A Day or Two No Sense Essay Essay-Filler 'Essay'
A Life-Snippet On a Rural Mountain Road Somewhere In Mexico
Drinking Oaxaca Coffee and Horsetail Weed Infusion
Hello, the person here who is writing this has been drinking alternatively great organic Oaxaca coffee sweetened with pure organic honey from a large blue mug and, from a twin mug, a very spicy horsetail weed infusion that my body has intuitively directed me to drink. In recent weeks that daily spiciness now includes two fresh habanero peppers and a large amount of cayenne pepper powder. And yellow lemon juice. I am curious to see for how long my body will want this ‘health’ drink. It seems that, using body testing, the coffee-infusion combination is assisting my body with cleaning out each of the toilets inside the billions of those amazing cells that have the incredible power to manifest and portray me even as that me has been continuously changing. Now, isn’t that truly magical?! Regardless the cellular structure of that food, the fool I am has a cellular continuity even as hairs turn grey and fall from my head while I get to snip out the increased bushiness growing out from nostrils and ears.
That cellular cleansing has been greatly assisted by clean mostly organic food. And that food has been ingested after it has gotten a thumbs up from the PS-RAP muscle testing process to which I submit all ingestibles before consumption. Who here thinks that highly processed foods of any sort, CAFOed animals, monocultured and GMOed crops or Frankenstein-like highly processed poorly fatted fake meats, are going to be somatically or terrestrially healthy?!
Has it paid off, this weird body-directed diet? My reflexologist has seen my muscle mass strength and resilience increase without a change in exercise. She suggests that in her opinion I’ve lost about 25 years of age from my body and now have a young person’s body. A few weeks ago that was confirmed as I kept pace with a 21 year old active mountain climber when he fast-walked up the mountain path north of the cabaña which is my home at this time. That would not have been possible, even six months ago I don’t think. At one point her looked to me and asked ‘How old are you?’
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I am sitting on a tile ground-level teraza surrounded by trees, the sound of wind and often birds and dogs and insects. Right now I hear the uplifting sound of my friend building a second one-room cabaña that is even more secluded than the one I’m in. It is a little ways up the hill from this one. A donkey bray’s each morning with the sun rising and the dogs bay at the moon after midnight. I’m about a ninety minute walk, or about a fifty minute walk-bus trip, into ‘El Centro de la Ciudad de Oaxaca’. The first twenty minutes of those are to walk on a now dusty clay-dirt road with the tracks of rainy season streams in a tiny rural community. The air is clean and clear. Often I see farm animals when I walk — goats, sheep, chickens, turkeys, that donkey carrying firewood, and bulls chewing grass, their owner as patient as it is possible to imagine. And dogs! Lots of dogs.
The food is fresh and rich and grown in, or resident on, the actual real tangible earth that is dry now, in the dry season. This year extra dry in a year that has experienced a near drought. Some of the residents have, for the first time, dry wells. The San Felipe river is dry before reaching the suburb, something not seen in the twenty-five years that my koan-meditation leader has resided here.
As I’m writing I often listen to music and poke around with different genres and odd searches to see what pops up to be put into my essays. For this ‘nonsense’ none-such excursion I’ll be ‘lazy’ and simply attach the random collection I have been using as a holding station for songs looking for the eccentric appropriate future essay. As I wrote that, Tom Jones and the Stereophonics cover of ‘Momma Told Me Not To Come’ came into my ears. For me a better title would have been more accurately ’Momma Told Me Not to Leave’. Or perhaps, ’Momma Told Me Not to Grow Up’.
What to Write?
Following an internal prompt a few days ago, seconded by my friend’s external prompt the following night, I began to write this non-essay style update essay to fill in for having missed my last, ‘proper’ essay’s, weekly deadline. (It is still being written!) So far that is my second miss since becoming ‘professional’ here in substack in the spring of last year. And now this update essay is late and lands at the end of my standard deadline! LOL!
And for me this is yet another great opportunity to engage with joy the practice of imperfection because even self-set goals are able, and perhaps even liable, to become a form of self-imprisonment-perfectionism even with, or perhaps because of, the essay practice having become for me a form of free-form liberation of energy from self and social constrictions and restrictions. Most days I feel bubbling up from within me something like fizzy wine, or a child’s giggles at a loud fart in the quiet part of a wedding or funeral. Wordless ineffable joy.
