Author Archives: Paula Josa-Jones

Aug12

flying, opening

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I wrote this on my way to Italy for an artist’s residency in early 2014.  I remember feeling anxious at the prospect of being away for a month.  Imagine that as a problem!  Italy for a month.  Oh well.

Looking at what I wrote now, it feels connected to my post on searching.  Sometimes searching requires deeper more rigorous inquiry, more vastness in our sensing.  Finding and arriving are about entering the bonehouse, the skinsuit with our hearts intact and our minds willing.  And so I share this today.

Looking out the airplane windows, feeling dulled into ordinariness – a flat airless terrain of fatigue and sorrow.

Then we are in the air.  Look!

Vast pillowy expanses of clouds with a distant cloud rhinoceros and a small ancient upwelling cloud tree; distant shapes like humped mountains and a shiny patch of distant lake like a silvery mirage.

Finger-combed prairies of lumpy clouds.

Now mountains, real ones, sharper and steep-pitched, not like the nubbled cloud ranges.

Here come quick, daft wisps of thin cloud-flocks like transparent geese speeding by.

The clouds meet a soft rim of sky, a seam of cloud and blue blurring into each other, softening to each other like cats napping, fur on fur.  A soft white mat laid at the doorstep of infinite blue, absent all marks and markers of civilization save the noisy pod that carries us.

Now big bulbous boxer cloud heads with ruined noses and shuffled ears rising up out of smooth porcelain plains, like virgin snow or curving shapes smoothed into perfection by a sculptor’s hands.

Now sun ghosts on the Ligurian water, shining, dissolving; light and cloud mingling in the haze, the silver of the reflecting water drifting outward and upward like hopeful angels, full of light, full of prayer.

I have arrived.

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Aug10

searching

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I watched the Fox news clown show Thursday night followed by Jon Stewart’s farewell program and felt a sinking despair.  What to do without the leavening, enlightening perspective of this brilliant generous man?  Where to look for a lift of mind, heart and spirit?  Rachel Maddow and the MSNBC crew, of course, but the comedic aeration is essential.

Another search: we are house hunting.  Looking high and low for what may be the next best fit for our complicated lives.  There is something about this process that makes me want to consider Italy, Spain, France, England. None of those places is exempt from political madness either. My family’s roots are in Norway, but that feels distant, cold and deeply unknown.

I love New York.  I hate winter.  I love the ocean.  I don’t like tourists.  The list goes on and on like a crazy ping pong match.  My angst blooms and morphs like the weird spongy thing I saw growing under a rock when I was eight and exploring the ravine behind our house.  I remember flying up the hill, horrified by whatever was growing there.  Feels a little like that, especially whatever is growing in the political murk.

Finding the balance between doing the work and letting the universe hold it and hold me is the tricky part.  I heard a wonderful quote by Maria Popova of Brain Pickings in the On Being podcast the other day.  She said that critical thinking without hope is cynicism, and that hope without critical thinking is naivete.  I think that arcs back to both my search for sanity and humor in the social-political world, and my search for a home.

Another thing that Maria Popova said was that the search for genuine insight, understanding, connection (not her words, but my translation) takes time.  Really steeping oneself in a thought, a book, a conversation, a process of creation, rather than the superficial fast forward of listicles.

Searching should take time.  It should ask us to look deeply, meditate, feel into the question, the poem, the place, the moment.  Or in the profound invitation of the practice of Authentic Movement, wait to be moved.

 

 

 

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Jul27

thank you friends

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All my Body-Mind Centering friends are departed save a handful, nestling in our dorms one last night.  I am filled with appreciation, admiration, delight.  Here is an offering, inspired by Clover Catskill’s beautiful performance today.

Thank you friends!

Mindful

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for –
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world –
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant –
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these –
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean’s shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

~ Mary Oliver

Jul26

sinking into practice

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This image feels like the rich slough of sensory experiencing material I have been steeping in all week at the Body-Mind Centering Association conference at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.  This is only my second BMCA conference, and I am hooked. It is an immersion in bodily wisdom and mindfulness via the visionary work of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and those who have studied, appreciated and expanded her teachings.  The collegial breadth and depth here is stunning, delicious, inspiring.  Feeling met, held, welcomed and taught by this community is a most precious gift.

My post-conference body carries the many traces of shared dances, sounds and questions.  It also carries a hunger to deepen those inquiries, to nourish these friendships, old and new.  As we ready ourselves to leave, I feel a slight panic and a more than slight sadness.  I want these connections, I want to be included here.  I want more experience of these lovely faces, bodies, minds and the tremendous integrity and devotion they embody.

Thank you one and all!