Joey’s Swamp
Georgia meets Maryland in the Okefenokee Swamp
Elena and I are self-professed Swamp-Trotters — she being a plein air painter and amateur botanist always keenly on the lookout for a fresh scene or a rare specimen; and me as her faithful scout, up front doing the heavy-lifting and steering the canoe or kayak from behind.
Last month we returned to one of our favorite swamps. This time, we took Joey’s boat tour of the Okefenokee in the company of nearly a dozen other tourists. That’s Joey in today’s picture. Joey hails from Georgia, a seventh-generation swamper proudly married into an eighth-generation family.
Elena and I had wanted to gauge for ourselves damage done to the Swamp by its recent 80% burn-over. As we set out, Joey reassured us. “Happens pretty often, and it’s a good thing. If we didn’t get fires, this would be the Okefenokee Forest.” Turns out his Swamp is the second most often lightning-struck place in America, with Tampa, Florida being numero uno.
“You can’t be shy on a job like this.” Joey, you realize pretty quickly, is what the French call “formidable.” Southern and effortlessly funny enough to claim billing on a Blue Collar Comedy Tour, he was also painlessly putting over a steady stream of pertinent, interesting facts, including such seeming esoterica as his up-to-date speculations about why cypresses have knees (stability, or for more oxygen?).
Joey was pretty out-front about hoping for tips. He confessed manfully to having needed to take government money for a week or two, recently, because local tourism is way down. Today’s boatload, while affluent-looking enough, displayed that flatscreen-stunned passivity on public occasions which bodes so ill for participatory democracy in the looming conformist future being prepared for once-free Americans.
I cannot seem to relax in any situation where I am watching performers struggle to connect with their audience. So I took it upon myself, as a professional courtesy, one underpaid performer to another, to play Maryland straight man to Joey’s Georgia, to help warm up our boatload of gawkers. We’d all end up having a better time.
My guy-to-guy instinct assured me Joey could have handled anything humanly conceivable that might have broken out in that little tour boat (“This is not Disneyland,” he mentioned at one point. “Those gators ain’t animatronic. If one tries to climb into the boat…”). So I proceeded to “do” reactions and feed him set-ups, then shut up as he gradually began to draw into the discussion questions and quips from the other folks.
Joey knew what was up, and he could tell I enjoyed it, too, and for the hell of it, he had Elena take a snapshot of us during part of the tour where he landed the boat and stepped out to demonstrate the “trembling earth,” as Native Americans once called this swamp prairie.
He also showed us how to chose and eat a delicious golden-tipped spear known as Never Wet, so called because a fine mesh of tiny fibers keeps away the water (“It can dip under and come up dry as it went down.”) Good crunch, nice mouth-feel, and a little radish heat that makes it tasted like excellent salad fodder. And we got it straight, my huckleberry friend, that a huckleberry is just another way of saying blueberry.
By then in the tour, almost everybody in our party had loosened up enough to tell little stories of their old days and old ways from where they grew up and lived all around the country. We in Joey’s boat, mostly of a generation, had also all grown up in the same place, it turned out seeming like, because no matter where we haled from, here and now in the Swamp, we regained our former human certainty about Nature, our childlike intuition of a welcoming infinitely-enriching plenitude around us.
I like bucketlist@wordpress.com, for example, because starring yourself dramatizing the world through expensive “event” tourism is the admirable cream at the top of a vast array of endless travel possibilities. But what Joey’s tour reminded us about was how, happily, inexpensive human-scale tourism does not crush you. You are not just another brittle eco-conformist, one of the passive, hushed and humbled communicants of a sacred government-controlled “environment” which people are said to somehow always be “threatening.”
Stepping up on the dock after the tour, we men each slipped Joey a few bucks. I gave him a five-dollar handshake and said, “Sometimes it helps to have a straight man, to warm up the house.”
“Tell the folks back home to come on down,” Joey told me to tell you. “We need to see ’em, and there’s a lot here to enjoy.”
Amen. Ask for Joey.
Exile No More
Home again, exile…
The skull attic exile who plays simple brain-games like Floating the Triplex and Rolling Along the Midway (see previous posts) has come two-thirds of the way back home again to his lost empire.