Books
And even with this expansive freedom away from the worded narratives of truth that restricted me with their saccharine falsehoods, I am still patterned around books, books, books. Books, that strange attractor that allows me (and all other ‘experts’ in the world) to fabricate the truths of the mind that is besotted with words as power. And to fly high with the power of words to obfuscate from ourselves and each other the truth of our wordless un-narrated existence as a body-centric discoverer of movement of and with dreams looking for physical expression
I eat and write sitting cross-legged on the floor so the ‘real’ table becomes the temporary bookshelf for my ‘current’ books. Typically that is a mixture of library and personal books. Not shown above are my own copies of The Complete Works of Montaigne and The Gulag Archipelago that I dive into regularly — they are a little too big for the table to bear. I am lucky to be in la ciudad de Oaxaca with its lending library because it is one of only three in Mexico. Most libraries here disallow lending. And the Oaxaca Lending Library acts as a, or perhaps key, support centre for people — tourists, travellers and residents — who speak English. It was founded 60 years ago by a Canadian and now actively supports literacy with local Spanish book libraries in the nearly one hundred tiny, mostly Zapotec, communities throughout the large province of Oaxaca.
The New Today Synchronicity and Spanish Language Embodiment
Now on this new today, since writing that paragraph above has passed into the past since I began it, I was given a lovely, perhaps even delightful, synchronicity: Don Quijote de La Mancha en Español!
How synchronicity? I’m in the middle of a super concentrated uptake to be fluent in Spanish in two or three more months. To that end of I’ve been listening to Spanish audiolibros. The first was Don Quijote de La Mancha. Recently I put out into the Universe a request to find a used copy of it to read along with the audio books because my Spanish has improved enough for it to be a valuable exercise. Voila, in an unexpected place, that being in one of the tiniest coffee shops in Oaxaca which is rife with small coffee shops, this one has a tiny ‘library’ with a mixture of Spanish and English language books. And DQ was one of them.
Why fast track Spanish learning after almost two years of no study? I don’t really know! For more than a year my body directed me to write (especially these substack essays) and to do extended yoga instead of learning Spanish in a Spanish speaking country. (I entered Mexico in mid-February 2022.) There was a recent redirection from my body that asked me to learn it fast. So, now a significant and joyful part of each day is a few hours of using my unique amalgam of techniques and processes to become fluent first with speech and listening. For the speech part I’m studying with the brilliant on-line course called Synergy Spanish by Marcus Santamaria. It is wonderful beyond palabras. Thank you Marcos for bringing that brilliant course by Marcus into my life — I love it and love Spanish!
For the listening part, which I took to shortly after diving deep into Synergy Spanish, I turned to the audiolibros in December because, as it turns out, someone has measured the speeds of spoken languages and Spanish is spoken at a rate typically about 50% faster than English is spoken. So it’s not just that we English speakers are hearing a new language that makes Spanish hearing difficult. It is also that that new language, when Spanish, is spoken very fast! I’ve seen a huge difference in my ear since I started in December when Don Quixote was just one long indecipherable word. Now, a month later, I hear almost every word with daily expanding understanding. Today I read along with Don Quijote and OMG! the reading is almost faster than my eyes too. And yet, and yet, I’m hearing almost every word now and so progress is significantly made.
Yes, I began with Don Quijote de la Mancha. Really? Why? Yes, yes I know that Don Quijote is in an old Spanish that is similar in disconnect from contemporary Spanish as is the English of Edward de Vere (aka Shakespeare) from current English. No matter! I read DQ in English many years ago and loved it. On top of that I do a meditation to bring into my mind-body continuum the energy and spirit of the Spanish language. And so what better way to assist that than by using the Spanish equivalent to Edward de Vere? And, for now, I understand not only is it the energy and feel of the Spanish that I am looking to absorb into my being, it is, more pragmatically, about becoming the speed of Spanish in order to hear the words as living. That is what’s important for now since I’m understanding about 10% of it anyway. And I love that I have become like a learning child, loving that easy playful process as I pick out words and phrases with more frequency and expansiveness.
(The language learning has diverted a significant part of my writing, under the direction of my body. And has played a part in my missed deadlines.)
And Another, Elaborate, Book Magic Synchronicity
And I recently added un audiolibros contemporáneo de Gabriel García Márquez, Amore en la Tiempo de Cholera, in my audolibros playlist. So now I’m looking for a used book copy of that or will borrow it because Love in the Time of Cholera is one of my lifetime favourite books of fiction. Now to read it in Spanish!
