opposed to rational or scientific, moments when the mind acknowledges the incomplete and faulty nature of the sensory input upon which 'reality' is based.

It is my privately held theory that object manipulators (like artists and magicians of every stripe (and I do love stripes)) are prone to 'extraordinary experiences' of what the human body and mind are capable of . Those who strive to reach beyond the everyday become artists to express the unquantifiable living wonder they find there, and like Prometheus, they emerge from the mountain of the gods bearing fire to spread among humankind. The success of this quest depends on the ability to enter into mystery, to swim in waters where others might drown, and equally important, to return intact and to form a bridge between the transcendent and the ordinary, to chart those waters for a daring few, further explorers. It may be an act of grief at separation, a longing to return to transcendent bliss, as in the case of Rumi, but it is vitally important for the world, for the advancement of human potential, that these highly gifted beings return to a reality that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth, and bring back a little of that warmth and illumination with them. They make the world habitable for everyone who seeks out the extraordinary.

I knew there was a reason. That vague unsettling feeling that led me three months ago, the dissatisfaction, the burn of things not lining up, of too many things jostling for attention, coincidence upon haphazard colliding with force, simultaneity and synchronicity impacting, and the collisions were too forceful within my warring selves. I wrote apocali (?), not one, multiple apocalypses, saw the wrongness of that word, the lack of it, the very wrongness an unease I couldn't pinpoint. How could it not encompass the multiplicity of endings being drawn together? That noticing made me afraid. The bling-sightedness of all those prophets. Mass hysteria and conspiracy, all singular and selfish. And here, just on page 84, something I didn't know was true, yet, has just been confirmed by China Mieville. A bit dramatically, but all the same. The right chord is struck. The brush takes the next stroke. Is it any wonder then that I feel... vindicated? relieved? Someone else noticed and wrote to my fears. Made them sane. Made them fictive and poetic, spelled them out in myth. Which has its roots in the collective unconscious and without reason, beyond reason, draws us in from the night of logic. Here you're not alone, he whispers, here the world is raving mad. Some comfort.

"It's the ends of the world."
"End of the world?"
"Ends."--- Kraken, by China Mieville

I've been thinking a lot about the end of the world, and our slow-burning chosen apocali. Would apocalypses make more sense? It's sick that we could even think to pluralize apocalypse, but we are dying by chemicals and radiation and wearing away all the capacity of our own planet to protect us from the sun, from the extremes of nature's capriciousness, and so it is not just one thing but a whole host of endgame players, check and mate, the confluence of our self-will and the world's will, our intent suicidal and the world's, homicidal. In that, I suppose there is only a singular, apocalypse, to describe when it finally becomes too late for any actions to sway the course of fate and annihilation is assured.

history from inside the bars

It's important to remember that our agricultural industry is our war industry. Chemical fertilizers were generated by our war engines and pesticides were converted from nerve gases. Beat our swords into ploughshares, have we? Then instead of buying war bonds, we buy cereal. We feed our animals subsidized corn, and grow fat with surplus. We won a war but lost ourselves. We consumed the battleground and now are eaten by it.

Internecine

adj. destructive to both sides in a conflict.

Hidden wrath in a place of power.
So quick no one sees him draw his sword.
Who will inhabit the castle of bone
With life ambition's price to enter?
Unrelenting foe, immovable, unseen.
For you this is not a home but a
Battleground.

Anything but wings

Here it is, the poem towards the end of the book about fireflies.
Go into the twilight.

I am the one holding the bubble wand. Fortunately (?) my power is in positively altering my environment, though I often do not directly feel the results. Let's talk about allelopathy, secreting chemicals that alter the growing environment and make it less hospitable for one's competitors. Allelopathy is an adaptive strategy. That's not what I do. I am about the business of making things slightly better in the space all around me. I focus and create bubbles, dandelion tufts, things beautiful and simple and buoyant that are dispersed on the wind to take root in some forgotten corners. I no sooner breathe than create, no sooner create than rejoice. And my greatest joy is in the motion and interaction that my loves and small attentions conceive. I create a place that is a little bit better, a little richer, than anywhere else, maybe it is the only clean patch and neat, or riotous and vibrant, but the party which is open, is open even to the people who come and take (we call them generalists) who will take what I can give and then move on. They pop the bubbles which would have died anyway, but they tread on the goldeny threads of inspiration and cosmic joy in that moment of dance between the world and the senses. They are loud and don't know what I have begun to say in the quiet. My worlds are not hidden from the street traffic, and everyone can see what is valuable in it but not why, and they pull the meaning up by the roots, dissect it to see if it had merit. A disincentive perhaps to share my world, to exhale (my being and my breath). Every body has to survive, but if I can't help but live in mutualistic association and I have no protecting symbiont the world takes care of itself by taking from me anything that I offer.

Show up at the page, appearing at this window I offer myself up as a blank mind to the tender mercies of the winds, Muses as faint in scent, as feathery to touch, as invisible, as passingly extant as all thought and inner experience flowering into some product the subtlest fluid of which it is permissible to drink and in drinking to be drunk deeply, to pour forth that fountain-- that voluble torrent of love and care, the softest words whispered to oneself and the dark ceiling in the night beyond light in the twilit chambers where filters each shadow becoming impressions on the pastel wall, as memorable as water beads running in the shower, and as intently noted even while they slide away all. Words are free and thus is their pain; to live fleeting, mutable lives in the mind, altering the landscape for the space of half an eternity--half a second. What could matter in this ever-fixed ever-changed war, where transformation is the only constant, the only choice, and the particular, the definite marks death?

