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Wednesday, April 14, 2004 Experiment:i've decided to try posting general Integral Science stuff in the other log (integralscience.motime.com). The literal glossary will take a little time to HTML into place but it should be up soon. I still feel myself to be egaging a flawed public/private medium in doing this via computor, but every other medium except authentic personal communiction is just as flawed if not more so, and the need to reach out to stangers in gestures of goodwill, good faith, good taste and good sense remains. I can only hope that the experiment is instrumental in subverting/healing the medium in which this part of my life-dance is communicated, and that this healthy information leads to increasingly less abstract and dissociated forms of healthy comming-together. Please, consider what is posted, both here and there as invitations to personal interaction between us and not as things meant to be complete in themselves. posted by: piankhy | 19:23 | comments Monday, April 12, 2004 INDIVIDUAL: I began a week long fast this past Saturday. Something that I hope will shift things in my life in general some, but mostly in regard to food, which I have been taking for granted recently. Twin Oaks has more organic, raw food than most places I have been, but the variety and quality of raw food necessary for my preferred diet of at least 90% raw food--as well as the encouraging enviroment for it--is not to be found here. I am not a raw vegan, but prefer the instictive-paleodiets (if you can call them "diets"),which are raw but omnivorous. My experience of these more primal ways of eating is one of awakening and communion, not only between my body, mind and tastebuds,(such that I like what is good for me and dislike what is bad for me), but of a real sense of communion, involvement and appreciation of our real situation as organic beings in a world in which eating and killing and dying and birthing and living are all part of the same mysterious dance. I do not eat the way I do to survive--nothing survives. I eat this way as a way to keep in touch with Life and to remind myself to Live. The feeling I sometimes have of desponcency, the sense of myself as someone trying to go up-hill in what amounts to a cultural avalanche which is not halted here but only slowed somewhat, creates, I suppose, a subtle anxiety that I sometimes numb with the ubiquitiously available cooked or otherwise processed food. This is alright and seems to me only human under the circumstances (As with the rest of my life, the idea is not perfection, but the maintainence of a flexible and balanced, but progessive, dynamism in my life as a whole). However, when I find myself hovering at around the 50% cooked mark, i feel like its time to wake myself up a little, hence the fast. So far the fasting is certainly making me into a better conductor of Chi (Ki,prana,Bioelectricity); the Chi Gung and the Tantric exercises I do everyday are much more noticable in their effects. In tantric practice especially, the relationship between food and the movement of sexualenergy along the chakras is underlined in a big way. I attribute this not so much to the fasting itself as to the detoxing of processed substances it precipitates to some extent. But this is only the beginning of the second day and these are different circumstances that those of previous long fasts. Since I began the fast I have had the idea of ritualizing the act of eating more after it is over, perhaps even creating special "alter" for myself on which to take my meals. In my experience, along with ritually raising, hunting, harvesting or otherwise killing other beings for food,nothing highlights the sarcredness of food so much as going without it. posted by: piankhy | 12:28 | comments Friday, April 02, 2004 LIFE-DANCE ENTRY: Neighbor: Twin Oaks Community in Virginia. Instead of the cultural fire I hoped to start here, the fire of healthy culture, of Living over Surviving, I kneel after 2 years--although strangely without complaint--over embers. A bit less soggy than the place I was before, the tender here seems a little better, and my flame is perhaps a little stronger--it is not a dying ember; the Life-Dance is not dead here; P. and I are dancing as best we can. Besides, its good for me to kneel and to blow , to show some patience with myself and the world. Its good for me just to remain so long this close to the ground... Family Member: The house Tupelo is mellower nowadays. I don't want to underestimate the the potential for real friendliness here. At the same time, of intimate, living friendship I see little sign. I tease and joke with I. and her children. With others, an occasional talk in the kitchen of Jam in the music room. House meetings still make me feel a little alienated. I wrote my mother a letter but more on that in another time and place. Citizen of the world: This log as a personal civil gesture towards healthy culture and a Personal rather than public or private world order. A guesture of friendship and invitation to strangers considered as Indivdual family members, neighbors, citizens and souls. And of healthy Information. And this is my first Life-Dance entry. Hope-fully these kinds of entries will get more concise, integrative, and evocatively poetic as time goes by. Only poetry or song can begin to approach truthfullness regarding a dance of Living that is inherently paradoxical. Still its only information and I need to get myself out of this boondocs more and into Richmond or Charlottesville, for some real Personal politics. Can I really be personal in a private venue if I cant be so in a public one? Indivdual: Things I'm doing alone. Self-Breema, Chi Gung, study. A Vision Quest a little more than a month ago, another a couple of months hence. Am I still mostly raw? Maybe 55% or so. It doesnt really bother me but I want to work on it. 70% seems reasonable under the circumstances. Pastel music these days, balanced I hope, by lyrics of darker shades. Some of my songs seem to approach Christopher Alexanders' architectural esthetic in Vol. 2 of "The Nature of order". Some kind of lightness, and hardness and longing...Joy and grief, grimness and wonder...Soul: dont think that I am so uninhibited that I will "bear all of my soul" here; secrets are usually unheathy but I never said I was "healthy" exactly, just "healing". Snake, Virgo, "Scholar" , enneagram 5, Introvert. To take as my motto "here I am--deal with me." To enact as much as relate the Living Truth. Sophisticated Humble deliberation and authority rather than prejudice, vanity, and phobia. I get there sometime, but fear and neurosis remain as well. The Michael Teaching and a group here at Twin Oaks forming around them. Not quite the court at which I'd feel happiest confessing, but some real potential I think... |
thanks to squidfingers for the background