I turn away from these and toward my current veil puddling luxuriantly on the sofa. She is long and beautiful—a sunset I haven’t yet seen—of lavender and pinks with a golden edge. I love her. I love that she can open the inside of me with her shades and tender touch. I take her in my hands. So soft. I breathe and stand. My wan legs don’t want to pace around the rug, which is what they will have to do if I want this veil to float.

I toss her gently up. She slithers down to the ground, exhaling very, very slowly. She finally settles. Wanting to watch all that again, I bend and gather her and toss her and watch her respire. Gorgeous. Again. And this time I want her to unfurl so I toss her but don’t drop her. I let her billow. I wrap a wide arc of space in her skin. Soon she has seduced me into her world. My legs and feet have forgotten their clay and I am in the small sky that inhabits my NYC apartment. Air is always a morsel of sky, yes? Breath is always a morsel of sky.

She hypnotizes me. I forget the restlessness outside the Moment. We move together. We are calm, hanging in timelessness, hanging in a Moment. The middle world, where I swirl with my veil, is romantic. The middle world. The middle of the world. The center of the world. We pass through a large invisible door into that movie clip of two lovers at a cafe table holding hands consumed in one another.  We Know about mysteries. Otherness. Unity. The conversation bumbles and peters out, a soupçon of thought and feeling spicing a full serving of Other.

I look up from the Lover’s Eyes and gaze out the window at my mind. I enjoy my mind—lots of architecture, thoughts that divide and separate and sort, chip away and reconstruct. BUT…once I enter the Moment the room is too full for a mind so full of itself and out of its depth. Mysticism is not of the mind. Mysticism uses the mind in order to discard the mind. How hard it must be for the mind to accept this servitude. Mind thought it was ruler. The Moment is that part of being awake that goes beyond thought. I can’t sleep my way into the Moment. I have to wake my way into the Moment.

Here I am with my veil, in the Moment. My lungs fill with sky. The veil fills with sky.

After a while I lie down, my veil a sylph sleeping on my chest. She grows warm as she sleeps. My organs relax under her. My skin melts into the cloth covering it. I am in the Garden again, innocent, protected, at One. Even my often-separated body is at One.

Thank you for reading. More on Veil coming soon. Also Gravity & Breath.

Please…tell me your story of dancing with your veil…

Top photo of Alia Thabit by Dunya McPherson
Photo of Dunya by Paul B. Goode

I continued. I noticed at one point a slight impulse — actually a thin thought — about moving my left leg. My Witnessing Self knew that moving — really a slight fidget – would mean about 30″ to a minute of reconnecting to my deepening relaxation, so I decided not to move but instead to breathe more deeply into the area. Almost immediately afterward I had a brain tantrum — a loud, brash, 2-yr-old blaze of mind activity. There was no emotion, no anger or frustration, but just a mental pattern. My Witness Self recognized instantly that this was my habituated mind reacting to a choice to ignore its subliminal suggestion to fidget my left leg. I realize that fidgeting is my way of avoiding continuous focus and of learning.

This juncture passed and I sank deeper into gravity, into my breath. Over the course of 10 minutes I shifted inward a gear or two. Then I slid my legs down and rested.

On Reflection
Though this chant didn’t reach an expanded place, it was an excellent weight-lifting session. I have difficulty finding a kind way of being disciplined. In recent years in Dancemeditation, I’ve been adjusting harsh, punitive disciplinarian-ness of my professional dance years. I seek strength and clarity which require the cultivation of will, but that will mustn’t be a willfulness reeking of domination (which, oddly, might be a form of greed, yes? Want. want, want, my way, my way, my way, etc.) During the Shafi chant, I glimpsed my rebellious side as a two-year-old rebellion.

Insight
My battle has moved into the mental plane. (The emotional level seems settled.) Rebellion shows up as a mental pattern. This is potent information for me. I ‘feel’ my old emotions — their staleness and non-immediateness, but old mental templates are tough to apperceive. We have a cultural prejudice toward considering the mind as a fresh, fluid, objective territory, but in the Shafi chant I saw that it can be fixed in a rut without the sense of being able to tell, feeling-wise, that this is so.

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Why is personal practice so important? A naf would whisper in our heads that it isn’t, that we are fine without our practice. Go ahead, eat that donut, crap out in front of internet TV, FB the evening away…But practice is solace to our pain. In practice, we recall and re-experience crucial learnings from retreat training periods together. We bring the group, the teachings and the teacher into our daily flow.

