like a cat in the sun

I was lying on my side, feeling a pleasant unimportance of myself, with my legs and arms lying about randomly and the only thing I could feel was my ribcage rising in a quick shallow breath like a breath you might see on a cat lying in the sun, I was just like that, simply lying and not thinking how one should lie. Cats just lie and just breathe, they don't think they should cross their legs, button up their shirts or keep their mouth closed. They don't, they lie down just like that.

And how wonderful it is.

my very first baby step

I have finally made my first step. At first I was just standing and then I lost balance and stepped forward. At this point I lost my balance altogether and fell on the ground. Trying to walk on your hands can be quite challenging at first!

Isn't it like your first baby step? At first you are just trying to stand and then your balance shifts somewhat and you have to make a step to keep yourself standing, isn't that what it is really? So the baby is not really planning to step, to walk, it just happens naturally and is not a product of the ability to walk, is a product of the inability to stand!

yummy black slug

Shiny black slug, like a piece of licorice! Sweet and salty, right into your mouth, slurp!

It's a black and proud Scottish slug, roaming free in the sunny meadows of the Highlands!

His name is Charles, just like prince Charles. Charles is currently looking for a girlfriend, so if anybody knows a pretty little slugginette that will brighten up his days, let me know!

sleeping on the ground

Lying on the ground, on hard ground, on a hard mattress. I sleep on a hard mattress now and notice how different and how satisfying it feels. It feels safe, I'm safe because I'm on the ground, because I cannot fall, because if I reach out, I'm touching the floor and it's right under me, supporting my weight without fail, with a secure and steady force that I can almost feel.
I cannot sleep on my stomach anymore, like I used to when I had a softer mattress. It’s uncomfortable because I cannot breathe. It was a surprising discovery but it makes sense. You see, there is no space for me to breathe when I’m lying on my stomach because this harder mattress doesn't give in, doesn't make space for my belly and my ribcage to expand, to draw the air in. It’s hard work to breathe like that - you have to lift the weight of your body with each breath - and I change to a fetal position.
For sleeping on the ground the fetal position is the best, the most natural. You are not troubled by the hardness of the surface. You do not feel so much if the ground is cold or wet and you are always ready to stand up and face whatever might be in front of you. The fetal position is really the best, the most practical and the most natural too. And sleeping on the ground naturally forces it to happen, naturally makes you revert to your animal sleeping ways.

ground under your feet

Contact with the ground, barefoot, dancing barefoot, sleeping on the floor, feeling how close you are to the ground. Walking, placing your feet down carefully, taking pleasure in the sole of your foot touching the flat surface of the earth, slowly, like a cat, drawing strength from it. Dancing barefoot, like animals dance, dancing barefoot makes you free, makes you yearn to be unstoppable, to be like a force of nature, all-consuming, writhing in thirst, in hunger, in desire.

Don’t separate yourself from the ground, don’t cut yourself from that source, from that source of strength, from that grip, from this sweet heaviness that wraps around your ankles, holds you down, deliciously close to the ground, deliciously powerful and fearless. Because close to the ground you are fearless, you are the one in power, you are the source of light that draws in the moths, you are the animal above all animals. Don’t forget to make your feet dirty, to stump that ground, that earth, in the rhythm of your heart, of your heart pumping, so wild.




On the picture: OSHUN: GODDESS OF LOVE

from:
http://www.goddessmyths.com/Lucina-Ptesan-Wi.html

Oshun, the Yoruba Goddess of Love and Life-Sustaining Rivers, is the Goddess of all the arts, but especially dance. Beauty belongs to Oshun and represents the human ability to create beauty for its own sake, to create beyond need. It is also said that she is the knitter of civilization, since great cities have been founded, for the most part, along rivers in order to supply water to their populations. She is portrayed here in a pose typical of the Yoruba priestesses of Oshun who recline gracefully along the banks of the Niger River in West Africa. In the branches of the tree on the left is the fan of one of these priestesses from Osogbo, Nigeria.