Triplex is simultaneous awareness of the crown of the head and tips of fingers and toes — it is an overview of the lost empire. Midway rolls a point of sensitivity up and down, back and front, around the body — it is a walking-tour of the lost empire. Lastly, comes Sinking Your Weight: learning to do what Chinese boxers call “rooting.” This is you, exile, taking command of your empire once again and forever!
How to stand easy
Think of it this way. A little boy hypnotized by a toy store window never wants to leave. Anybody who ever tried leading the child away knows what happens next. The kid permits you to take his small hand, but the limp arm isn’t connected to anything anymore, having become what tai chi chuan calls “empty.”
Tugging on it does not move the little body. A firm yank (“Come on!”) only causes him to sway toward you and then sway back, shining eyes always fixed on one special toy. The fact is, to get him moving along, you must “break the root” by lifting the stubborn young man off his feet.
Chinese “soft” boxing cultivates in adults this same ability to instantly become rooted to the spot. The fighter who keeps the best balance has the best chance of winning the fight; and a gentle but expertly placed push by a well-rooted tai chi player can send you staggering backwards, arms windmilling, half the length of a basketball court.
How do adults learn to root like a child? One way is by practicing a chi gung posture called Holding the Ball (or the Tree or the Column, etc.) Chi gung is standing meditation, and this version is done with arms rounded out, fingers almost touching, as if you were hugging a beach ball.
Holding the Ball you suspend your crown from tai chi’s famous “golden thread” and dangle yourself like a med-school skeleton while systematically willing yourself to relax from head to toe. This feels like you are sinking your weight down your body. You feel wonderfully light and loose and limber up above your unrelaxed weight.
After a while, when legs tire from standing, people shift weight to their other foot or change stance, which offers some relief but only displaces the same tension elsewhere. Soon, if you can’t sit down, the legs start trembling. But there’s another solution. Take command of yourself.
You can master trembling legs, not by moving, but simply by consciously relaxing these twitchy muscles, by continuing to sink your weight farther and farther down both legs. Comes a day when your weight feels as if it goes right through the soles of your feet and into the floor, and, just like that, you are rooting. From this day forward, you can stand motionless and in perfect comfort for however long you must.
Skull attic exile trio
Triumphantly, this is the third and final of our skull attic exile games.
Exile, once you were cheated out of your body like a younger son in a bad kung-fu movie. To return in fact is to physically re-experience being there again. There can be no other meaningful definition. Agreed?
So, to remind yourself of your stolen holding’s boundaries, Triplex is like standing on the highest hilltop commanding your land in one panoramic view. Then, Midway takes the former exile for a walk around your grounds and back up the hill again. And, lastly, Sinking Your Weight makes a physical fact out of your moving back in, by consciously taking control of every inch of the no-longer-lost empire. Welcome home!
There may be a million other ways, such as years of yoga and tai chi, but these three easy brain-games can, will and do re-establish a good working mind/body unity. An endless amount of other challenging possibilities now emerges for the new old you to explore — what’s all this chi we hear so much about? — but those adventures must wait to be discussed until another day.
After so much blogging on this one esoteric subject, let me end these recent posts with a joke on me. What follows is, I swear to God, a true story.
Whaaa?! Turning into a munchkin
So, on this one night, I was just standing, eyes closed, dangling and sinking and rooting, when Something Weird Happened. I… compacted. I felt the top of me was sinking slowly into my own legs. I felt half as tall as I really am, as if I were now wearing my shoulders around my waist.
Seriously.
I experienced this compacting as an absolute physical event — the first new physical sensation inside my body since junior high. My six-four slowly but surely compacted into a body that felt, from the inside, to now be about the height of a munchkin.
It didn’t hurt or feel unpleasant. In fact, for a brand-new experience, compacting felt sort of natural. And it didn’t frighten me, either — remember how completely relaxed I was — because I knew I hadn’t actually shrunk.
Or had I?!
Do we ever stop believing in magic? I did open one eye and check to make sure all the furniture in the room was still being looked down on.
Weeks later, after I could perform the compacting at will, a Chinese stylist friend of mine set me to reading certain key passages in the tai chi classics, and I understood better what before seemed obscure.