More recently I added to my tiny library a collection of essays by Márquez en Español. The vendor brought it to my attention when I was looking for Amor en el Tiempo de Cholera. I had no mindful interest in buying it, and yet I felt it call to me, as books have done throughout my life. I was very surprised because of its size, it is about six centimetres thick (remember my long walk home) and it was not what I thought I wanted to assist me with my acquisition of Spanish. Who would turn it into an audiolibros? (Later I didn’t find it on YouTube.) So I muscle tested to confirm that I am to go ahead with this obscure 240 peso purchase. The equally thick Don Quijote was only 70 pesos.
And thirty minutes later I flipped to p119 of this 740 page book at random while waiting for my friend to join me at a nearby restaurant for a late lunch/early supper. My eyes popped out of my head and the hairs stood up on arms. There, in the middle of the page, in my poorly understood Spanish, I was beautifully energised with an instant and really crazy synchronicity that connected to my previous day’s experience with my reflexologist, which in turned had connected to my having lived with dead wrists until 2016.
A Tale of Two Dead Wrists and Their Manacles to the Mind
The previous day my reflexologist-massage therapist’s face paled when she, MC, did a deep dive into the negative energy she felt in my wrists. In Spanish the word ‘wrists’ is muñecas, which I have found to be particularly difficult to pronounce and remember. MC was puzzled by what she felt and so I explained to her my wrist history. The history begins in infancy, 1961. The telling of that history began with an awareness-shock on my first visit, in 2016, to a theta-healer reiki practitioner and psychic. At the time I had no interest in anything psychic and had gone to her after I had been pointedly directed to do so by a series of bizarre and basically unequivocal synchronicities. (A story to be told another day.)
After sharing some details of my medical history JG, the psychic-reiki healer, directed me to her massage table and proceeded to do a hands-off reiki assessment of my form. She commented about my right shoulder, which I hadn’t told her that indeed had some minor discomfort. She commented on one or two other locations and when she got to my wrists cried out, “OMG! What have you done to your wrists?!!!!!” “Nothing,” I replied, puzzled. I hadn’t said anything to her about them because they were fine. IMO. “They don’t bend very well,” I added. “Never have.” “Oh no!” she countered very forcefully, “you’ve done something to them. We’ll look at them later,” she affirmed adamantly. She finished her examination and then an initial treatment in which I was introduced to her vision of muscle testing.
That was in early January. I’ve since expanded and enriched what I learned from her muscle testing technique and have been successfully teaching my process, that I now call Psyche-Somatic Resonance Awareness Process (PS-RAP), to the curious — even to my reflexologist and more recently to my new dentist. Both healthy people have seen health improvements. MC directly asked me what I did because, she said, I have better skin than she does and wanted to improve hers. Which has, in fact, happened.
In the second week of February 2016, JG said ‘Okay, it’s time to look at your wrists.’ She took both my wrists in her hands and then did her psychic thing. Something she rarely did in our time of almost three years together. (Although it did pop up very amusingly when her psychic guides interrupted her theta work with me to tell her that using the Louise Hay mind-body health template for me for a particular problem wouldn’t work: I was one of the exceptions Hays cautioned about in her book You Can Heal Your Life. I had a copy of that book at that time and so was familiar with it.)
After a pause with my wrists in her hands JG told me that she saw how my mother had frozen my wrists when I was an infant by squeezing them with such force that she had put [energetic] handcuffs (manacles — muñecas) on them and in my mind.
That night I continued from where I had left off reading Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald. The novel is about a single mother with an eighteen month old daughter and a mother with early signs of adult onset dementia. That night I read that the mother with frustration and anger squeezed her daughter’s arms so hard, with her hands like handcuffs (a form of manacle), that the girl squeaked then went silent and all colour left her skin. The mother was afraid that her daughter had stopped breathing. At the time even that was an interesting and intense synchronicity for me. How to even calculate the odds against something like that? That was on a Wednesday. It continues.
Three days later I was on day two of a three day yoga-meditation silence intensive. During a late morning meditation I saw in my mind’s eye transparent porcelain hands clamped to my wrists and killing them. I was surprised because I have only ever seen some kind of image in a meditation once or twice before that. And then they shattered! The transparent porcelain filled the space like some kind of explosion of glass. In that instant I felt my wrists for the first time in my life. I had lived fifty plus years with extremely inflexible wrists ignorant of their lacking feeling because their deadness was my ‘normal.’ Until that day I didn’t know that what JG had felt was, in effect, dead wrists.
