Highway One

I spent my last two days after class was over exploring the Monterey Bay. I loved Pfeiffer State Park in Big Sur, Point Lobos and the butternut squash pizza at La Bicyclette in Carmel, the Hidden Peak teahouse in Santa Cruz, and Asilomar Beach and the aquarium in Monterey. 

I remembered the Hanuman temple I had visited on my road trip and how it overlooked the Monterey Bay. When I visited the temple two years ago it seemed so remote, a place I would never get back to. I realized from where I was now it was less than an hour away. I wanted to return and say thank you for the book on yoga therapeutics I found there, Anatomy and Asana, that brought me to Toronto. And to honor the journey that carried me, like Hanuman, over the obstacles of the last few years.

Next to Hanuman, at the top of Mount Madonna, I could see fog hover like a quilt over the ocean. I noticed from that vantage point how much space there is above the clouds. I thought about how much had changed since I last stood in that spot next to Hanuman, how I was on the way to start my internship then, and now, two years later, I was a running a private practice, specializing in yoga therapeutics and craniosacral. How it came faster than I thought because the need was greater than I knew.

I thought about this blog and how I set out to draw and started to write. When I first thought about becoming an OT I was afraid I was giving up on my life as an artist. I saw them as separate things. When I told Nick Bantock, years ago, about this concern he told me, "It's as if your interests are drawing up a mountain. You can't see yet because they're on different sides, unknown to each other. But keep going, keep feeding them because they are drawing upward and will one day meet at the peak." 

From where I stood at the top of Mount Madonna, I could see that he was right.

Lift Off

On our last morning of class we learned that Dr. John Upledger, who developed craniosacral therapy and whose work I was studying at Esalen, passed away the night before after a long illness. Both Gabrielle Roth and Dr. Upledger were pioneers in exploring the energy, waves, patterns, and rhythms  of the body. A dance of inner worlds and outer worlds whose transformative powers can only be felt by being present.

What must it have been like for them to feel something that was uncharted and go forth with that curiosity? How lonely and exciting it must have been. In the five days I was at Esalen, two of my most influential teachers ended their human journey. One who was an entry point, from whom I first heard of Esalen, and one whose work I was studying now. A full circle of sorts, with me in the middle. How strange that I was there at that very moment, in the most Western edge of the country where land turns to sea, for lift off.

Intention

I loved the plants that tumbled and swirled throughout Esalen. Our teacher, Eric Moya, pointed out how, as humans, we don't have roots or chlorophyll to keep us alive, we gain life from movement. Anything that makes it harder to move, makes it harder to stay alive. We don't grow old, we just stop moving.

He also talked about when something is at the edge of your skill set it can seem magical or mystical or impossible. Then you get on the learning curve, struggle for a bit, and once you learn it, what once seemed magical and mystical becomes your new normal.

I loved to get up early, sit with a cup of green tea, and watch the morning sun rise on the ocean. Every time I scanned the sea, I hoped for a dolphin or porpoise or seal, but I never saw one. The day before, in class, we talked about intention. It always seemed too simple to me, intention, and often got resistance from that Archie Bunker voice in my mind. But more and more I've been discovering that the more simple it is, the more effective it is, and in the work I do, I'm in awe of the huge shifts that come from subtle movement. 

So, one morning I sat at the edge of the sea and playfully set the intention to see a dolphin. Within seconds a fin poked out of water. And then it happened again. Altogether seven blue fins arched in and out of the shimmering pink water. A pod of dolphins swam by right in front of me, as if to say, ha ha, and yes, and welcome to your new normal.

Monkey Bars

Esalen reminded me of growing up in Vermont in the 70's, before growing and cooking and recycling was being Green, back when you grew and cooked in order to eat and you recycled because you needed that bag for other things. 