Good luck, exiles! Nothing beats being home again!
Exile’s Triumph
...poor skull attic exile…
The exile in question is our poor skull attic exile, driven out of full-possession of his/her body at adolescence. (Lost? Check out “Revolt of the Skull Attic Exile” and “Exile’s Return.”)
Mind/body unity is the natural and most healthy relationship a person can have with their own flesh. It is essentially how you were as a child. We adults are not androids carrying around our brains in a box. Pretending that we can be so divorced from our body is a sure prelude to sickness-unto-death for the mind and body.
This is not a blogger’s opinion; it is an ancient axiom of both Western and Eastern medicine.
Having previously described the school-days genesis of this split, I then recommended floating your Triplex as an easy brain-game that begins the exile’s return. Today let me offer the second of three steps to take you home again: another easy psychosomatic exercise called Midway which was previously described in “How To Go Back To Sleep.”
Rolling along your Midway
Stretch out on your back, arms comfortably disposed, breathe normally and relax. The idea will be to trace one continuous line around your entire body, back to front, top to bottom, using a single point of sensitivity no bigger than a dime.
So become aware of — feel as a point of sensitivity — the lip-notch under your nose, then slowly and steadily move this sensitive point downward over your lips, around the curve of your chin, across the Adam’s Apple, and so on straight along the center-line of your torso. No rush, but keep the point moving and truly feel the skin.
At about three inches below your navel, pass the point of sensitivity through your body, dividing it into two points, and move these twin points in parallel at the same time lower on your upper thighs, knees, calves — keep on feeling both areas of skin simultaneously — around the heels and up over the middle toes and mounting the front of both legs.
Arriving at the pelvis, the two sensitive points merge into one and cross through your body again, and travel now up your spine, between the shoulder blades, between the twin tendons of your neck, up and over the crown of your head, down the forehead, down your nose like a drop of water running right back again to where you started at the nose-notch.
Three runs-around is a good start. Learn to do it at will.
Monkey-Brain Warning Alert!
As with Triplex, the sole obstacle to playing Midway is, not your body, but your mind itself.
Your mind is a jealous god, and more than likely you live in thrall to it. The mind has been primary in your adult life for so long, it will resent your regaining self-control by a simple act of will. Monkey-brain likes living in exile. It will actively work against your best interests since this exercise of will power proves you are not altogether or merely your mind.
First, it will tell you you are bored by Triplex or Midway. And if you think you are only your mind, you will believe it and stop playing because, after all, aren’t you, like, bored? Chuckle So it acts like a spoiled child: “This is stupid. Do something else.”
Please, don’t stop playing but be alert, or else the mind will begin slyly substituting for the actual experience only the idea or image of floating your Triplex or of tracing a point of feeling around your body. No good! This playing at playing will short-fuse the beneficent mind/body games.
So gently insist, calm your dear chattering ugly little monkey-brain, and go right on playing. What monkey-brain fears is a demotion will actually benefit your entire mind/body. Sanity is the good health of the mind just as good health is the sanity of the body.
Tomorrow! Sinking Your Weight — The third and final of the trio of mind/body-building games — never get tired standing up… And why such a neat little skill makes a big mind/body difference!
Exile’s Return
…a body full of mind — a mind full of body…
As promised yesterday, today we go into the mechanics of “floating your Triplex.”
This brain-game is how we begin coaxing skull attic exiles down, to stop them from haunting their own lives and begin reclaiming those fabled lost kingdoms, their bodies.
Remember, a kid can play this game almost immediately because his/her body is always naturally present as simply being themselves. The much-vaunted term “mind/body unity” amounts to very little more, initially, than reestablishing childhood’s natural and full sense of self.
Most adults only pay attention to their insides if they hurt strangely or feel especially good. So, barring agony or ecstasy, the little exile inside the skull goes on year after year, crouching up there behind a pair of bleary eyes, forever scanning flat-screens at work, at home, in the palm of your hand, on TV, while watching movies, video gaming…
No more! Exile is over!