At Dancemeditation retreat, we learn many teachings. One core teaching is to approach ourself without tyranny. We practice steady, centered, calm self-witnesses. We move and breathe and chant and explore with a generous dose of compassion for our selves and our small human predicaments. We learn to know we are safe, that we can trust. Our training time is the act of taking our young terrified selves by the metaphorical hand and being the good parent, the good guide, the nurturer, healer, loving deity, the Lover. We  work to become not only the person riddled with darkness but also the person who knows that these darknesses will pass and that we will be okay, that we are fine, that we are lovable and Beloved. When we return home and do daily practice, we integrate the depth of experience we’ve initiated during retreat. In daily practice, we continue to knead the compassionate space we have learned into our flesh.

A practitioner of a Path is one who practices the practices of the Path, but it isn’t just practicing that makes the practitioner. It is also knowing, and remembering why practices are being done. A Path is an awakening. A transformation. Blind adherence is not enough. We need also to turn willingly into the awakening.

When you resist practice, you stand on that threshold. Your foot is lifting to step. Will you crossover? Will you wake? Pat the naf on the head and step in.

Indonesian design teapot

Every object promises an experience. At this moment, it rests on its resting spot, but it has its time of action. I think of drying my hands on the towel, sliding into my coat to go out, the vase holding a stem of lilies, the lamp lit, glasses on my nose, the computer humming and vomiting a world onto my face. And the books. The books are very ‘come hither’.  They say, “Come in. Come into me. Come into these pages, turn them, spider letters weaving threads between your synapses.” These mercurial objects carry a world of experience. I look at them and the memory of the experience and the promise of another day, another partnership, another adventure with them is in their sculpture as they sit and watch me.

I am working with a new chanting. New to me. Otherwise, old as time. Its not important that anyone know what the word is. It’s a Sufi chant. Sufi chanting is called zhikr — remembrance.

My new chant surprises me because the part that is meaning — its literal translation — doesn’t touch the fullness of the experience. This chant must be right for me since, as I do it, I cross a threshold into the place I never want to forget, a place where I feel completely human yet safe and real. Most ordinary days, human-ness is a long string of vigilance and fear. I’m familiar with all that, inured to it.  I seek the place where, like my time as an infant, I was held by my mother or father and they were vigilant for me. I was safe in their arms. They watched out for the wolf and bear, the snake and illness. Those killers. ‘Being held’ is a sweet flavor of giving up into the Moment. Yet the Moment requires surrender, letting yourself be held.

On the surface, the Moment could be any sort of temperature or condition; it could be painful, or it could be luscious. That, however, is just its surface. There is the inside of the Moment. The inside of the Moment is far more than being held and carried. It has a secret wisdom. (Not so secret if you get there but untouchable to most who stand on the outside of the glass window in life.) The importance of spiritual seeking is to find and touch, every day and in as many moments as possible, the inside of the Moment — not forgetting what should never be forgotten.

The inside of the Moment is a lamp in the dark, a vista that is boundless, is newness, is inspired existence, is non-separateness, is freedom, is spaciousness. It is soft like rabbit fur, and a perfect embrace. It is communion, knowing, contentment, and the end of bottomless want. It is the end of fear.

Back in NYC I focus on business. I sit in front of my computer and type away. I’m on the phone. I email. I organize Dancemeditation sessions and ‘run the store’. But as I do, I feel what I am doing. Inside my apartment, I inhale EMFs. As I walk along the street, I inhale heavy metals. With every breath comes poison.

NYC is a stimulant — caffeine or speed. It’s a great jolt, useful in creative tasks and for un-spooling complex ideas. The mesa is nourishment. Direct inspiration. I make the two sound very black and white. Who wouldn’t prefer the mesa? But the mesa has its rigors. Its austerity is a large part of its ability to heal, and that must be gotten used to. New York is materially cushy. Lots of water. Lots of electricity. Anything you could possibly want — for a price.
The power of NYC for me has always been its raw energy. If I can transform it with my practice I have a dynamic resource, but I have to transform it, not get lost in it, or follow its whims and tides which easily chew up a soul.

I feel almost as if I need to get all my business work done quickly before I lose my juice. But then I realize that the healing that took place on the mesa is changing how I am working. I breathe as I type. I tend toward balance. I don’t teeter on an edge. I am all here, and being all here is far less crazy, less volatile, less self- destructive than past ways I’ve lived in NYC.

I stopped in at Grace Church on 10th and Broadway to listen to the noon organ concert. That was a nice break. The cool colored light. The smell of wooden pews and leather prayer books. Timelessness, to breathe and be bathed in music.