That, along with craniosacral and its unwinding of tissues, evoked a memory of monkey  bars, gym class, and first grade. We were all lined up, the rungs so high and the ground so low that the gym teacher, who was also the principal, had to lift us up to reach the bars. It was a hot, humid, Vermont day and the boys started taking off their shirts. I was hot too with a feeling, a rumble inside. 

So I took off my shirt. I knew it wasn't done, girls taking off their shirts, but our bodies all looked the same so I didn't know why. And if something didn't make sense then how could it be right? The teacher muttered "Women's Lib," as I passed by.

At Esalen, that long ago feeling came back in a flash. I knew, even at six years old, that what I had done was not an act of innocence but a great act of being fearless. The glint of sun on metal, the warmth of sun on skin, the feeling of power mixed with doubt as I swung high above a crowd of gasping girls and angry boys. How the only way through was to keep my body moving and trust that the next rung would appear.

Gabrielle Roth

She was on my mind so much at Esalen, though I hadn't taken a class with her for years. I remembered the workshop she held at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, how amazing it was to dance in the glow of stained glass on dark wood floors, and how Marissa Tomei was in that class. 

On my third morning at Esalen I walked past the office and saw a photo of Gabrielle Roth in the window where there hadn't been one the day before. It said "In Loving Memory," and that she had passed away on October 22nd, just the night before. 

Last summer, when I went to Wanderlust in Vermont, her class was the first I signed up for. I was so disappointed when it was canceled due to illness. I thought it must be the flu or something but it was at Esalen that I learned she had cancer. 

I walked, stunned, to the edge of the sea. The sun shimmered on the waves and I felt her fully. I heard things she said like "It takes discipline to be a free spirit" and "If you want to be fascinating, be fascinated." I felt other things well up from deep inside like "Never give up" and "This is your lifetime." And I thought about how hard it is to be brave, but how it is worth it, probably.

Big Sur, California

I recently returned from a Craniosacral 2 training at Esalen in Big Sur, California. It was heartbreakingly beautiful, both the training and setting. Morning light on the ocean, the view during breakfast, huge gardens, the walk down the path to the hot springs. I loved being in the hot springs at night, watching ocean waves crash under the light of the full moon.

I had a choice for this training. I could take it in Big Sur in October, or Albany, New York in February. Not a difficult choice, but I was also drawn to Esalen because I remembered Gabrielle Roth, one of my most influential teachers, had lived and worked there. She started as a dancer in San Francisco and, after an injury, was told she would never dance again. She fell into a depression, moved to Esalen to work as a massage therapist, and it was there that she discovered it was dancing that would ultimately heal her. It was where she perceived the 5 Rhythms of movement that she would later write about and teach all over the world.  

She was rock and roll and spiritual at once and it wasn't a contradiction for her like it wasn't a contradiction for me. I just hadn't met others like that. It was from her that I first learned about the power of the body's wisdom, how transformative movement could be, and how there is so much more going on than what we can see.

When she spoke about Big Sur, all those years ago, it always seemed so far away to me. Some parts of the world are like that, they feel impossibly far when you first hear about them. Yet here I was, here.

Toronto, Canada

I just returned from an incredible two week yoga therapeutics training in Toronto, Canada that, even after almost twenty years of yoga practice, has profoundly shifted my life. Frustrated by the limitations of working as a therapist in a hospital setting, I've been searching for a long time for a way to help people get out of pain and back to into their lives. And I have found it.

I was one of a few Americans at the training, the only person from New Mexico. I never would have known about this work if it wasn't for a book I discovered at the tiny bookstore next to the Hanuman temple at the top of Mount Madonna in California, a stop along the way on my road trip. I couldn't have known then that this book, a tiny seed, a single gem, would later become a wish fulfilling jewel.

I adored Toronto. I'd never been there before and had no idea it was such a lovely city filled with amazing food, art, independent bookstores, street cars, coffee shops, and parks. I am hoping someone from Canada will adopt me. I felt the same way when I visited and fell in love with Halifax, Nova Scotia many years ago. I had no idea, I said to a Canadian classmate, to which she responded, "Yes, we are so much more than the purple stripe at the top of your map!"