Floating Your Triplex
Traditionally, meditation comes at the end of a tough martial arts class, when sweaty students sit cross-legged on the floor, eyes shut, trying to control their panting. The rule says even the youngest must keep their eyes closed, so, for something to do alone in the dark, masters teach little whitebelts a mind/body-building game called Triplex.
Triplex can be played instantly, motionless, anywhere. Take a second to notice how the top of your head is feeling, right on the crown, then be sensitive to your ten fingertips, and lastly to the tips of all your toes. Now stay aware of all these feelings at once. “Stay” is how you play. From second to second, keep the high, middle and low levels of sensation — your triplex — balanced in one single simultaneous act of awareness.
Top of the head, tips of fingers and toes. Simple, right? You are cultivating possession of your own extremities. You are sizing yourself. We call this “floating your Triplex.” Do it until you can do it effortlessly. Takes only a very little practice. It is literally child’s play.
Oh, sure, occasionally a silly whitebelt announces it cannot be done. But, although you can only think productively of one thing at a time, your mind can easily be aware of feeling many different sensations at once. If you are nodding your head to the beat of a band, clapping your hands and tapping your foot, it is exactly because you feel all three sensations happening together that they are so much fun to do.
Tomorrow: Exile’s Triumph! We will review “rolling around your Midway,” plus: a bonus skill — How to Stand Up Forever and Never Get Tired.
Revolt of the Skull Attic Exile!
The mind has a body, of course, but the body has a mind of its own.
When I posted “How To Go Back To Sleep,” recently, I was guilty of leap-frogging over “floating the Triplex” and, instead, immediately started you off with “how to roll down your Midway.”
I know, I know, this terminology is a wee but obscure, but give me a second. Nothing in this is really at all difficult; and I’m trying to lay a pearl beyond price in the palm of your hand, okay? Bear with me.
What I wrote remains true. Midway will help you outwit insomnia, but it serves best, in its largest context, as the second of the two easy brain-games out of Mind/Body For Dummies.
So today I’m going to recall how childhood’s normal mind/body got stolen from you. Then, tomorrow and on Friday, we will cover a childishly simple means by which you can re-achieve, immediately and without mysticism, the feels-good psychosomatic healing which is what sages mean by your “mind/body unity.”
No brag, just fact.
You Lost It In High School
Growing life feels good. Every day, without any effort on their part, children become stronger, taller and more mature. It is almost all they have ever known of biological destiny; and this constant experience of ceaseless and happy maturation goes on, unearned yet inherently optimistic and enriching. The wind is always beneath their wings.
The tapering off of growth in the late teens and early twenties signals but does not account for the disappearance of innocent mind/body wholeness. Instead, more bewildering and final, all of adulthood arrives. The oldest story.
Family relatives no longer marvel at how big you’re becoming. The easy-going neighborhood friendships get left behind. New people stop smiling down at you because now you’re tall enough to meet eye-to-eye. Passing strangers, flat-faced or grinning hungrily, look over your body and think about you and sex. Pimples; body hair; the first orgasm. Playtime is over.
As a child, you always had secrets, fears and dreams, but these arose spontaneously and from the whole self as naturally as how you always blurted out the first words that came into your head. By junior high and high school, however, you are drowning in mirrors.
Adolescent self-consciousness plunges you — raw, hormonal and unprepared — into seesawing social status, emotional games, a future to win, physical dangers, the need to belong and intense sexual self-consciousness. You are playing now, not for toys, but for other kids’ bodies.
Do you remember what you did?
You created a little person — the real you — who kneels in your skull and looks out through your eyes. You shattered the mind/body and withdrew yourself from full possession of a hairy, grown-up body which, since it was now sexually accessible to others, no longer entirely belonged to you anymore.
Out of fear of not being loveable, you proudly did all that was left to do for the now-deposed and humiliated former emperor of a once-infinite kingdom of childhood. You split yourself up and created two adults where before there only used to be one whole kid.
Most adolescents who are lucky enough to come from close-knit families will experience their distancing from childhood as a gradual ironic separation between how we must live and what we really feel. The catastrophe of the few comes when this physic split happens suddenly and in a child’s panic.
Did you, too, end up a skull exile haunting your own life after moving upstairs into the bone attic? Whatever happened to that perfectly good body you abandoned in high school?
