Cold Iron

I spent the better part of the daylight hours of the past Thursday and Friday doing soil exploration using hand tools; hand auger drills of various sizes as well as a pipe and slide hammer contraption known as a "drive probe".

Both of these gadgets required human muscle to work, and since as it happened the soils that the human muscle - my muscle - were required to work on were either composed of fucking great lumps of rock, or end-of-summer-dry silt soil that had the fixed opinion that it was just like rock said muscles were sternly reminded that it was nearly fifty-five years ago that they formed from their primordial protoplasm.

In plain terms, I am no longer young, and for the past two days required my body to do something that was too demanding for its remaining strength and endurance.

I am tired, and sore. The big muscles in my shoulders, arms, and thighs ache and cramp, and the now-familiar deep burn of pain in my right hip has flickered up like a fire fed fresh coals. I have taken several painkillers to tamp down this fire, but the result has been to deny me sleep, an oddly common side-effect of this particular medication. So when the second big lag-cramp twisted me up from our bed I limped out here to sit and stretch and think and write a little, since I am outside the room of sleep, my nose pressed against the warm night-glass but my eyes still wide open, my mind still spinning, unable to open that casement and enter into the silent room to lie down and sleep.

Surely I cannot be the only one who, aging, begins to feel the body's fraying, the steady, sullen failing of the parts that once worked so well, the weakness of once-strong muscles and the grinding of once-smooth joints that remind me that I am a long way down the road towards my body's inevitable failure?

And I am surely luckier than many. My body was stronger, for a longer time, at a higher level than many of the sorts of people I see daily; young people whose obesity makes them look and move like old men or old women. People who seem to sit rather than walk, walk rather than run. People who decades younger than I whose bodies, or minds, bear the obvious marks of serious illness, or violent injury.

And I am lucky in having been gifted with the endurance of pain. Pain and I are old...well, not friends but, perhaps, two old enemies who have crafted a sort of familiarity with one another. He is not a stranger to me, this daily thief who robs me of the back that was strong and straight, the stride that was long - as long as the stride of a man with legs less than three feet from sole to crotch could be - and fierce.

Every morning we rise within moments of each other, my companion and I; often he pokes me in the shoulder or in the hip before I have straightened up from my night's rest to remind me that he has never left me, that I will never be alone so long as my joints continue to deteriorate and my bones continue their hobby of collecting stray bits of calcite like gingerbread on the eaves of an old house.

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So I sit in the quiet room, the only light the phosphors of the white screen before me, trying to let my body settle into a quiet hum that will give me time to think, and write.

From the rental house at the corner to the west comes the noise of the University students enjoying a Friday night's socializing. I am suddenly seized by the strong desire to dress and walk down the dark street to show them my herky step like a marionette with a tangled string, and tell them to dance, and run, to leap and skylark, to arch and bend and enjoy the young strength and suppleness of their bodies now, whilst they may, while they enjoy the fullness of youth, and power, and grace so that they may have those memories to pull about them when the ache and stiffness of age and hard use lays its cold iron on their limbs and bends their backs like the brittle stalks of the autumn grass.

Dance for joy

I've never really "gotten" dance the way I get music or drama or film. Stories told by Terpsichore have just never worked for me. And, yes, the "Nutcracker" is very pretty, yes, thank you. I do have a four-year-old who loves princesses and ballerinas.So while I don't get the princessy part what I do get is the dancer as athlete. Which is why I wanted to repost this photograph of the dancer Naiomi Goldberg's battered feet.

Often the price of knowing the truth, or attaining beauty, or achieving mastery in anything, is pain.

And often the pain must be given freely for to attain the true mastery, the true beauty, the requisite suffering must be a gift that does not count the cost.

(h/t to Kevin Rolly, whose image this is)

The Empty Cup

I know a cyberpal who is going though some serious renovating: personal, physical AND home-improvement-ological (she's removating and lookng for a new roof!). Part of her regimen includes giving up hot showers. Now let me say, for the record, that in the course of 20something years working for Uncle Sugar I've taken my share of cold showers. Panama? Honduras? The Sinai? Yeah, baby..! Bring on the good cold stuff. But New England? Oregon?

Brrrr. Not so much.

I remember having a conversation about something like this with the old Japanese sensei at my kendo school.

He was doing a drill with me where he made simple cuts at my head. I was supposed to parry them and immediately cut back at him; the purpose of the drill was to learn to riposte without thinking, to respond immediately to an attack with a stronger attack.

But I hadn't understood the instruction - I wasn't completing the parry and as a result was allowing him to hit me on the head. He was this tiny, wizend Japanese, probably 90 pounds dripping wet, but he'd been fighting with a shinai since Hirohito was a stripling and his arms and wrists were like steel springs. He snapped the tip of the shinai like a cracking whip; it stung every time it hit and he hit every time. Finally he lowered the tip of his sword and just looked at me.

"Why do you not defend against the men cut?" he asked, genuinely puzzled.

I was puzzled: "Sensei, I thought we were not supposed to."

"Suffering you will get without trying," the master said to me sternly, "to make yourself suffer without need is to waste the lessons that suffering will teach you."

I get the deal about stressing the body to improve the body and mind. But cold showers sound so...hair-shirt. Brrrr!And yet...for all that my sensei expected me to protect myself from avoidable pain, the kenjutsu tradition is that the students practice until they drop and the sensei gets to whale the tar out of them with a bokken (wooden sword) when they screw up. Or not: some of the great kenjutsu training stories involves the sensei sneaking around and whacking the students at random just to get him all cat-like and quick. Remember, this is zen we're talking about. The nutshell of a good koan is that it makes absolutely no sense...until it does.

So do you find that self-imposed "suffering" - fasts, physical strain like yoga or types of training, minor deprivations like forgoing meat, sugar or taking a cold shower instead of a hot one - helps to focus the mind and tauten the body in the way that, say, great suffering and tragedy can bring about a sort of enlightenment? In what ways? What's your experience?

I'm genuinely curious. What do you all think?