Back to the Present and More Wrist Work Healing
Two days before I bought Márquez’s book of essays my wrists, mis muñecas, were once again being held. This time one at a time by my reflexologist-therapist, MC. When she touched first the one and then the other I saw her face get increasingly and astonishingly ashen; and her skin beneath her eyes went from golden brown to almost black; and her body seemed to deflate after she began her strong healing touch. When I commented on her dark eyes, she was surprised and went to a mirror to confirm that I had not exaggerated.
When she finished her work I told her the story of my wrists in my limited Spanish. I confess to being surprised at her physical expression of that trauma, a trauma that I thought I had been cleared of in 2016. A clue that that healing had not been completed was that after eight years of yoga my wrists, while having kept their feeling, have only marginally increased their flexibility. They have steadily and powerfully resisted many yogic exercises. After MC stopped she explained that there was still a lot of trauma left in my wrists to be cleared, that she had not been able to clear all of it in that one session.
Can You Be a Japanese Porcelain Doll and Pass Me New Wrists?
It was two days after that retelling to MC of my tail of two dead wrists that I bought Márquez’s book of journal entries at my body’s request. And then it was about thirty minutes later, while waiting for my friend at the restaurant that, after a random page turn, I read:
Afuera el espectáculo lo están dando los turistas disfrazados de papagayos, y la delegación japonesa, con siete actrices disfrazadas de muñecas de porcelana. Sólo una es conocida del público: Machiko Kio, la belleza de Rashomon.
Wow! The hairs stood up on my arms. How was that possible that two days earlier I was struggling to speak muñecas to MC, and explain about porcelain hands, to read in Spanish about wrists of porcelain, muñecas de porcelana?! Was that possible? So I went into the online Spanish-English dictionary and learned that ‘muñecas’ has many meanings beyond ‘wrists’. One of them being ‘dolls’, which was how Márquez used it in this essay referencing them to the seven Japanese women at the documented event as fine as porcelain dolls. (My partner of 5 years is Japanese.)
Is that really the end of that synchronicity? For now? We’ll see how my wrists loosen after MC finishes her energetic clearing work.
The Other Books and the Synchronicity of Catching a Drip or Two
Before the wrist synchronicity called to me to be written in some detail, I thought I would comment on some of the many other small synchronicities I have experienced with the other books on the mesa. My current reading practice has become a rather circular or perhaps helical practice of reading from the books by randomly dipping before actually finishing any of them. The odd one doesn’t get fully finished, although that is still relatively rare for me not to finish a book
Before closing though, I will laugh at this odd and funny — and interesting — synchronicity from The Tenth Door, Michelle Hébert’s autobiography of her experiences with American enlightened yogi Walt Baptiste. It is filled with an amazing series of synchronicities with my life, with perhaps the funniest one being Hébert’s description of an inverse correspondence between the leakiness of her plumbing in El Salvador and the degree to which she was grounded and present with her prana, ie life-force energy. That has a remarkable correspondence with my plumbing at this time. I have a leaky kitchen faucet tap that seems to go from a fast almost pour to almost nothing for no obvious reason I’ve been able to determine. (My landlord has been slow to fix it because it requires complete replacement and he wants to upgrade it and is saving for that.) That water leakiness began months before reading the passage in The Tenth Door. So, from Hébert’s description I have in the last week begun to practice actively grounding my own life-force energy very consciously with active aware body as breath movement to see the effects it has on the rate of drip. So far, I’ve seen the drip come down to almost nothing and I no longer need the five gallon pail on standby to catch the overflow! (With the drought and the cost of water, I catch the drip and use it to wash the food and dishes.)
We’ll see how that experiment goes in the next few weeks as my body-ness ebbs and flows with the vicissitudes of life and how the rate of drip has increased or decreased. Tonight, as I close, it is almost at zero.
With that, I’m done with my latest Montaignesque essay. A friend recently called my efforts ‘works of art’. Thank you, that was wonderful for you to say. Time will be the arbitrator of their art-worthiness, of course. Will anyone read these palabras in more than 450 years as they do with Shakespeare, Cervantes and Montaigne? LOL! What a funny thought, even as I simply love to play with, the dance of idea, feeling and word, as each bring their own take on meaning in the dance narrative that plays with words we foolishly fixate on.
Thank you for reading.
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Song of the non-Essay Essay Thing
Lyrics Look at the river as it winds down the Rise like a tear goin' down cheek-side creek To the body of blood, salty golden Holding' the life of our own, though we do not Look…