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.

Dreamstates: Vision and flight

This is another attempt at documenting my inner landscape. Let's hope it sticks this time. Each narrative is related in a larger whole through journeys into the dreamtime. My goal is to make the stories relatable and inspiring, and leave some personal details out of it. Dreamwork is pretty easy, all you have to do is close your eyes.
* * *
An inner voice impelled me to sit down, and then turn to face a closed door, and next to close my eyes. I found myself flying on the back of a peregrine falcon past a stream of colors. A great owl was ahead of us, and time stretched as the tiny falcon and I encircled his enormous shoulder to face him. The owl, not gently at all, said, “Wake up, the phone call is for you, stupid!” He then touched the tip of his wing feathers to the center of my forehead. Light began to beam from the touch and swirl all around us. Then the owl brushed me with his wings, as if removing dust from the space all around my body, clearing out my aura. I remember thinking how much I want an owl wing. As I am thinking about wings, he traces the place under my arms where my wing feathers will grow. He tells me that when I get back to the real world I will be able to fly. Then the owl pauses, examining my arms. It is as if something is missing from among my invisible-as-yet-ungrown feathers. “Where are your pinions?” he asks. With that question, I resurface.

Take the Cake

Or, A Happiness Unquation.
an anecdote that may explain a lot.
I am a passenger in a car. My friend is sitting next to me. On my lap is a beautifully decorated vegan cake. I am twenty-one, and I am excited because I can eat it without feeling bad later, and because there are pretty flowers and hearts all over it. I am so very happy to be holding a cake on my lap. I feel very special. Like a five-year-old. Like a five-year-old princess. Make that a fairy princess. You get the idea.
All of a sudden, I realize SOMETHING IS WRONG. I am happy. I am holding cake. I feel special. WHAT IF my friend sitting next to me is not feeling special, or like a five-year-old-fairy-princess?
What if she is upset because she doesn't get to hold the cake?
More to the point, what if she is upset because I feel special?
And so I offer to let her hold the cake.
She is bewildered by my offer. She is not aware that I felt so very happy about holding the cake, and it certainly won't make her as thrilled. She has no desire to hold the cake. She says so. We both laugh, and I grin sheepishly, clutching the cake a little tighter.
I reflect on the enormity of my errors in the areas of subjectivity and the transferability of happiness, as well as my own sense of self-worth. I refer to this incident as a "Take the Cake" scenario. I use it to measure whether I am denying myself enjoyment in a fruitless attempt to make others feel happy. Is this a Take the Cake scenario?

More Earthsea

As I said, Ursula K. LeGuin is good if you have trouble with your shadow.

"Ged stood up, and took his staff, and lightly stepped over the side of the boat. Vetch thought to see him fall and sink down in the sea, the sea that surely was there behind this dry, dim veil that hid away water, sky, and light. But there was no sea any more. Ged walked away from the boat. The dark sand showed his footprints where he went, and whispered a little under his step...
He strode forward, away form the boat, but in no direction. There were no directions here, no north or south or east or west, only towards and away...

At that Ged lifted up the staff high, and the radiance of it brightened intolerably, burning with so white and great a light that it compelled and harrowed even that ancient darkness. In that light all form of man sloughed off the thing that came towards Ged. It drew together and shrank and blackened, crawling on four short taloned legs upon the sand. But still it came forward, lifting up to him a blind unformed snout without lips or ears or eyes. As they came right together it became utterly black in the white mage-radiance that burned about it, and it heaved itself upright. In silence, man and shadow met face to face, and stopped.
Aloud and clearly, breaking that old silence, Ged spoke the shadow's name and in the same moment the shadow spoke without lips or tongue, saying the same word: "Ged." And the two voices were one voice.
Ged reached out his hands, dropping his staff, and took hold of his shadow, of the black self that reached out to him. Light and darkness met, and joined, and were one."

