The wind...

There are many pieces of writing I have written but not posted on the blog.  I often write something and feel, "no, that is not quite it," or, " no, that is not it at all".  This is one of those posts.  I wrote it a few weeks ago.  It touches on some subjects I care deeply about and hope to learn to adequately express at some future date.

Last night, the city was filled with the terrific sounds of wind and rain.  And this morning the clouds were breaking, the sun shining on a clear, crisp, wet land.  I ran up through Little Saigon until I peaked up over the hill and could see the bay.  From the start of the run I could feel strands of sore muscles from my run through Chinatown yesterday - a run which always leads me to fantasize about learning Mandarin and cooking with the various vegetables and herbs on display, exploring the restaurants and bars and teashops, and weaving myself into a population I have no interaction with.

There are times when I unequivocally experience the body as a miracle, a mystical vehicle, an alchemical apparatus.  I shy away from saying such things because I know how easily misinterpreted, strange, or intellectually pretentious and vacuous they may sound.  All I mean is that, like the precepts, which we can always go deeper into and become enlightened by, we can continuously go deeper into understanding the body and become enlightened by our understanding of the body.  Understanding the body can transform us and harmonize us with the rest of the world.

As I started the run I could feel the area at the bottom lower left of my right knee that often starts to hurt - still sore from yesterday.  There have been times when I've had to walk a few miles home because of that pain.  I slowly jogged in place, letting my entire body soften, getting into the mentality or somatic space of simply being with the body.  The pain didn't go away, but I softened into it, embraced it.  As I ran with this pain and my tired muscles, felt them, noticed them, nurtured them, the entire body softened, and I felt this pain in my knee was like a blooming flower.  I'm not sure how to describe what that means - the best I can do in this moment is to say that the pain did not go away, but transformed into something beautiful, transformed from being something I was slightly upset by into something that was helping me awaken to myself.  

Running, like zazen, gives me the freedom to soften, to hold lightly, to be with.  It gives me the freedom to notice many things without holding to any of them - to simply notice phenomena and be with what I notice.  There is no wanting.  This soft place of noticing, being with, and not wanting is a place I experience as filled with love: loving not only other beings, but all that is noticed.  Like zazen it can be mystical: through running I can feel an incredible harmony with the universe.  Running as harmony and togetherness: yesterday as I ran, I looked up into the sky to feel and love the rain on my face: I was together with the rain.  I worked with it.  I was together with the ground: I felt everything about the quality of the ground and my feet on it.  I should not say everything, but rather, I noticed much that was between us.  Together with the ground, I hardly had to look at it - I gazed at the sky for a long time, feeling my body moving and working with the world around it. 

Running is like zazen because, for me, they are activities that open up a space to work with all being.

And just for the sake of being tangential, here is one: it is these experiences of working with being, and feeling together with being, that allow to me to feel a kinship with and love for so many radically alien religious experiences and perspectives: being with the wind on my face, I feel like I know the winds, feel like I could know many winds - the cool dry ones, the cool wet ones; the ones that enliven and give energy, the ones that drain us.  I feel like I know them in such a way that, if I got to know them just a bit better, that I would want to name them, personify them - understand who they are, where they come from, how they feel, how they interact with the rest of the world

Perhaps gods are ways of getting to know all the forces around us, of honoring all those forces that we are together with.  Perhaps the gods don't exist, but is that the point?  The winds do, and so do our experiences of them - and our relationships with them.  By which I mean, we do not simply experience wind, we have the opportunity to cultivate the way we experience and know wind.  What does it look like to really get to know the varieties of wind, the energies of sun and moon, etc?  Rather than the tired old explanation of "gods as the way people explained the world before science," (which for the most part is just an assumption people make, but is not actually founded in history), how about this: the human fabrication of gods as technique for cultivating relationships to the various elements of being... and technique not being equated with "truth".  I often feel that other cultures, through placing less of a premium on "truth", perhaps, just perhaps, were able to deepen their relationships with being... (I recall - years ago and I can't remember in what texts - encountering a few stories where anthropologists, out in "the bush" somewhere, asked: "Do you guys really believe in this stuff?"  And the "natives" laughed hysterically - "this guy thinks we actually believe the gods of the wind really do have long white beards...!")    

That tangent could turn into a short book, but anyway...  I was at the intersection of Larkin and McAllister waiting for a light, and the wind was so strong that it pushed me back as I ran in place.  I jumped higher into the air and let it push me back.  I thought of my old friend Tico-Tico, who I played Capoeira with a decade ago.  Tico-Tico said that our mestre named him after a little bird who hopped around, but would float for a second with each hop.   Tico-Tico knew how to float, and I thought of him because I felt like I was floating, or almost floating: almost floating with a great capacity to float.  The light turned and I started running into the wind.  I imagined that the wind opened up a space for me to run into, and upon imagining this I felt that the wind embraced me.   

Fantasy, and fantasy turning into a real experience, has always been a part of running for me.  And so running is one of the great antidotes for myself having become so serious and academic over the past half a decade.  While running imaginations and memories and feelings spread out endlessly.  I remembered with crystal clarity a 400 meter race I ran in the ninth grade against a dozen other schools leading up to the central California championships.  Coming around the first bend into the straightaway, the wind tore into all of us.  It pushed all the others immediately back.  I remember feeling completely in tune with that force and how I suddenly moved faster and finished 20 or 30 meters ahead of everyone else.  And then I began reading Greek stories about gods who prefer certain heroes, and I felt I understood that.  It a great spiritual matter to pray, with the body, and allow oneself to completely embrace the wind. Not only this, but to be embraced by the wind, even to imagine that the wind is with you and supporting you.  We may be well aware that the wind had no consciousness and is not in fact supporting us.  But it is a great spiritual matter to let the wind be a god. In my own way I believe in all the gods that have ever and could ever possibly exist.