alan gyllenhaal
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to dancejag
Each morning, for the space of an hour, I am immersed in water. For an
hour, I meditate to the Holosync sounds of rain, water, waves, a
liquid drumming that rolls beyond the pulse to a deeper source.
Somehow during that hour, my breathing becomes more formed, more
regulated, more entrained, like a pair of dancing legs that has found
the rhythm at last and could well afford to be caught by a larger,
deeper power.
Each morning as I settle into water, I wait to be caught and I am
seldom disappointed. The interesting thing is that after almost 6
months of daily meditation to the sounds of water (I've only missed 2
sessions), my whole body has been groomed for the taking even before I
put on my ear phones. And the taking is like a grand plunge into the
different layers of the self, only this self (for the lack of a better
image) is like a huge octopus dancing in the depths of the ocean
water. All my tentacles are veering wildly away from the center and
yet I can feel their rhythm perfectly in the center, all the
incongruities making sense ultimately in this center. Hard put to say
what this image means, but it's the most viable description of how I
feel at the end of the hour' a dancer reconciled to new beginnings, un-
choreographed steps, a dancer thinking on the tips of her dancing
slippers.
It is a very subtle process--this growing sense of interconnectedness,
a profound sense that even the most perverse has its roots in the most
plausible. I am an octopus wanting to go in 20 different directions,
feeling the outward pull-- inward'a sense of peace in the turbulence,
softness in the cacophony.
After the tapes, I get up and the morning somehow falls miraculously
into place'each email, each phone call falling into place like a
scripted dance. I am focused at work, in my writing. Opportunities
unfold before me. Words that I had struggled before to make
right'sound perfect in their resistance. Not everything is melodic,
but all that emerges is poetry'raw, cacophonous, not totally
understood nor totally cohesive'but perfectly in step.
When I come across something that previously would have torn me apart,
I watch unmoved. I am beginning more and more to see that impasse as
part of the puzzle whose beauty is that the final piece comes not at
the end, but at the beginning.
I am less and less interested in searching for the final truth that
justifies all, but more and more contented with the million truths
that fill each space and fragment of time. And the irony is that
somehow this cacophony makes me whole: I am more than one. I am
infinite'infinite pieces, infinite reflections from a single piece or
perhaps infinite pieces shattered from a single image. It does not
matter anymore, you see.
"The readiness is all," says Hamlet. And the immersion into these
tapes seems to be grooming me for that readiness. Readiness for what?
For nothing and for everything.
More and more I sense that the whole process of survival--living,
working, writing, mating, loving'all these are part of a water dance,
wherein the play's the thing, not to catch the conscience of the king,
but to be enjoyed and cherished as the last waltz...before the next.
Copyright 2006 Mary Desaulniers