Sacristan

One of the privileges of being a massage therapist is that I'm no longer afraid of getting old, and dying. Oh, I don't want to, of course. There's always that instinctive flinch away from death: no sentient creature is without it. But I mean the particular fear that comes of growing up in a world in which old bodies are carefully concealed and well-wrapped, even when they're allowed to appear at all. People really just don't know what their bodies are going to be like, when they're seventy, eighty, ninety. Except me. I know exactly what they're going to be like: the textures and tensions of skin and flesh, where the skeleton is going to loosen and stiffen; and so of course I know what mine is going to be like too. I know what deterioration can be mitigated and what can't. I'm not subject to the fantasy that I will somehow be the only person to hit 80 years of age without looking old; nor am I subject to vague exaggerated horror about that transformation. It's real, ordinary, everyday. I, too, should I make it to 95, will probably wear a diaper of sorts when I climb laboriously onto a massage table. But I'll enjoy my massage as much as ever.

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Bodies remain wonderful, magical. The Jewish conception of the body as a temple, a sacred space, has always resonated with me. Years of daily familiarity have heightened that sense, rather than diminishing it. This body, here, now, under my hands, these forms that are like and unlike any other body that has been on my table, that are like and unlike those of any other mammal, any other vertebrate, any other sentient creature. This is a house of God, if anything is: and it's one that we are uniquely suited to understand and venerate.

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My status, as a massage therapist, is low: somewhere in the range of hairdressers and housekeepers, even if it sometimes ranges as high as that of physical therapists or as low as that of prostitutes. One is "a treasure," of course, but one is never taken quite seriously. Which I'm happy about. If I were a less privileged person it might rankle, I guess: but these days I don't really want to be taken seriously: I don't want my feet to sink that deep in the sand. I'm traveling light: I have a long journey to make and I'm not planning on building any houses on the way. 

I think, always, of the dipper: that comical little bird, "usually seen bobbing up and down on a rock in mid-stream," otherwise modest and nondescript. It is a shaman, a traveler in two worlds: it will vanish into a stream or a waterfall's splash pool, and you'll glimpse it, if you're lucky, swimming under the water, with as much ease and speed as it flies through the air. It doesn't need respect, on either side of the mirror. It has its own business to mind.

Water Ouzel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cinclus_mexicanus_-_Nason_Creek,_Washington,_USA_-juvenile-8.jpg

One of several reasons I was a bad teacher: I dislike repeating myself. When I know I'm repeating myself, that is. Like everyone, I tend to say the same things over and over, but that's okay, as long as I've forgotten that I've said it before. When a former version is still resonating in my mind, though, and I try to say the thing again, it kicks up a feedback-storm in my mind – very like what happens, I imagine, to a stutterer, and with a very similar effect. I begin, hesitate, lose my place, and have to start over, only to have what I've just begun add to the confusion. A teacher needs to repeat things a lot. I find difficult, if not impossible. So when someone kindly suggests that I make a book out of my blogs, – as people do from time to time – something about embodiment and massage and meditation – it kindles a flutter, a minor panic, under my breastbone. Deliberately repeat myself? Oh, no.

Yet I'm thinking about it, in my ponderous way, and I'm even doing a little something like it, in that I'm starting to pick up old posts from the archives of Mole, refurbish them, and repost them over on my massage blog, where someone might actually see them. I do this against a lot of psychological resistance, which is why it's happening slowly.

Meantime: I am mortal, so very mortal. I gave a massage in a tea house, yesterday. I know nothing about tea houses – I'm utterly ignorant of all things Japanese – so I simply accepted that I must wear the white socks given me, in that space. I'm all in favor of taboos of place, and of ceremony and ritual that sets certain places apart; so I was quite willing to put on the socks. And massage is, itself, a sacred space to me – a place with its own rules, requiring a certain discipline of intention – so it felt appropriate, in one way: in another, I suspected that it was ludicrously inappropriate, and that somewhere Japanese spirits were cringing. Sorry.

Sorry, but that's my calling and my trade: going where people are, and working with what they give me. I'm a water-ouzel: a queer fish and an odd bird. I belong everywhere and nowhere; follow everybody's rules and nobody's. I don't know if I could do something so very drylandish as to write whole book.