the story of the martyr preacher and the evil cardinal

I have found this by the ruins of the castle in St Andrews, Scotland (click on the image to see a larger version). Apparently times were tough during Scottish reformation. Protestant preacher George Wishart, critic of papacy, was betrayed and burnt at a stake for his heresies by a man of God cardinal Beaton.
Nice.
In revenge, the cardinal was ambushed and killed by an enthusiastic party of Wishart's friends, his body hung from the battlements for all to ridicule. Was the cardinal fat (aren't all bad cardinals fat? Are there any good cardinals?)? Was his mortal sin of gluttony painfully exposed for everyone to watch and despise? I guess it would be difficult not to kill a cardinal like that, especially if he barbecued a good friend of yours for no good reason. The bloody gold-fingered catholic bastard got what he deserved!

Nowadays discussion about religion in Scotland tend to be a bit less passionate. But then again, a Scottish gentleman told me today that in the North of Scotland religious debates in pubs tend to be avoided. Rather like a petrified remnant of the times when one could be killed because of his/her views on the theological questions. An evolutionary adaptation, one is tempted to say: only the children of those who shut up survived.

In reality, of course, it wasn't about theology at all. Cardinal Beaton was an ambassador of France in Scotland who wanted to side with the French against the English and an enemy of Henry ' womanizer' VIII. It was all political, all about power. Maybe it was even Henry VIII who conspired to get him killed to continue his policy for Scotland. The reformation in Scotland was seen by Beaton as a way of the English to set foot on the Scottish territory.
But who really knows what happened?

