Sacred

The dream line: the clouds whipping past, flaring over the clinic, and the shells from the buds of the cherry trees clattering along the gutters like the hooves of tiny galloping horses. How they brought the good news from 37^th Avenue to 38^th.

Stopping with my fingers over rim of the iliac crest, not really mixing it up with the iliacus, not trying to do anything – that ambition that has ruined so many massages! – but just resting there. I've done deep work on this client before, going right down to the psoas, where it nestles by the spine under the intestines, and into the bowl of the pelvis to work the iliacus. It's not needed now, and it would in fact be counterproductive, but I pause a moment, letting my fingertips be so many heavy gold ball-bearings, weighing there. This is part of the temple too: this is sacred too.

How difficult and necessary the concept of the sacred is! It gets bullied and worried from both sides: from the people who think it makes no sense, and from the people who insist that properly speaking everything is sacred, so we shouldn't single anything out. The everything-is-sacred people are right, of course, on some abstract plain far above 38^th Avenue: but we're just a bunch of nervy, overexcitable primates, and we need our touchstones, our lucky charms, our teddy bears. Let them not challenge to themselves a strength they have not, lest they lose the comfortable support of those weaknesses that indeed they have.

I spoke of every day being an opportunity to start over, and Barney said every moment could be such an opportunity. Any moment could be a such a turning. I wonder if that's true, or if that's a similar reach for a feline dignity, a reach for something beyond what primates can really do?