Dogsitting, the Universe, and Getting Lost in Suburban Neighborhoods

We live in an old chaos of the sun...
Wallace Stevens

...I’m dogsitting this week...which means I have no choice to go on long walks with my good friend Bella...and, sometimes, get lost...like last night...

...as an adolescent read practically nothing but science fiction and fantasy...certainly didn’t read much that was assigned as homework...kinda burned out on it midway through college, though...too many space wars...too many elves...barely touched the stuff since...then, just recently, visiting mom’s house, decided to dig out the Foundation Trilogy...which is probably more interesting now than back in eighth grade when my eyes likely drifted over pages, waiting for old Isaac A. to cut the philosophy and break out the laser beams...

....one thing occurred to me, though, in reading all that about planets and stars and galaxies...I hadn’t seen the night sky in quite some time...not really...couldn’t remember the last time I paid attention to the stars or moon....partly, no doubt, the result of living in the city for two years...so, late last night, hopelessly lost with Bella the dog in a suburban neighborhood, spent a good amount of time looking up...

...some people look at the vastness of the universe and see proof of the existence of God...since how else can you explain something so awesome...others see quite the opposite...since how else can you explain something large and yet so empty...

...all I know is that we were lost for hours late at night...but it didn’t seem to bother the dog...so I didn’t let it bother me, either...

Losing Your Head

So...in Yoga there’s something called a sun salutation...or surya namaskar, if ya wanna get all sanskrity about it...which is a series of postures...or asanas...done in sequence in a flowing kinda motion, in tune with the breath...though what those postures are can vary...actually, they can involve all kindsa stuff...though there tend to be a couple of basic parts, at least one or two of which involve kinda looking upwards...y’know, at the sun...and saluting it, kinda...if ya happen to be outside...and it happens to be sunny....

okay, I don’t know what the hell a sun salutation is, though I’ve done thousands of ‘em...including approximately a hundred and eight at a time once, down in Mexico...somehow ending up singing the first verse of a Bruce Springsteen song in the middle of it....it’s a long story...but, see, not knowing even while doing kinda goes back to that whole feeling-oneself-from-the-inside thing that got so badly sidetracked a couple posts ago...kinda like Fantastic Voyage...that book by Isaac Asimov...where this submarine and its crew are shrunk down to where they can float through the internal passageways of somebody’s body...except without the submarine...and it's your own body...am I making sense, now? Didn’t think so....

What is meditation? You don’t know. And that is the basis on which to meditate....“I don’t know.” Do you understand the beauty of that? It means that my mind is stripped of all technique, of all information about meditation, of everything others have said about it.
J. Krishnamurti

When the logic and proportion
have fallen sloppy dead
and the White Knight is talking backwards,
and the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”...
Grace Slick

So, anyway, we were doing sun salutations last night and my teacher suggested that, in the forward bend following that big upward motion described so badly above, the thing to do is to let go of the head completely, just let it drop...which was cool....since, if there’s one thing I don’t do enough of, it’s losing my head...

...not that I’d wanna be without it permanently, mind you....it does have its uses, but it keeps awfully busy...too busy...never stopping, always charging...not forward but in endless serpentine pathways, crashing into its own walls, falling off its own cliffs...struggling up its own mountains, molehills, and mausoleums...as often as not ending up where it began...only more tired and confused....

might be good if I could put it in a box, or have it served on a plate like John the Baptist, or play beach volleyball with it....

maybe that’s what I’ll do next time I’m in Mexico...

or maybe not....