Night Play

It is about 6:30 and I have not looked at the clock since a little after 5. More than an hour of play and it has passed delightfully as if it were only 15 minutes. Before I went to sleep last night I watched a TED talk by Evelyn Glennie on listening to music with your body. I woke from a dream of playing a duet, improvising with the mallets and with an invisible partner on a small marimba. Now (to go back to the warmth of my bed) I am lying breathing into my body. I have earplugs in to soften the city sounds and a sleep mask for darkness and I am hearing from inside, the breaths jetting in and out as I pull and push the air more insistently. I am a resonator and my throat is now the pipe connecting the screen of the theater in my head to the often neglected caverns of an imagined hollow body. I pull a little harder and the rushing air strokes my vocal cords into life a warbling chant pouring out into the darkness.

A rush of warmth and trembling and joyful excitement softens all my body edges and boundaries and I expand into the disappearing bed. It is the same light-filled and life-filled sacred space which shakes me in prayer and also the nurturing darkness of a star-filled innerverse into which I disappear at other times my limbs no longer compactly discernible but dissolved deliciously into utter spaciousness.

My coach has suggested I play with my body postures this week opening where I am tending to close and rounding in where I tend toward outwardness. I think of it as a form of integration similar to the yin-yang integration of Dylan Newcomb's 16 ways which I am also practicing as part of my program to release the constraints which often stop me from moving. I am afraid of losing my equilibrium, afraid that I no longer can respond gracefully to those things which might push me out of a comfortable balance, far too enamoured of the familiar and clinging to what I remember and have solidified as me while I feel the power of the waters of life rushing through uncharted canyons and out into open ocean. May I please have just a small pool to play in while the sun warms it and turns it to salt. I will end up a statue on the plains of Gomorrah if I do not engage more fully in the evolutionary rush. So I breathe and write and allow each day to morph into a slightly different shape.

There is always a pile of books by my bed. They are for transitions: into sleep, into the day, to be taken on my bus rides from one place to another. One of them now is Thomas Metzinger's The Ego Tunnel. He is a philosopher interested in the discoveries of neuroscience and in this book he is asking the question, What is the self? What he describes is the way in which we filter what comes in from outside and what we generate ourselves internally to construct or create a continuing sense of self. He calls it the ego tunnel because of its limiting nature. We never see all of what is around us, the matrix in which we live, but must create from the wealth inherent in that matrix a manageable shell, a safe container that is possible. Yet in the plenum of the matrix are infinite unformed possibilities.

In a paper titled "Life in the Interstices: Systems Biology and Process Thought" Joseph E. Earley, Sr. suggests "that what Whitehead calls 'empty space' should be considered to be a metaphorical space of indeterminacy, rather than some gap in extension in Newtonian absolute space." Monday I realized I was imaging my interstitial space visually and by doing that I was falling naturally into a Newtonian conception. Now I am asking myself what other sort of imaging I might practice so that I can realize the experience of a fuller plenum and expand my range of possibilities. I believe this is not only an individual journey but I trust that others are on similar journeys and that we are sharing a larger play space as well, one very much needed for breaking out of the cultural limitations which keep us from responding to our planetary anguish. What may enter my consciousness as abstracted onto a headspace screen needs to be breathed into my body and there co-create liberating action even while the abstract symbolizations may fade into a nurturing darkness.

What is my palette of possibilities and what new mixtures can I discover or create? Right now I have improvisational and compositional music. I have my life with plants and with foods. I have words. I need to dance more. I can sketch and create my living space. I recast my imaginal possibilities as I read science and philosophy and a scattering of ideas gleaned from across the net. I have my small group of friends I can throw these ideas around with. I have my night play and dreaming which ties it all together in sometimes kaleidoscopic ways. And this play space. Hopefully some more companions will join me so we may play together.

Welcome to my play space

Yesterday I sat in the stacks of the University of Washington library reading a small, faded blue copy of collected essays by Alfred North Whitehead. In an essay title "Harvard: the Future" Whitehead wrote: "The important characterization of knowledge is in respect to clarity and vagueness...The world is not made up of independent things, each completely determinate in abstraction from all the rest...Our experience is dominated by composite wholes, more or less clear in the focus, and more or less vague in the penumbra, and with the whole shading off into umbral darkness which is ignorance. But throughout the whole, alike in the focal regions, the penumbral regions, and the umbral regions, there is baffling mixture of clarity and vagueness."

For many years I have been saying, "I live in the interstices, in between rather than enclosed within any particular thing..." When I was in seminary earning a Master's in Theological Studies (the impractical, academically-oriented version of seminary degree) I toyed with the idea of the Eccentric Christ. Even as a much younger person I envisioned my older age to be one of eccentricity not as a pastiche of odd and quirky behaviors but as someone who follows the different drummer into many less explored lifeways.

Now I am entering into that older age in its fullness as a 65-year-old rewriting once again the story of my life so I can understand my own map within the much larger maps of family heritage and engagement, of social movements (not only political movements but all of the shifting activity of larger human groups I participate in), of professional and personal commitments (I teach piano and am active in the Seattle Music Teachers Association and I am committed to a small group called Walk your Talk within the local integral movement within the global integral movement)... And in each of these I feel both somewhat in and somewhat out perhaps perfectly embodying the Chinese image of doubt, one foot in each of two boats floating in the ever moving water.

But yesterday I realized that the mental image I have been carrying has been that of two circles with a space in between and that even if I overlap the circles in a Venn diagram and if I inhabit the oblong intersection I am still constricted by the absolute boundaries. How excited I was to realize that those sharply-drawn boundaries could disappear into Whitehead's penumbra and that clarity and vagueness not only could but do coexist within and without. And just as important, in reading Whitehead's graceful prose and while playing with his ideas I remembered how important and how intensely pleasurable intellectual activity is for me. It is a joy to be graced with good-quality thought and to think well and I am moved.

Ah, an intersection between mind and body! A deep pleasure which unites them. It is I think this coexistence of pleasure and value which is the true context of original hedonism, not a falling into a half-sided, only body-oriented version which has passed for hedonism in a detached and materialist modern age. My play is to bring together all the aspects of my highest being into my (and our) play space, the place of the holy play we call creativity.

Welcome to my playground.