afraid to be alive

The sensuality is lost. It’s nowhere better visible than in our eating habits. Food has become sterile, packaged, organic-shmorganic, with that many carbohydrates and that many calories. Fat-free, sugar-free, taste-free. Coming with instructions on the packaging, so that you don’t have to know anything about food anymore, it’s all been taken care of, professional nutritionists are working to provide you with nutrition that will guarantee you are eating healthily and that you won’t have to feel guilty about not taking care of yourself properly and according to the newest dietary fashion. Guilt-tripping is a powerful tool - when people see me eating salads their primary feeling is that of guilt that they are not eating enough salads themselves. Unprovoked by me, they usually mumble some kind of excuse why they don’t have time to do the same or that they really should be doing more of that too. As if me eating salads was a sort of slap in the face that reminded them of their dietary sins. They admire my discipline in forcing myself to prepare my own salads, to suffer the pain of touching the lovely sweet cherry tomatoes and feel the sharp knife slicing through them, the pleasure of cutting the striking purple onion in very thin, crispy rings, tossing the salad leaves into the bowl to make a bedding for all these juicy colours. Golden olive oil, delightful compositions of tastes, textures and aromas. One needs to be really disciplined to inflict so much beauty onto oneself, the risk of bursting with happiness is terrifying!
People get so used to the misleading safety of the packaging and instructions that they forget what food really is and what a joy it is too! How does it feels to touch it, feel it, taste it. I saw a friend of mine buy food for dinner and among the things that she bought were baby potatoes packed in plastic. The inevitable instructions said they should be prepared in a microwave. But soon she discovered that there was no microwave in the house. She panicked. How do you make potatoes if they don’t come with instructions? She called a friend that was ‘an expert’ on cooking and conferred with that person for about 15 minutes on the highly complex subject of potato cuisine. I was standing there in the kitchen, watching all this in awe. How can one be so far removed from reality?
But there are more examples like this. People don’t want to eat fruit anymore because you have to peel it. Even apples are too messy because juice can squirt out of them if you bite them. How terrible! The most practical fruit are bananas because they are easy to ‘unpack’.
How about the sensuality of food, juice of ripe fruits on your lips, licking it off, licking the juice off your fingers, getting your fingers dirty with food is one of the pleasures of eating, did we forget that?
People get so touchy, they become vegetarians not because of a genuine impulse but because their rejection of anything bloody, bodily, sensual. Blood and suffering are unacceptable, life should be all light and fat-free, sugar-free, all clean and sterile, eating internal organs of dead animals is a no-no. A juicy steak? We cannot eat that anymore, you can see blood oozing from it as you cut it with your knife. We can stomach chicken though - no problem; it’s meat too, it was a living animal just like the poor cow but you cannot see the blood. The meat is white, pure, seemingly fat- and blood-free, a sterile dose of protein for your balanced diet. Makes you feel a bit less guilty about not being a vegetarian.
Sex becomes sterile too. There is no place here for sweating in the throes of passion, there is no place for bodily fluids, for the scent of another person’s body, there is no place for sensuality in movement, for power and dominance, for pain, for rhythm in dance, in music, for intensity, for confusion, for provocation. All sterile, tasteless, colourless, according to the newest way of how not to be human. But we are humans, we are animals and we are not made to be sterile like that. We all desire life, passion, sensuality. If a sensual person enters the room, a person full of vitality, everybody is drawn to that fire. Everybody. Because that’s life, that’s fulfillment and we all want that. We might think something else, think we have to accept the rules of proper behavior and be sterile and polite but the moment such person enters the room we know, we feel what is that we really desire. We desire to be free and express ourselves as what we are. Ultimately, our deep nature is the same: we are animals, we are humans and we want to live and breathe and be happy.
I don’t want to hear that people are different and maybe there are people that desire to be sterile. I strongly disagree, passionately so. I believe that there are many ways to err but there is only one way to do it right. There are many ways to be unhappy but only one way to be happy. We all know when we see a truly happy person, don’t we? A person that laughs a lot, that laughs throwing the head to the back, exposing the throat, it’s a deep laugh of someone free, of someone that is not afraid. A person that enjoys life and inspires people around him/her to enjoy it too. Don’t we all know how to tell if someone is truly happy? And it’s not the momentary happiness that I’m talking about. Not a happiness of winning a prize, getting a present, no, a constant happiness of someone that enjoys to be alive and enjoys both the good and the bad. Because there is no good and bad, there is simply life. It’s a kind of happiness that is difficult to hide and radiates to the outside, it spills over and touches the people that are near.
There is one way to be happy, one truth and there are thousand ways to deceive oneself, thousand ways to become a slave of this and that cultural brainwashing. A slave to feel guilty that you are not doing what everybody (it seems) says you should be doing. Guilty of not being perfect and up to (what seems) to be everybody’s expectations. But is it even true? Do other people really expect us all to be doctors and lawyers? Accountants and consultants in suits? I don’t think so. I see when I take a good look around me, I see that people want to be with people that are interesting, that are doing something interesting to us all, something entertaining and useful. We want people around us to be happy and there are happy doctors and lawyers, of course. They are people that truly wanted to become that, that really felt that was that right thing for them. But there are many others that enter that path because of what they think everybody else wants from them. And that is a shame. Because we don’t want people to be unhappy, we don’t want them to do something without conviction. Who wants to be the patient of a doctor that is forcing himself/herself to be one, that is doing it only for prestige, that treats his/her patients as objects that will help on the path to success? Nobody. We want a doctor that cares about his/her patients, that practices medicine to help people. Simply put, we love and respect a person that is true.
Ultimately we want everybody around us to be happy, to be free. When people are afraid, enslaved and hurting they are bound to do stupid things and hurt others. Or to nullify themselves and become zombies, self-effacing automatons that are not capable of true human interaction, that can ‘talk’ to people only through pre-baked formulae, only along the safe rails of politeness. Politeness used in that way becomes another face of alienation, another way to stay away, to avoid touching the other person, to avoid saying anything provoking, anything that might bring life into the conversation. Life is scary, dangerous, especially if you are in the state of extreme retraction, if you have made your personality and your true nature shrink so much inside of you that you live almost exclusively by the rules imposed from the outside. To the people from the outside interaction with such a person is like talking to somebody who’s dead. Dead, yet smiling, dead, yet talking. When you are like that, interaction with someone alive is very scary. Why? Because you don’t want to face the truth, because facing the truth and seeing the reality for what it is is what you have been avoiding the whole time. Because you have internalized the myths and recipes of your culture and you decided that living according to them can spare you from uncertainty and suffering. It won’t happen but it’s hard to stop believing in that. It’s hard to stop believing in all that reassuring fairy-tales that our culture imposes on us. It’s a siren song and we are enchanted, we keep believing in face of the enormous amounts of evidence to the contrary, we cling to it because it’s supposed to be true and since everybody says it’s true, it must be, right?
Looking for figures of authority to show us the way is one of the causes of this problem. Why do we look up to the other people to tell us what to do? Why do we think they know better? Because they have studied? Because they wear a suit? Because others seem to listen to them too? Everybody is his/her own best expert on how to be happy. We only have to ask ourselves, talk to ourselves. Look carefully into the world that is around us and see and feel what is it that we want. What makes us happy? What makes us miserable, what makes us feel we are alive? What are we afraid of and why?

