My hands climb the air slowly on their own.

The canyon floor spread around me,
the pale green trees lacy along the river.
A dense hiss then
a blast of pitting sand folding me before
shooting off like a big air serpent disgusted
by its marbled morsel of me.
And the world halted.

My hands halted.
There was nowhere else.
A silvery kanoun hangs the icicles of plucked tones on a sparse branch.

My heart beat.
The canyon still.
In a room with a red floor five women
with five wombs, five hearts, ten hands
and ten thousand pulses
are still.
A silvery kanoun hangs plucked tones.

Pale green branches eyelash cheeks.
The river of thoughts or no thoughts winds
her water, ruffled by fish, stones, breaths
of five ruby women.

*****

During Dancemeditation my body combines times. The sense of dual realities – not so much recollection – is montage or pentimento. In this poem, the stillness combines all times. During the class, this was so palpable to me. I also felt that there was no particular importance to the specific scenes other than their stillness. I had no urge to analyze the ‘meaning’ of place, or action, or who. The value was ‘stillness’.
Yet there was place. There were occupants. And these aspects were beautiful to me. It was a limpid, awake dream-like perception – not a day-dream or memory. The exactitude of the experience had the detail of  Persian miniature, though not particularly visual so much as a full-range awareness. An other-worldly awareness.

Stepping beyond ordinary awareness is an interesting cultivation. These perceptions are not accidental. They aren’t easy to find. Like a coming across a tiny brook with perfect green moss, undisturbed, pure, with a small bird flipping its head in a shaft of light, and you know, never having taken that path before just at that time of day, you might never see that exact scene ever again.
It is so delicate…

I prepared new visual film poem for my book‘s premier party. The film titled ‘Collections’ is a series of still life images. And I thought how odd it was to use still images in a video when the whole point of video is motion. As I edited, I saw the attraction––stopped time. Still life. Then, even better, I could surge time, sforzando, then stretch or chop it by how I transitioned from one image to another. Such pleasurable control. And the final joy was seeing the structure of the whole piece express classical lineaments. Themes returning. Themes developing. Beauty. Eternity. This sort of time.

Here are a few images from Collections.

Amidst a bombardment of desire-mongering , making time to practice seems faintly absurd. Practice is slowing. It is simplifying the monkey mind, watching as neurotransmitters turn edginess to silk. Naturally this sounds appealing, but it is dissonant with modern life. Desire-mongering is the culprit. That’s the spot where I grab myself…Do I really want all the things? The interactions, the clothes, the food, the gizmos, the ambitions, the specious obligations, the perfections? No. I mostly don’t. I need a few things. A very few things. Mostly I need time, which means removing the clutter of acquisition. I need time for timeless-ness.

Here’s what Casita (Negron Wild) wrote me after the 2008 Cape Cod Winter Weekend:
“There are times when god stops the clock and I am suspended––frozen in time. There is something about the suspension that provides a neccessary contrast to the relentless motion of everyday life. Thank you for helping me be in stillness in motion, and watching the body’s intelligence emerge and communicate through the mind. These times are golden, as they are so hard to find, yet they tower over the details of everyday life––large and expansive.”