Still Sundays

September 5th.

Harvest months. Love like loving New York. Marco Rojas. A peek into Emerson’s “Over-Soul.”

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

New York City inhaled the Sun and exhaled crackling heat to its fullest this past week before simmering into Fall. A magical dragon. The best few months when New York, New York is at her finest are here. The City is a marvel this time of the year: street fairs, divine weather, lush bronze, yellows, greens paint leaves everywhere and the air—the cool aloe vera  breeze—almost demands a stillness.  September comes with a fire but one that doesn’t burn and instead cooks just at the right temperature.  Harvest all you have sown in the prior months.

It’s Labor Day tomorrow. The first Labor Day in the United States was celebrated on September 5, 1882 in New York City followed by the rest of the country in 1894.  12 years later. It became a federal holiday, when, following the deaths of a number of workers at the hands of the U.S. military and U.S. Marshals during the Pullman Strike, President Grover Cleveland put reconciliation with the labor movement as a top political priority.

Now Labor Day marks as the end of summer, rest, final barbecues, beginning of NFL and college football seasons.  We are falling apart as a labor force. Laborers don’t just need rest but respect. What’s the point of a holiday when it is not a top political priority any longer?

I played tour guide to my brother and his wife this past week.  People like when I show them my New York mostly because I am in love with the wormy apple. I realize how rare it is to live in a place that you are actively in love with while living in it. That’s how a partnership ought to be. Not because it is perfect but you still want that at the end of the day, week, year. It requires conscious effort and concentration to appreciate why you are where ever you in the first place. Because if you can’t appreciate it despite all that it is not, you must face head-on the choice to move.

Yoga.

Marco Rojas.

The one for whom I have yet to find apt words to articulate the experience he creates during his classes.

I have no choice but attempt after what happened Friday night.

My mind spilled outside myself on Friday night.

I am prepared for clarity, alignment, integration and a delicious euphoria after Marco Rojas’s yoga classes. I have experienced physical strength that I never thought myself capable due to his classes and that can be quite empowering on its own.  I have known Marco since 2007 when I first explored yoga. Technically I have returned to a consistent practice only for a month—3 to 5 days a week. I first felt the blissful rush of endorphins we dub as “yoga high” after two excruciating weeks. I now comprehend one cannot sip that nectar without committed devotion.

What happened Friday night was the utmost unusual for me. During class Marco even called out my name from the other end of the room and said, “THAT is IT, Annie.” And he hardly ever draws attention to people unless he just can’t help it, a quick spontaneous utterance echoing belief and disbelief. I don’t know what he had meant. It was a pose, although challenging, not outside my abilities. I had done it before. There was no time to analyze, we were already onto the next posture. Marco has never repeated a sequence of postures in the four years I have experienced his classes. Never. His practice entails a blend of Hatha—holding poses for an extended period, Vinayasa—a flow linked with breathing, Ashtanga—a series of challenging postures, Iyengar—meticulous focus on alignment.

So after class I was giddy with joy—I could have danced in public without music. Maybe I did. I don’t recall. I canceled plans for the night; I just wanted to “be” in this divine state of peace. I came home, heated left-overs, placed laundry in the washer, ate, for a change even turned the T.V. on (then quickly off) and then like a deck of cards out of nowhere crashed. It was the utmost bizarre experience. I would have embraced the bizarre had I known what was to follow. Things are—gratefully—as “right” as can be in my life. It is a welcome change. So this undertow was a new experience. I knew two things with certainty: I had never experienced this before and I was terrified.

I don’t use any stimulants and hallucinogenics. I have always known and felt I could “get there” without them. No one has yet convinced me that I need any aid to “experience” what they experience given how I think, feel, see, and am already without any narcotics.

I am incapable of explaining my petrifying emotions that left my senses in a vertigo on Friday night, suffice it to say I felt falling off the edge. The following morning I spoke to my mother and discussed perhaps I need to get on some medication or something. This was not normal. This was not safe. This was not somewhere I wanted to go again. She recommended I get my thyroid checked again. I do have thyroid issues and perhaps it was worse now and my mother informed me that imbalance there can trigger feelings of anxiety.  I tried to place an emotion on what I had felt: anxiety? no. aloneness? maybe. But certainly not loneliness and I am not afraid of being alone whatsoever, so what was this new aloneness? Fear? Yes. Immense fear. I was a ball that got tossed into a galaxy without stars at an unfamiliar speed.

So I did the only thing I thought would make sense: I went back to the source that pushed me there. Prior to the beginning of Saturday’s class I tried to explain to Marco what had happened but was unable lest I open the floodgates to tears that my tear ducts could no longer produce.

I said the only thing that made sense: I think I am losing it.

Marco laughed and burst open with a huge smile: “No, you are finding it.”

“I am so scared. I don’t ever want to be that scared again. What happened last night?”

Marco replied matter-of-factly, “You know how unnerving transformation is? Well, transcendence is frightening. Don’t resist. Welcome to freedom.”

I began the class with others. I set my intention. I dedicated the practice. And.I.was.on.fire. I was no longer a spec of dust tossed in a dark galaxy but a fireball lighting the path.

I was not going to be fine, I was fine. Friday night was normal.

We rush to medications and tranquilizers and everything possible outside of ourselves because we are so unfamiliar with feeling deeply, especially new feelings. We read content online and in magazines about how to feel this and that. We want quick answers—in jolly rancher platitudes that serve no spiritual nourishment—without going to the depth required to the source where the answers come from.

Saturday night, as if guided by a memory, I picked up The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, a book I first discovered in 9th grade and flipped to the essay “Over-Soul.” I didn’t want a quote online, I didn’t want a summary, I wanted the whole damn thing. I knew I was not alone after Marco’s comforting words. I was more centered than I had ever felt. I hadn’t read Emerson since high school.

Without a single tear I read the entire chapter.

I share excerpts:

“I am constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for events than the will I call mine. As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.

We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and article is equally related; the eternal ONE.

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade—the droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element and forcing in on our distant notice—we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of nature. All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not a faculty, but a light; is not the intellect and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie—an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed.

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. Language cannot paint it with his colors. It is too subtle. It is undefinable, unmeasurable; but we know that it pervades and contains us. We know that all spiritual being is in man…

The walls are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps off spiritual nature, to the attributes of God.

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its independency of those limitations which circumscribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribes all things. As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In like manner it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has in most men overpowered the mind to that degree that the walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmountable; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in this world, the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse measures of the force of the soul.

The soul’s advances are not made by gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight line, but rather by ascension of state, such as can be represented by metamorphosis—from the egg to the worm, from the worm to the fly…With each divine impulse the mind rends the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into eternity, and inspires and expires its air…This is the law of the moral and of mental gain. The simple rise as by specific levity not into a particular virtue, but into the region of all the virtues.

Those whose words are timeless are so for a reason. Their words still save us again and again.

I am not afraid.

Gratitude.

Someone else discovered Stillness on a Sunday. I am delighted. I am not just honored that somehow I am linked with it but find comfort that another understands. You can read more here: A Cadence of Choice.

I hope another links to it too—their version, their City, their Sunday in whatever medium: a still sketch on  a Sunday morning, a still snap shot on a Sunday afternoon, a passage from a stilling reading on a Sunday evening. One by one we can unlearn to rush to stillness which leads us to dizziness once we “get there” but instead ease into it, like one does into a favorite long-sleeve shirt reserved for the first day of Autumn.

We are okay.

It’s our burden, duty, and gift to feel and feel deeply.

~a.q.s.

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