the smell of fear

Redhead vs blonde. This was the Scottish Universities karate competition. I didn't expect it to be that stressful but when it was my turn to fight I felt my heart pumping and swelling in my throat. I smelled my armpits and my sweat didn't smell the way it does normally - it exuded a very intense pungent odour, the smell of fear, the smell of something very animal. Animals can supposedly smell our fear and as I was sniffing my stinky armpits I realized why - when we are afraid we let them know.

When the fight started something very strange happened to me: I was totally unaware of what was happening around me, of what judges were saying, of all the people watching; only the sound of my name shouted by my friends could pierce that wall, they were calling me back to reality, they were calling me to wake me up. It was the strangest sensation to be lost to your body, to be lost to your animal side in this way. I only realized that afterwards, I realized how much the focus of my attention had narrowed. I remember reading about tunnel vision: people describe the sensation of their visual field narrowing in the throes of intense physical fight. For this moment they lose control of reality, they only see the person they're fighting with.

It happened to me and I lost because if you lose your calm and you're fighting against someone who didn't (and who knows what he or she is doing), you will lose. It was fascinating for me to realize that and to see that I could be taken over by emotions in such a overpowering way.

more photos from the competition

press your tongue against the heaven of your mouth

This is the story of how I bought a mouthguard and how it made me think about the history of language and thought. On a beautiful sunny day and I went for lunch and swung by a sports shop and got one. Back at home I started reading the instructions on the package. I read the one in English first:

Bring water to a boil. Remove water from heat source. Place mouthguard in the water for 12 seconds (see picture).

After that you have to put the mouth guard in and let it adjust to the shape of your teeth. In that bit it says:

Press your tongue against the roof of your mouth.

and in Spanish:

Empuje la lengua contra el cielo de la boca.

Cielo de la boca! Roof of the mouth! Only that 'cielo' doesn't mean roof, it means heaven. Heaven of the mouth. The firmament of your mouth.

Of course, heaven was something quite different before. It was the roof of our world, a solid surface encrusted with stars, a protective shell that enveloped our planet and gave the sun and the moon a place to run around and around again and come back on the other side.


from some random website:

Until about the time of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) [See biography], Christian scholars understood the firmament of the Bible as depicting the rigid sky, which revolved around the earth once each day, carrying along all the stars. This assumed motion of the sky reflected the common-sense notion that the earth was stationary. For the stars to move in a manner consistent with observation, they had to be held fixed in their relative positions. The stars seemed to trace partial circles around the poles each night. Their movements appeared exactly as if they were fixed on the underside of a great revolving dome, or the inner surface of a sphere. This belief in a rigid sphere of heaven gave rise to the expression "the sphere of the fixed stars."

The planetary motions did not conform to this explanation, and it was the detailed study of the orbits of the planets by Johannes Kepler, his discovery of the elliptical form of the orbit of Mars, and Newton's interpretation of Kepler's discoveries, which led to the recognition of the law of gravity, and the abandonment of the idea of a rigid rotating firmament.