Tomorrow: Exile’s Return! — the skull attic exile recaptures his lost kingdom of mind/body by playing brain-games in the dark with his eyes closed.
One Up On John Travolta
Florida and old friends came together on Amelia Island, last week, just a few blocks from where John Grisham is running a catwalk up between his two new ocean-view homes.
Town ordinances forbid blocking the regularly-spaced exposure to the shore which mansions would certainly do; and this thoughtfulness about the future of their snug little island is what keeps Amelia pretty and low-key enough to attract off-duty celebrities, including my wife’s patron, John Travolta, who has a home here as well.
“Patron” is a family joke, but Travolta does own one of Elena Maza’s quiet gems: the perfect palmy tropical island receding in the wake of an unseen ship whose fantail you are standing on: “The Island.” Her original oil painting sold years ago; his is a copy. Now do you want to know a secret which, in all likelihood, the movie star himself hasn’t noticed yet? If you look to the right, look beneath the wake, you can just make out a swimming sea turtle.
The only problem with the dream scenario consequent upon knowing this tidbit — you, casually admiring his collection one evening before dinner, offhandedly gesturing: “I like the way the sea turtle only emerges when you’ve savored the entire composition sufficiently, don’t you, John?” — the trouble is both Elena and I agree that, since “The Island” is a smallish picture, it’s probably hung in one of his yacht’s loos.
So my wife, the very fine artist, and I — whatever it is I do — gratefully soaked up our time in the sun, sharing the Lanes’ gracious high-tech home. One is proud to have such excellent, civic-minded friends. If their way of living is retirement, maybe we ought to all retire because in sum the world would be a better place for it.
Judy Lane is among the most remarkable women I’ve ever known: the very type of that imperative postmodern breed, the international consultant, who now offers her community the benefits of a brilliant and richly-experienced mind. Judy kindly schooled me once she noticed I pay attention to intelligent women, having married a specimen of the breed.
And what quick words can convey a tenth of Sam Lane, my oldest friend? Errol Flynn as Robin Hood says, “I love a man who can best me.” Sam Lane bests me every time — always has, always will.
Thanks, guys. As Noel Coward sang: “I’ll see you again…”
FOOTNOTE: This post is one of herbork’s most popular, so, a year later, I’ve finally linked to Elena’s picture. John Travolta bought from an Annapolis, Maryland art gallery a 9’x12′ giclee print of “Island” exactly as sold here. http://www.imagekind.com/Island_art?IMID=b861b2aa-f021-4c00-b6cc-bacf0731810a
Off to Florida
Posting may get spotty next week…
I’m off to Florida, to stay with my oldest friend in the world, and to go swamp-trotting beside the most wonderful woman in the world, who, as fate would have it, just happens to be my wife, Elena. Keep in touch, dear friends, and WATCH THIS SPACE!
The Limits of Enlightenment
“If you work on your mind with your mind, how can you avoid a terrible confusion?” — famous old Zen riddle
Satori? Nothing mysterious about it. Everybody, even a roaring atheist, knows a great deal about spiritual enlightenment.
After all, seers and sages have been anatomizing ultimate reality for as long as human records survive. So many different texts turn up that we begin to suspect achieving enlightenment, like climbing Everest, is unusual but not impossible.
What else do we know? To begin with, we can say for certain that reaching ultimate reality is not like passing through a shimmering force field into a greener land bearing a brighter sun. The involuntary testimony of a god and a saint, their shocked suffering under torture, proves this, soberingly enough.
Christ’s agonies on the Cross reduced Him to begging out loud for some explanation: “My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Jesus revealed a horrified terror no different than that of St. Joan of Arc, of whom it was reported by some who watched her burn at the stake, the Maid of Orleans never truly believed God would let the fire hurt her until the flames actually reached her flesh.
And, therefore, neither deities in mortal form nor saints come among us as virgin soldiers can mentally will themselves across a barrier into any mode of Being which evades the worst necessity of human flesh — to suffer.
Their spirits suffered even worse. “What if I was wrong?” What tears at us in St. Joan’s screams as in Christ’s silence is the terrible plummeting of a super-human into all-too-human doubt. “What if I was wrong about… everything?”