My roommates walk toward class in the early morning light, a woman passes by the photographs of Guy Laliberte on display in the Distillery District, an artist paints on the sidewalk, blue glass and rain at our rental house, Krishna gazes from the window of BluGod Tattoo on Yonge Street.

Canyon Road

This drawing of a Navajo mud doll is now on view at the Scripps Fine Art Gallery on Canyon Road in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It's part of a RISD Alumni show. The drawing is beautifully framed and I chose it because it seemed the most Santa Fe. It's exciting to have my work on this famous road.

I meant to post this a few weeks ago, the show is actually coming down this Saturday, September 8th. If you're in the area this week try to stop by. The gallery is next door to the Teahouse where you can sit under the trees and have oolong tea or chai.

Revelry

A transitional time calls for a transitional post. I just came across this photo of a sketch I did at the Huntington in San Marino, California during my internship two years ago. I adored the Huntington. I spent the entire day wandering through its museums and tea houses and every kind of garden imaginable.

I thought this was the perfect piece for this phase of my blog. A photo from the end of my road trip then that holds the return to drawing that is to come, of a couple dancing in revelry under palm trees in paradise in honor of my birthday, today.

I've been doing a lot of furniture moving these days, in my new house, heart, and mind, trying to figure out how things will best fit. How much can be left out in order to create space for making art? How much must stay in order to be able to live?

As summer turns to fall and furniture finds its place, drawing comes closer. Like this photo that reminds me of the place between here and there, drawing too is an in-between thing. It becomes not the thing you are drawing exactly, but a thing of its own. And you just have to stay with it to see where it takes you.

Epilogue

I tried hard to finish this project before going on vacation, but here I am writing the final post back in Vermont, where I started this story two years ago. I'm sitting at the community table in Vergennes Laundry, the French bakery located in the former laundromat where we came whenever the washer broke or the pipes froze thirty years ago. As I type, surrounded by laptops, croissants, and caneles, ghosts wearing parkas struggle with laundry baskets over snow banks while angels with espresso dance overhead. To imagine is to move an image. My thirteen year old self who ached to run away from everything broken could never have known that right in this very place, Paris would come to me.

Full circle, back where I started. Not full circle exactly, but a spiraling upward, like a conch shell, the cochlea of the inner ear, or a maple creemee. The spiraling inward is also spiraling outward, the sacred is right there in the mundane, the far away is right in front of you.

My blog and I will be taking a summer break, and when we return I will be returning to drawing because, as Brenda Euland wrote, "If you skip for a day or two, it is hard to get started again. In a queer way you are afraid of it." I've become a little afraid of it and I want to move through that. Which leads me full circle to Ganesha, the Remover of Obstacles, the first drawing, the first post, when I started this blog for that very purpose four years ago.

I recently learned that Ganesha is also the God of Writers. He wrote the ancient Indian epic the Mahabarata, the most voluminous book the world has ever known. It contains the Bhagavad-Gita, the Song of God, the story of the spiritual practice of yoga. Dictated by the sage Vyasa, Ganesha made a promise to write the Mahabarata until it was done. When his pen broke, he broke off his own tusk and dipped it into ink in order to hold to his promise to keep writing. For that his broken tusk represents self-sacrifice. But it also represents openness, just as when a window breaks it becomes open to the whole world.

Arrival

When I arrived at my final destination in Los Angeles my cell phone died. The cord would no longer attach and after taking a few last battery breaths, she stopped accepting life. She had burned brightly, the Painter. She was better known for making calls and for taking calls, she had no name but her images remain. Forever, for everyone, from sea to shining sea...