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.

a glance at ecological restoration

excerpts from Bill Jordan's book The Sunflower Forest:
"Besides this, in attempting the paradoxical trick of reversing and reliving history in order to escape it, the restorationist creates a context in which to explore, experience, and perhaps even reconcile cyclic and progressive time. In fact, this double experience of time is implicit in the word "restore" itself. The "re-" suggests the cyclic and dynamic, while the "-store" indicates the stable, the stationary, and the unchanging. Combining the two--the circle for return and regeneration, and the line for progress and change-- generates the figure of the rising spiral or helix of evolution, each turn of which marks a return to the old and "original," but at a higher level of self-awareness."

"the idea that the goal of restoration is a "self-sustaining" ecosystem is so misguided--not only because the idea is ecologically untenable, but also because it is precisely the effort of sustaining the ecosystem against the pressure of novel influences that accounts for much of the value of restoration as a way of defining and making us aware of our relationship with it. "

"Properly and reflexively carried out, it generates nothing less than an ecological definition of who we are--that is, a definition of our species, or of a particular human community, expressed in terms of how it has influenced and interacted with other organism and with whole ecological systems over a particular period of time."

from my readings:

"It is not numerical singularity that guarantees uniqueness; rather eachness derives from the imaginal potential, the God, in the thing."

"We can respond from the heart, reawaken the heart. In the ancient world the organ of perception was the heart. The heart was immediately connected to things via the sense. The word for perception or sensation in Greek was aisthesis, which means at root a breathing in or taking in of the world, the gasp, "aha," the "uh" of the breath in wonder, shock, amazement, an aesthetic response to the image (eidolon) presented. In ancient Greek physiology and in Biblical psychology the heart was the organ of sensation: it was also the place of imagination. The common sense (sensus comunis) was lodged in and around the heart and its role was to apprehend images. Sensing the world and imagining the world are not divided in the aesthetic response of the heart as in our later psychologies derived from Scholastics, Cartesians, and British empiricists. Their notions abetted the murder of the world's soul by cutting apart the heart's natural activity into sensing facts on one side and intuiting fantasies on the other, leaving us images without bodies and bodies without images, an immaterial subjective imagination severed from an extended world of dead objective facts. But the heart's way of perceiving is both a sensing and an imagining: to sense penetratingly we must imagine, and to imagine accurately we must sense. "
-James Hillman, Anima Mundi

the god of spectacles

Some gods sit behind you in the theater with a bag of popcorn.
Just a thought, but shouldn't there exist, somewhere beyond timespace, a deity who loves the theater? A deity to whom actors, dancers, musicians and mountebanks are devotees? A god, well, perhaps a goddess, who smiles at performance? A god who thrives in the moment when a human steps out of himself, becomes free from ego or limit, and creates that perfect doorway into the infinite? To such a splendid being, performance is the best sacrifice, and every time we show that part in ourselves before others, the god of spectacles is fed. I'm sure he? she? it has a better name.
The hunger of the human spirit for delight and magic in a dissolving experience means the god of spectacles will never die. Its shrines, movie theaters and opera halls and high school stages will not go unvisited, and its altars will always be filled at the Oscars.
This is the god listening in an empty theater, reverberating through the floorbeams, sighing in the air breathed by so many lungs gasping in wonder. It is a god of darkness and of listening, of behind-the-scenes improvisation. It is the god who demands that the show must go on, and gives its followers a swift kick off an impressive-looking cliff to teach them how to fly.
And once the dust settles on the floor, it is the god waiting for the next inspiration, the next intake of breath before a human begins what will become the next prayer to the god of spectacles.

another way to think about life

http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pollan_gives_a_plant_s_eye_view.html

sapwood, heartwood

I've been thinking about gifts of the heart. A heart is strongest when it is open. A weak heart is one which remains closed and constrained. We search everywhere for the comfort and sweetness locked deep within our beings, and instead find Splenda for our souls; excesses of all kinds. Our short-lived satisfactions contains aspartame, a chemical which will turn into formaldehyde if heated.
We are all missing some sweet vein like maple syrup in our souls, the liquid gold which never runs dry, and flows from the earth to our lips. The tremendous maples are grandmothers teaching us how to be love, in perfect fountains; how to love and always have more than enough. Because it does not come from us, but instead through us, on its way around the universe. We have only to tap into the wellspring of our vitality. And take care that the buckets are not lined with lead.