All lovers want is for the loving never to stop. And suddenly, at the worst moment of their greatest need, God doesn’t answer their calls. So, to the suffering bodies and shattered certainties of Christ and the Maid, now a third torture was also added, something simple and pathetic: a lover’s broken heart.
Helpless not to feel betrayed, for a few moments Jesus and Joan at last become enough like the generations of the rest of us to join in humanity’s never-ending reproach to God. Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor lectures Christ: “You ask too much of us!”
Young martial artists make the same complaint to their masters.
Dry to the Bone
Conformists worship sterility.
An unpleasant thought, but now that we’ve broached it…
How better to describe those who make by Law a civic virtue of banging your own sex and killing your own babies? Not much interest among conformists in advancing the human race, I take it? Do you suppose this explains tragic dying conformist-dominated Western Europe?
Well, conformists, be that as it may, your frigid self-loathing, although no doubt richly deserved personally, is, by and large, writ much too large in the public affairs of our plurality. The vast majority is Us, the ones who love our lives, love being human and want our kids to be, too, thank you.
Conformists always say they love animals, but that’s silly. Everybody knows conformists can’t love. Many of you have dated several or married some, so you know what I mean. No, what conformists really believe is animals are more important than people. Little babies are the enemy of Gaea.
Such a shame. Of course, it is an ancient truism that people who like animals too much like people too little. Sentimentality, dear PETA, is caring more for something than reality does. But it also explains why nowadays our offspring at government schools are not educated as children but trained like pets.
And, entre nous, I don’t care much for conformists.
How To Go Back To Sleep
A joy forever…
Here is a simple and effective technique for getting back to sleep when an over-active brain wakes you up at night and won’t stop yammering. The provenance of this sleepy-time gift is auspicious as hell — a world-historical individual named Robert W. Smith, author of the first important book about tai chi in English.
In the Seventies, I became Bob’s closed-door student. Never mind how I ended up taking private instruction from a martial arts legend — the breakthrough first Western student of Professor Chen Man Ching, China’s last great unbeatable “soft” boxer.
I know, I know, what does all of that mean? Isn’t important for now. What I want to get across is simply this. During those Disco Nights, while others were busy dancing The Hustle in a white polyester suit, a man I admired down to the ground, a man as American as Spencer Tracy, hipped me to the difference between how Westerners and Asians inhabit their bodies.
Sounds innocent enough, perhaps, yet it opens onto the universe next door, and so what it leads to, over years of study of chi by even a slow learner, is profound beyond fascination. However, be that as it may, what I wanted to explain now was a little mind game Bob taught us which I call Midway.
Want to drop back off to sleep? Try this…
Stretch out on your back, arms comfortably disposed, breath normally and relax. The idea will be to trace one continuous line around your entire body, back and front, top to bottom, with a single moving point of sensitivity no bigger than a dime.
So become aware of — feel as a point of sensitivity — the lip-notch under your nose, then slowly and steadily move this sensitive point downward over your lips, around the curve of your chin, across the Adam’s Apple, and so on straight along the center-line of your torso. No rush, but keep the point moving and truly feel the skin.
At about three inches below your navel, pass the point of sensitivity through your body, dividing it into two points, and, always feeling both areas of skin simultaneously, move these twin points in parallel at the same time lower on your upper thighs, knees, calves, around the heels and up over the middle toes and mounting the front of both legs.
Arriving at the pelvis, the two sensitive points merge into one and cross through your body again, and travel now up your spine, between the shoulder blades, between the twin tendons of your neck, up and over the top of your head, down the forehead, like a drop of water running down your nose, right back again where you started, at the nose-notch.
Keep your Midway going for, say, three cycles. No matter how hyper my mind gets at night, when I can’t drop off to sleep, I’ve yet to make it through a fourth cycle of Midway. Remember, you must not fool yourself by merely visualizing the path you are tracing but must truly feel your own flesh every inch of the way.
Easy and fun and good for you in all sorts of esoteric Chinese-medical ways we can go into some other time. Have a good night’s sleep on Herbork.
Thanks, Bob.
Herbork 