Darkness envelops and holds, cradling each others’ hearts. Time expanding and contracting with breath. Breathing. Finding, winding, and unwinding. A motion, a caress, a twitch, an exchange, a change. A new side, a new place, a new space. Return. Lingering thoughts enmesh with contact and change. We dive inward and weave through our paths, trying on futures and pasts. Hopes and fears and memories and visions dancing in time, in prime, entwined.

Fifty-two days. Of continuous, growing certainty. Of learning. Of tasting. Of realizing more is possible than was ever imagined before. The light pours in from the slanted blinds, marching through the windows with the morning air, matching the dreamy essence of wakefulness, pulling, prodding, gently teasing us to consciousness. Sleep is peeling back, slowly, and the continuous unperceived reminder that you are there, you are here, you are, inside, gives way to perception of you here, there, a part of me. Smiling, gratefulness. First contact with lazer blueness, gleaming dreamy lusciousness. And the spine-tingling crackling that fills us. Together. A new day.

The changes have taken hold in me too, and my own fall is imminent. I wake up contemplating it, tossing it about. When to let go? When to give in? When to dive in? The timing will be perfect when it’s perfect. I’ve never held back. I’ve never waited. But now I’m struck by an attack of patience, of restraint, in very small ways. Symbols dance in my mind, sugarplums of all. The retrograde stream pulls things into perspective, although maybe not in preferred ways. And still I wait. Watching. Feeling. Trying to be true to it all.

We dance, we sink, we fall. Into the black sand castle.

No separate, no end, no start, no pretend. No pretense. No rend. The stars light the deep overhead and blend the blanket between live and dead. A dark, a part. A start.

Future love dances. And lives. And bleeds. Shedding the trial, the difference, the weeds of mind that overgrow. Overflow. Join the show.

In ma.  In peace.  In breath.

Maneuvering.  Sic, mandating.  Vis a vis.  When once the time has come again time it shall be.  Again.  But never yet not yet.  To see I must wipe the distractions from my face.  The skin and the drink, the doldrums and the sink.  The narrowest slit of a needle eye, but bright and full and beaconing me.  The swell has found me, and caught me, and in it I now pass onward.  Time distances all things but death, ever closing, ever winning.  And so to myself I mutter in conspicuous capitulation: Head up man, lets do what we’re here to do.

skullstudy, Erik Jacobsen

In particular, it sucks.

I just can’t take the punishment as well. For example, a little sailing race last night and this morning my upper thoracic spine feels like solid iron. Wonderful. I paddle out once a week and now my shoulders have decided to refrain from any asana cooperation whatsoever. And somewhere in the last few weeks, my right ankle has started feeling destabilized, and my right wrist is bugging me. Creaky bones. Not enough to stop my practice, but enough to slow it the hell down. Shit.

And yeah, I’m bitching about getting older. I know. It blows. Acceptance coming. Deep sadhana.

Sleep comes, sleep goes, but the night always shows the slipping sand through my toes. I hide in my little ways, trying to figure out how to avoid laying down. The darkness envelops and surrounds, muffling sounds, nothing quite lost, but nothing found. Will dawn be soon? Ah no. More time to stare up at the white, more time to face the black, chest feeling tight. I wake to stifled breath, with no answers. Restriction pulling me fully, raggedly, awake. My practice the only way back to sleep. My devotion the only way to keep my head, my shaggy mental heap.

Summer slows, summer glows. Two years now gone by from the down. Two years of poorly practiced patience, gone round. And so many more years to go, so many more days to show the lost as found. Smells of summer abound. The heaving luscious welcome ocean ground, watery homeward bound. Breath rise and fall, listening to the summer sound.

Resurfacing to this world again. Here again. Back again. Solidly fidgeting in place, watching my breath shorten and squeeze, doing what I can to soothe the aching sensation of depressurization away from my paradise, my constant embrace. Sea legs, in reverse. Slight stumbling as the emotions absorb the return to this old life. My escape was temporary, yet so total that now I’m disoriented with my Real Life. I don’t entirely recognize it. Almost as if I had been previously watching it all as a movie, and now I reach out my fingers and try to prove to myself it’s real. Again. Less than subconsious attempts at surrounding myself in liquid: if it rolls off my skin, I pour it inside, trying to fill the empty spot, trying to affect the embrace that compressed the emptiness to nothing.

Breath lengthening. Breath lightening. My mission clear, my methodology muddled and gray. I can see where the path leads but I can’t see the fucking thing itself. Maybe this is the feeling of making one’s path, truly, honestly, daringly…? Regardless, onward. A new decade, a new orbit, another sloughing of skin, another chance.

Such spaces hold only those who fall there.  No desire brings one willingly.  Only suffering, or wishful remorse, or subsequent alienation, or passive-aggressiveness, or lack of motivation, or subtle ignorance, or shallow forethought.  And then there are those that learn how to say no.  No becomes as no is.  No suddenly draws all the fire, all the ire, all the murk and mess.  But it shields itself in its own bliss, laughing off the gusts of experience like water off a duck.  One must pick their experience after all.  Perhaps the level of experience?  Perhaps.  Most likely not, as level is as level does, and frequently level only means: mis-interpreted.

Phantoms.

Loose among the reeds, scattering among leaves, listening like thieves.  Dream spaces left upside of all, wishing finally to fall.  In fall.  IN fall.  Inward fall.  Inward sprawl.  The dive down in takes its own spin, and later stays strung out and listing, waiting for the proper call.  At your wall.  The listening takes upwards, and inwards and finally outwards.  Uncontained, unwieldy, unforgiving.  Lastly living the place of peace.