According to Bill, who knows the formula, our capacious roof should be able to collect 800 gallons of water from one inch of rain or ten inches of snow melt. Terrific!  My goal has been to get the catchment in place before the winter snow in the hope of harvesting enough snow melt and rain to provide for the coming needs of earth floor construction and possibly a portion of summer retreat next year.

Ric and Jamie had two hours to get a large PVC  pipe, mounted below the gutter for the gutter to drain into, as well as the fittings onto the cistern before the sun set. They worked steadily as the light dropped lower and lower.

Tim gathers tools, piling leftover lumber, propanel, and insulation as Steve and Juany measure and mount the slide door track. They all stop and smoke a cigarette around noon.

I walk around, inspecting, asking final questions about the bottom edge of the west wall which doesn’t touch the ground. Steve nods. “See it touches on the east side. The ground slopes ever-so-slightly which is why that side has a gap,” he explains. The barn is level and squared. I’ll have to seal around those edges before winter. I continue to inspect and see nothing to complain about. The barn is clean and sharp and wonderful.
They grind out their cigarette butts, heave up the first slide door, working it onto its track. Then the second. Jauny shoves them together. Thunk! He gestures to the door, like the circus lion tamer, “Fits snug as a glove!” And it does. The barn is done.

They will go now and I feel both sad and relieved. It’s been a consuming five days; I can use a digestion period. We shake hands. I give them the second half of the payment, a small tip each, a box of Chocolate Chip Oatmeal cookies for the ride home, and to Junay for his birthday, a set of antelope antlers I found on a hike. I wave them off and stand in stunned silence. Has this really happened, this thing that six weeks ago was phone calls and internet digging? Did I really find Wilson Pole Barn Company, research them, vet them, put in an order, transfer money from one account to another, send in the first half payment, fly out to the mesa and find the site, locate a jackhammer and a hauling tractor? Me, a dancer, who knows nothing of all this? Yes. I did. I cry as I imagine myself managing to do this, choosing it, learning it, and moving forward instead of thinking I can’t, or getting stuck, or saying that I’ll do it later.
It is a beautiful barn. A perfect barn. I feel such affection for the wonderful crew (Wilson Pole Barn specialists out of Wagoner, OK) who hammered in every nail by hand.

This is for me the first major endeavor where the ideas and actions remain. As a dancer, all my work disappears—a performance that I prepare three months for is over in twenty minutes. The same with dances that I choreograph on others. My memoir was better. It lingers as do videos, but both of these are projects that are consumed rather quickly by others and which once I’ve completed them, I rarely look into afterward. The barn however is there. I will be going in and out. I see it again and again as I walk the winding dusty track between the pinions. I think back to the moment when the ravens revealed that spot and think how in just a few days, the Wilson crew is evolving the insubstantial into substantial. Not six months, or a year or two years. No. It is happening before my eyes. Like a pre-digital photographs in a dark room. The edges sharpening, the form filling, timbers, metal sheets coalescing into a barn!
A seed that has found ground and does not blow away…

I watch them continue steadily on. Very zen-like without any zen to their self-concept. Tim leans intently over the saw horses to trim a piece of 2X4 for a window frame. Every frame he has made fits perfectly. He didn’t finish high school. Never saw the need. None of the three have much use for college—didn’t go themselves and can’t see how it would have made much difference to their lives. If their kids want to go, they shrug, its up to them. On day #4, I hear more detail about their lives and opinions as they chug down orange soda (Tim), 7-Up (Juany), and Coke (Steve).

Steve has been married twice. He is wise. He has gentle sotto voce advice for impetuous young Juany, who, at 29 , knows it all: is so decisive, his wife spends all his money!, she wants him to make more money but she wants him home. Juany wants to get home soon cause he loves his little girl who misses him, she wants her daddy. Yes, he loves his wife BUT… And there is always the “I love my wife, but,” in every break-time effusion. Steve listens, off-hand, dropping a bit of succinct, calm advice here and there which is mostly ignored.

    I was totally enthralled. Smooth, experienced, elegant. they worked quietly, just the sound of hammers striking the wood. No nailguns, no power drills. I felt their energy going into the nails, into the boards, into the large, sturdy poles. This is a human barn made by men who are seasoned artists. Now I understand Steve’s impeccable posture. In perfect balance, he trots around on the roof beams, sure-footed as a high rope walker.

     By the end of the afternoon, the barn’s bones were there. I can now see the entire skeleton and have only to fuss in my dreams over where the doors and windows should be placed.
I couldn’t focus on anything else much today. Excited, I ran back and forth from cabin to barn site, called or emailed a bit here and there. A dream is coming true.