I am frustrated with my own slow progress, self-referential loops that leave me myopic in the passive and descriptive, endless circular thoughts filled with commas, with hesitation. I am frustrated with the way my mind settles and clears following stones thrown to the bottom of a lake. How long it takes. I am the stone-thrower. I fight the gradual accumulation of what I already sense, and would stamp my feet to have the whole before me. Despite my tantrums I work steadily, I progress despite myself, or when I am asleep. I must keep myself in the dark, work miracles behind closed eyelids. No wonder my waking self forgoes sleep as long as or longer than it can physically be forgone, anything in rebellion, anything but what my deep self dreams of, anything but wings. Why can I not grant that boon in and for myself? I am yet keeping myself powerless. Stalemate with stale hopes on a dusty shelf, when I know that the snowglobes hold castles and patterns of the deepest shades, burgundy, royal blue, and the gold that burns. Dust is useful to me yet, and it suits my mood. Things which are glorious pretend at the tawdry. After all, from what matter sprung creation?

Even affirmations can be frustrating

My paradigms are not shifting. It is as if someone else is confirming a paradigm that I didn't know how to express. But I was aware of it, without words, and because I couldn't name it it was full of hoarse sorrow. As I am reading the Spell of the Sensuous, by David Abram, I am feeling grief for the loss of a larger sense of connection to the community of life. I can feel the nerve endings that were severed when I or my predecessors were cut off from the nonhuman world. My ancestors robbed me of my heritage, this valuable sense, with a vicious and painful separation that is today manifesting everywhere as pollution, degradation, physiological disease and psychological disorder.

I'm beginning even to question keeping houseplants, as it separates a single organism from coexistence and interaction with all others (gee, kind of like us! I don't need ants or bird, wait, do I?). It is cruel to put a fish in a bowl, not because it hurts him, but because it denies and cuts him off from all elements and forms of knowledge, experience of life and life forms, and with this codependence removed, his life is now meaningless, without context, and he is gasping just as surely as if he was taken from the water.

No wonder I am ill. Not like in Madagascar, violently, but this is more a malaise, my head blocked up with a sinus migrain of the spirit. I lost 11 pounds due to dysentery, but I gained 15 back due to anxiety at being again rootless from the material world upon my return to my own culture. Even when I was there, I could feel the way missionaries and colonizers and aid workers had wrenched from the land some meaning, forcibly, with language and science as primary weapons.

I am frustrated by the huge barriers to sensitivity and sensation that exist in our civilized, high-tech culture. And also that people who are in need of life-saving solutions embrace these imperialist, colonialist and violent technologies which will unwittingly sever their ties to any life-source, imprisoning them in the tomb of the individual existence.
I want something so badly, but I can't articulate it.

What can you do with a drunken sailor?

That was the first thing that came into my head, be prepared for STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS! More like a trickle. If there was anything to be said, I would have said it. No actually, I would have hemmed and hawed (what a great expression that is) and then I would have said 'um' a few more times, and then thought about what I was going to say some more, and then tried to phrase it, with the end result that you ran out of patience and finished my sentence for me! I stand in the way of good conversation. I also try to stay on the phone as long as possible, there is something so beautiful in the awkward way people try not to seem like they are hanging up on me, because I'm sure not hanging up! People are awkward and beautiful. Have you ever noticed that? Watch someone eating a sandwich. Watch someone eating anything, really. They are very self-conscious, and disgusting, sort of, you can hear chewing noises and see down their throat. A great thing to do is to try and make eye contact with someone while they are eating, and see their gaze slide away, embarrassed and full of enjoyment. I love how we think that we are so fragile that we can be shattered with a glance! Walking along down the street, carefully avoiding each other, eyes on our shoes, nervously we put our hands in our pockets, we take them out again, we ruffle our hair. Being a human is probably the best game I can think of, because we forget we are playing and we start taking ourselves seriously! Could that be the theme of this blog so far? Hmmm....
I've been in a good mood lately because of the rain. About twice every day for the past month it has been raining in Poughkeepsie, and there is something about the sky just before, just after, or during a thunderstorm, it makes me very happy to be alive, and to be wearing a yellow raincoat, and to be wet/notwet inside/outside, any combination of the above, possibly with a mug of tea and a movie, or barefoot in wet grass. Also, puddles! The smells are better, the sunsets are definitely better, and it's soothing to listen to when I fall asleep. All of which leads me to the conclusion that I should move somewhere like Wales. Oh, Wales... of course I would live in a cottage, and it would downpour regularly and then one day a young, freshfaced Welsh shepherd would knock on my door, carrying a lost lamb and wearing a wool sweater (because damp wool has such a Nice smell), and I'd invite him in for tea (hem hem).
The answer to the drunken sailor question is you press-gang him, of course, but it's suggestive isn't it? In my childhood I was exposed to an unusual quantity of Irish drinking songs. I've no regrets, I won't be the sucker who has to buy the whole pub a round because she kept clapping when the chorus was over. But my true weakness is for folk ballads. Songs that wear their hearts on their sleeves, and are damn proud of it too. Unabashed sentimentality, that's for me, with a bit of antiwar propaganda here and there.
I suddenly had a paranoid moment of realizing how impersonal the internet is, and how little control I have over machines. Why am I trusting the computer? It could kill me with its little finger. If it had a little finger. (WHY is THAT an expression? English, I tell you, it's pretty weird, yeah, hehe.) But the worst is bathrooms that are fully automated. If machines suddenly developed consciousness, a sadistic sense of humor, and a grudge against humans, bathrooms in which the toilet flush, the running water, soap and dryers are all electrical would be an absolute nightmare. Be afraid! Be very afraid!
...And that's my story.
And then we went and had pasta.