There You Are

I grew up with a religious story or ritual: When you are in distress, pray to God for guidance and then flip open the pages of your Bible at random. You will find what you need.

This never really worked for me. I would be distressed about a boy and flip open to Levitical food laws. I would be worried about a test and flip to the description of the beast in Revelation.  Grieving over my grandfather's death, I flipped to the story of Lot's wife.

Some might argue: there's still a message, the ways of God are mysterious, do a little more research it's there.

But I've found non-traditionally religious literature to be far more reliable.

Tonight Annie Dillard stops me, mid-paragraph, with a quiet, awkward, sentence. Call it serendipity. I opened a book and a quote caught me like a salmon leaping upstream.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Dillard says:

"What we know, at least for starters, is: here we--so incontrovertibly--are." (130)

I stop because, of course, of course, we are. 

Let me situate the source of my frustration: I have been learning again, taking a conservatory of physical theatre for actor-creators. 

In class, we did an exercise in the neutral mask in which we have to be the ocean and move through it and wash onto the shore. 

The neutral mask is a mask of total presence and total ease. As one of our instructors put it, the mask tells you "you can do it." It isn't excited about that fact or afraid of that fact. The mask isn't worried about failing because it won't fail. Everything is ease and everything is unique and everything moves past without catching hold. 

This is both a beautiful gift and a big fat curse. The human is constantly experiencing emotions which slide through and over and into and out of the mind and, so, the body. By this I mean, I experience those things. By putting on the mask of ease, I am offered the gift of total presence and ease. Because it is a mask, it reveals the human flow of energy and experience that writes itself on my body. 

As I think about this and mull it over, I am at turns excited and daunted--my human bits roil up and down like a sine curve. I am reminded of zen. The mask is the moment of zen, the practice of waking up to remember that you are always, already present and that nothing more is required of you. You can experience this present moment fully and let it go. Then I am daunted because I realize that when I put on the mask: it is a practice to which people devote their lives. The mask is a master; I am a novice

Back to the ocean, I could picture it, feel it, sense it, hear it in my imagination as I waited my turn. Then I put on the mask, full of excitement. I turned around, making sure to breath in and out like the ocean, I let my arms drift and lift with awareness and I looked at the world around me. The fish, the kelp, the waves--I was told to turn back around and take off the mask. 

"You're a person, in the sea, looking at the sea. You need to be the sea."

What. 

"Breath it."

Yeah, ok. I put the mask on and the sea was gone. I heard that I couldn't look at the sea because that's a person looking at the sea. So I retreated to gesture and what felt like avant garden dance. I didn't see the sea I heard my breath and moved around the stage trying to follow the breath. I felt like fool.

Taking the mask off, I was told "There were moments." I believed it, having seen it in my classmates, and I still didn't understand it. 

I tried again and again and again and never made it through the sea to the beach, always I was stuck in the water, trying and failing to be a sea I could no longer see. 

It was an incredibly frustrating experience. I kept trying, anxious to put the mask on, anxious then to take it off, anxious to try something else, still seeing nothing until a blinding headache plopped me in my seat watching my classmates struggle as I had. 

I have several thoughts about the exercise that have been rolling in my head since we spent what felt like an eternity trying and failing to do those things.

1. It is an impossible task to be an ocean. It is so very hard to try to think of the ocean and yourself and yourself and the ocean as one and the same when someone is telling you over and over that you just aren't big enough. Because obviously. Obviously I am not the ocean and obviously the ocean is bigger than I am. 
2. The impossibility of the task does not strip the task of meaning. In trying to do it, I learn something.
3. Letting the breath move the body and then stilling body and breath is the most effective way--that I saw--to move from the ocean to the shore.
4. Trying to be the ocean or the shore is as sure a way to fail as not trying to do it. The harder any of us tried to be the ocean, the less ocean we were.
5. Ease. There is ease in the ocean, even in it's wildness, depth and richness.
6. Ease. There is ease in me, even in my wildness, depth, and richness.
7. After all, I am--incontrovertibly--here. 

At the end of the day, I am brought to the conclusion that I am learning to recognize and allow my own presence in the here and now. To be the space, I have to first be comfortably me. It's so funny to me that the incontrovertible fact is the one that I work so hard to know and do and be.

When frustration is happening, there is a nugget of wisdom or knowledge being pressed into existence. 

For starters, Dillard says, we are here.