After Whirling
Jan 21st, 2008 by Dunya
I wrote the following after a whirling night at Winter Monastery. It came out first as fragments and poetry about the feelings left in my body as I lay on the rug afterwards. A few written drafts later they sorted into this:
After whirling I remembered how my body used to be color blocks in a mirror, silhouettes on a wall. Tubular highways, lacing through sodden sponges of organs, clutched the bellows. My body had been contours under fashion trends. Light couldn’t enter.
After whirling, sun and moon curved my skin toward the dervish turn. I felt patches peel, gears slick and lock and link. Turning counterclockwise, winding back time, reversing my life––when was I barely a shape? My body is mostly motion, a rollercoaster from one piece of space to another. Motion peers through curtains of fascia, down halls of skin, pries apart pores, and breathes out to join wind, river, cloud, sea.
In a still room, I floated. It was like removing a very heavy overcoat and stepping into a warm tub. I lay gazing up at first…then…closing my eyes…I felt only lightness…freedom…joints bobbing like cow weed flowers…and by the time the river came to carry the tub away, to spill over me, my skin had already melted, and my eyeballs rolled under the arcing wave. My marrow rose into rain.
Hi Dunya,
This piece reminded me of something I wrote a few years ago, because of your references to water. At the time I did not know Dancemeditation, but it reminds me of being absorbed by whirling. Here it is:
Sub-merged in the sea
I push my feet off the earth, and release myself from my humanity.
What am I when I am floating, merged with the sea?
I am no longer perpendicular, rooted to the earth.
My feet are no longer feet, as they do not stand and step.
My hands have nothing to grasp, nothing to caress, they are no longer hands, but neither are the fins.
The verticality of my body is useless, destroyed. I am neither horizontal nor vertical. All directionality ceases and falls back into my body when I am sub-merged.
I am a dit, a dot, an ovum; I am the speck that becomes the world .
The thin membrane of my flesh divides water from water.
I am a sack of saline, bobbing in a sea of saline, pulled as the sea between the earth and the moon.
I am a vessel in a void.
I cannot divide water,
It is boundless, it is the shape of what it surrounds.
I am absorbed.
I am cut loose from my moorings , like a face in a photograph,
I am adrift in time and space.
Frictionless, I ride the suck and push.
I drift, an inertial drift, following the momentum until it dwindles, only to rise again…
Hi Dunya, thank you for the experience of whirling. I was not sure I could do it…… here is what I wrote after the experience. ~
My mind, racing, spinning, whirling around until I whirl and whirl so tightly inward I reach stillness. I become a tiny seed of existance. I turn and turn farther inward getting smaller and smaller until I turn myslef inside out and explode into the vast expansion of everything. Ecstacy. I experienced the cycle of contraction and expansion. The cycle of life. This is my dance.
Sonia, this inversion is beautifully put––turning inside out. I love the idea of becoming a seed that gives brith to a new universe of Self.
Yes, I am becoming more and more aware of being fully present in the body. Not only self, but truth. In housing myself, it is as if the seed of life is within me, growing into its fullness of I AM. The holy trinity if you will. Earth, Cosmos and self, together, growing from within. No longer do I need to bring this presence, this knowing, into me from outside, up above. I can bring it up, from my core. It is there, inside, like a seed growing into its fullness. I am still integrating my experiences from the retreat. Thank you.