Saturday, March 1, 2008

self portrait on Thursday



Thursday I thought I was the luckiest person in the world. It was a cool morning and an hour before yoga and I had my camera. Roaming the alleyways of Hyde Park I marveled at what lengths homeowners have gone to in tidying up the alleys. There is some sadness in over-tidiness, and I mourn the lack of respect for the accretive histories of dust (recall Sebald's artist in the studio?). I guess I romanticize dust. God knows there is plenty of it at my house--the ancient leather of my grandfathers cameras decays and flakes away, becomes part of what we breathe, the heaviness of the air we swim through.

Yoga was particularly good, and we ended with Om-ing that always leaves my head humming in another space, and all that immensity of love just swells--I feel a drought of outlets for it. I spill it and slosh it everywhere, but the bucket is forever being refilled from some unending source, watering little.

Lying in the sun during sivasana, I watched the tiny particles of dust waft into the angle of light that split the shadows of the room. It was as if they only existed for that singular moment that they were caught the slant of light, burning with intense fiery existence, and then emptied out into the other side of nothingness. Burning is the metaphor this week, a searing intensity of emotion flaming through--I know that emptiness awaits on the other side where the shadow lingers, but the knowledge doesn't temper the heat.