Thursday, April 26, 2012

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 37th Avenue to 38th.

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 38th 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?

3 comments:

rbarenblat said...

The shells from the buds of the cherry trees like the hooves of tiny galloping horses! Oh, beautiful.

And your fingertips as heavy gold ball-bearings. Sacred too. Yes. And yes, yes: everything is sacred when one looks at the world from a high enough vantage (what the mystics of my tradition call mochin d'gadlut, "big mind" or expanded consciousness), but most of us live most of our lives in mochin d'katnut, "small mind," where some things are holy and some are ordinary...

Zhoen said...

Nothing is sacred, except some things are sacred, everything is sacred, therefore nothing is sacred.

Whatever you are most afraid of, that is where the sacred lies. If you do not resist the powerful urge to draw back, as it draws you in, you are just a bit away from the holy place.

marly youmans said...

Nice!

And I do believe that all can "turn" in a moment, though often when we go through some door, it has been calling our names for a long time.

Metanoia. Metamorphosis.

Turn, turn, turn...