Cortazar in ecstasy

This is Julio Cortazar. I wanted to show you a piece of his writing that is a good example of what ecstasy means, what it looks like when you have words flow through you. It's enough to look at his face to understand that this man was not afraid to live.

If you don't understand Spanish try reading it anyway, see if you can find the rhythm, feel the waves rock you from side to side, see how he keeps on repeating the same words over and over again, over and over again, see how the stream of words takes you in, envelops you. I imagine this gives you a taste of how he felt writing this. It's not only the informational value of the words, it's the rhythm and structure of the whole piece that conveys something more than the story he's describing. See if you can feel it.

Julio Cortázar, Rayuela, cap. 7.

Toco tu boca, con un dedo toco el borde de tu boca, voy dibujándola como si
saliera de mi mano, como si por primera vez tu boca se entreabriera, y me hasta
cerrar los ojos para deshacerlo todo y recomenzar, hago nacer cada vez la boca
que deseo la boca que mi mano elige y te dibuja en la cara, una boca elegida
entre todas, con soberana libertad elegida por mi para dibujarla con mi mano en
tu cara, y que por un azar que no busco comprender coincide exactamente con tu
boca que sonríe por debajo de la que mi mano te dibuja.

Me miras, de cerca me miras, cada vez mas de cerca y entonces jugamos al
cíclope, nos miramos cada vez mas de cerca y los ojos se agrandan, se acercan
entre sí, se superponen y los cíclopes se miran, respirando confundidos, las
bocas se encuentran y luchan tibiamente, mordiéndose con los labios, apoyando
apenas la lengua en los dientes, Jugando en sus recintos donde un aire pesado
va y viene con un perfume viejo y un silencio. Entonces mis manos buscan
hundirse en tu pelo, acariciar lentamente la profundidad de tu pelo mientras
nos besamos como si tuviéramos la boca llena de flores o de peces, de
movimientos vivos, de fragancia oscura. Y si nos mordemos el dolor es dulce, y
si nos ahogamos en un breve y terrible absorber simultáneo del aliento, esa
instantánea muerte es bella. Y hay una sola saliva y un solo sabor a fruta
madura, y yo te siento temblar contra mi como una luna en el agua.


for more of Cortazar

ecstasy

[click on the image to see a larger version]

Ecstasy comes from Greek and means standing out of yourself, coming out of your body. Letting go of controlling everything in an intellectual way and letting your body be possessed by music, singing, writing, dancing. It's letting yourself BECOME what you are doing, letting go and emptying your body to merge with music, to let words flow through you, to let you voice fill you and the space around you, surrender totally and unconditionally.

Only if you are able to surrender, if you are not afraid to be possessed, engulfed, devoured, if you are not afraid t give up your identity, your personality, become a nobody, a mere instrument, an object, only then you will achieve ecstasy. You cannot make a decision to enter into that state, you cannot force it, plan it. It's in the sweet vulnerability of surrender, it's in letting down your guard, exposing your delicate underbelly of emotions that it can come to you. It's the fearless, the passionate, the mad that will be granted ecstasy.

sleepless in Ann Arbor and corn on the cob

I couldn't sleep last night. I got up , walked up the the fridge and inspected it carefully, looking for something juicy. The closest thing I could find was corn on the cob, packed in plastic. It wasn't cooked but I didn't care, I had raw corn like this before when I was a kid and we were robbing corn fields together with my father. He would keep the engine running and I would dash into the field, grab a few cobs and run back, sometimes chased by an enraged farmer holding a random gardening utensil.