The sun sets over palm trees and the Pacific in Long Beach, California after the first day of my internship and the last post of this story. When I was young and living in cold and snowy Vermont, it was hard for me to believe that the California beaches I saw on TV were real. I couldn't perceive it. But even though those beaches were beyond the boundaries of my experience, they had simply been there all along. For so long I thought imagination meant making up something that is not real. Through this road trip and this blog, I've discovered that imagination means tuning into something so it can become real. 

To imagine is to move an image.

The mind has no size or shape, just awareness. Enlightenment occurs when there are no longer any obstacles to our awareness or spiritual vision. Awareness does not penetrate or expand, it simply opens to what has always been present.   -His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama

Hero's Journey

Shelves filled with glass jars filled with pigments. A reflection of me reflects on her studio, a reflection of an overhead light reflects on her heart. Both Beatrice Wood and Robert Johnson lived in Ojai for a time and were students of Krishnamurti. I wonder if they knew each other? They both led long and amazing lives filled with curiosity, creativity, being broken and becoming whole, and following slender threads to a whole new way of understanding.

I am still in awe of how we grow psychologically. At first we admire a hero, never realizing that he or she only represents what needs to be realized in ourselves. Then, one or five years later, if we are reasonably intelligent about working with our projections, we wake up to find that we have become someone very much like that hero. We affix our own possibilities by projecting them onto someone else, and then we gradually assimilate them. A fourteen-year-old sees his future in a sixteen-year-old and in two years those admired qualities have been assimilated. A sixteen year old youth admires the qualities of a twenty-year old, and if things go well she incorporates those qualities into her own personality by the time she is twenty.


This process continues throughout our lives. Our projections of the hero onto others always represents where we are headed. The process generally slows down as we get older and our personality becomes a bit more formed, but the basic mechanism is always at work. Modern people, as I have said, can no longer house their souls in another person or thing; we must learn to house them ourselves and find the highest value within.


-Robert Johnson

Akhilanda

The Throne of Beato was created by a friend to celebrate Beatrice Wood's 102nd birthday. I spent a long time sitting on that throne, gazing at Ojai Mountain. Beatrice said she loved that mountain because it was the most stable thing in her life, it was there when she went to bed and still there when she woke up in the morning. The shimmering shards and fragments that make up the Throne of Beato bring to mind Akhilanda, the Hindu goddess of Never Not Broken. The following, from JC Peters article about Akhilanda, sums up the essence of The Always Broken Goddess.


Akhilanda derives her power from being broken: in flux, pulling herself apart, living in different, constant selves at the same time, from never becoming a whole that has limitations.


Akhilanda's lesson: even that new whole, that new colorful, amazing groove we create is an illusion. It means nothing unless we can keep on breaking apart and putting ourselves together again as many times as we need to. We are already "Never Not Broken." We were never a consistent limited whole. In our brokenness, we are unlimited. And that means we are amazing.


Thousands of shimmering shards, a hundred years, one mountain, and me.

Art Books

Beatrice Wood said that in her last years, in her 100's, sometimes she would get so tired she thought she would never get up again, she just couldn't get her bones to move. Then she would remember how she always meant to make that one figure in blue or that other one in red, and the ideas would pull her body up off the couch and back into the studio.  
  
"I have only one extravagance in my life. I wish it were a gigolo but it's not. It's art books."  -Beatrice Wood

Center for the Arts

Yesterday's post shows Beatrice Wood with Marcel DuChamp. They dated when they were young and remained life long friends. Young and struggling artists when they met, many years later she bought her house with the sale of one of his drawings. That house became her home and studio and is now the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts, a museum of her life and work. Her studio, seen here, was kept perfectly preserved. Beatrice said if there was one secret to her success as an artist, it's that she was well organized. 

It reminds me of how Gabrielle Roth says, "It takes discipline to be a free spirit." For the spirit to move freely you need to give it the structure, space, and attention to do so. In occupational therapy we say "Proximal stability leads to distal mobility." For the fingers to move freely the shoulder needs to be stable in its socket. Many paths leading to the same place.