I plunged my teeth into it and devoured it in two minutes, spending the following ten trying to get all the hard bits from in between my teeth. Earlier in the evening we went to an Italian restaurant with a bunch of people, the food was better than I thought it would be, especially the bread the waiter brought for starters - it was just pure deliciousness with some olive oil and salt. The company was great too - all without exception intelligent, good folk with spark and sense of humor. I had Heather to my left and Jonathan to my right and the waiter was really sweet. So sweet that I took an espresso when he suggested it even though nobody else did and used it to flush an ibuprofen down my oesophagus. My period was coming and I could feel that numb pain in my groin which made me want to crawl to bed as soon as possible. After everybody said goodbye and assured everybody else how great it was to be in their company, we walked over to the car and drove home. When I finally got to bed I noticed I'm awake, wide awake and even though I felt tired I couldn't fall asleep. I tried finding a Very Comfortable Position, which helps sometimes but didn't work now, not really. After a good amount of fidgeting I gave up and turned the light on. The sheet I was lying on was all twisted into a rope and lying at my feet. I sighed and grabbed a book I had on my night table. I wondered: why was I sleepless? I thought I was tolerant to caffeine to the extent that an espresso at 10 pm wouldn't keep me awake. Maybe it was the combination with ibuprofen? I remember reading of the synergistic effect - that caffeine made the analgesic effect of ibuprofen stronger. But could it work the other way too? Could ibuprofen make caffeine's stimulatory effect stronger? Another life's mystery I could solve the following day on the internet. Or not.

cocktail cherries, straight from a tree

Bright red cherries, covered in shiny layer of ice, still on the tree and ready to be picked! OK, they are not really cherries (I don't know what the hell they are but when I bit through one of them risking deadly poisoning, it tasted half-edible).

Look carefully: heavy wind must have been blowing while it rained; some of the fruit are pointing upwards, instead of hanging down.

It's Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's wool hat and gloves kind of weather here. People don't speak so much with each other on the streets or on the university bus that I take in the morning to the central campus. It's chilly and I notice that my cheerful hello to the bus driver is turning heads, just like yesterday. The driver is a pretty black woman with short hair and she gives me a big smile (she saw me scurry from the other side of the street with a dangling camera in one hand and an open backpack in the other). I get on.

random town in Michigan

The girl in front of me is reading a study book and trying hard to concentrate. She compulsively takes a wisp of her long auburn hair between her fingers and slides them until the ends, smoothing them out. The Indian-looking girl at the table next to hers is reading her lecture notes. She too is playing with her hair, laying her head on her arm, giving herself a hug with the other. This is seriously advanced pose, I estimate, she must have been here for quite a while. Her long fingers slowly dip in her black pony tail. Looks like it must feel good, to have one's fingers in such lush black hair, shiny and smooth.

I'm in the Cafe Royale at the main campus of the Michigan University and everybody around me is studying. People with laptops, Greek dictionaries, big piles of loose papers, and concentration problems.

The Indian girl is now swirling a wisp of hair around her index finger. The redhead succeeded at extracting a hair and is now examining it in detail with the help of her long fingernails, still looking at the notes. Her nails are painted pink.

I touch my own hair - it's seriously smooth; yesterday I bought this great shampoo, made for blond hair especially. I feel sorry for people with short hair, like the guy next to me. How can he concentrate on his reading?

Oh oh, there is some action! Some fat guy sits at the table of the redhead. She says OK but is obviously not so happy to be disturbed. She probably thinks that the guy wants to flirt with her (it's obvious: he's fat and she has beautiful auburn hair). And soon enough he gives it a try, followed by her embarrassed reaction. They exchange a few uneasy smiles and ten minutes later he packs up and leaves and she returns to sliding her fingers through her hair, all the way until the ends.

I notice in the corner of my eye that the Indian girl got out her driver's license and is giving it a thorough examination. Now is the moment, I tell myself and say out loud: you cannot concentrate anymore, huh? She's visibly relieved that someone has chatted her up and we start talking. I ask her about the trip I plan to make to Chicago. Not long after the redhead joins in. They turn out to be medical doctors, studying for their level 2 exams (whatever that is). When they find that out they start exchanging tips and I leave them alone, happy to have connected two people who probably wouldn't have talked to each other otherwise. I get back to my own reading.