You should be dancing…Yea!

I recently moved into a new place in West End. It’s great, good people, close to everything and on top of the hill with 180⁰ views from the CBD to Mt Cootha. A post of some pictures will follow soon. Of course to celebrate the new place we had to have a party.

Last Friday the 22, being the winter solstice, sounded like as good a time as any. I whipped up a flyer in illustrator and emailed it out to all concerned. Also pasted it up at Zen Central, where I teach, to let all those whose email I don’t know, know about it.

It was a great night; we finally shut down the turntables just after three in the morning but the most joyous event for the night came much earlier in the evening. Megan, a dear friend, suffered a spinal injury as a result of an accident at a party late last year. Around nine pm I walked into The Yoga Room, where DJ Druid was bring the love to all, to see her dancing. My heart leapt, I was so happy for her. It was the first time in more than six months I had seen her on a dance floor.

She still has a long way to go in her recovery but it was wonderful to see her like that again.

Who I really am?

Early this month I participated in a week long physical theater intensive called Winter Stomp held by the amazing people at Zen Zen Zo. I found it incredibly rewarding. A week long residential course where you do nothing but eat, sleep and train for eight to nine hours a day. No phones, no email, no contact with the outside. In the massively connected world in which we live it so rare to be allowed the opportunity to disconnect for a time and keenly focus on one thing.

It greatly reminded me of times spent in long yoga retreats. I soon found myself dropping into the same mind state and intensity of focus. It seems that we rarely push our selves to test our limits is this modern, cloistered world of ours. A rarity then, to be able to bring to one's training the specificity of intent achieved there. Many thanks to Lynne, Tatie, Aideen and Dave. Not simply for the engaging quality of instruction but how it was all put together as a community of shared effort and support.

The overarching theme for the week was the question:

Who am I really?

This theme was interwoven through much of the work in an effort for us to strip away many of the facades we construct for the world and gain a deeper understanding of self. I am sure there was also recognition that we often unknowingly deceive ourselves as well.

This work culminated in a solo performance on the last night by all of the stompers of a piece of completely open style attempting to answer the question posed.

As I had been on several occasions during the week I was enthralled at the level of talent, stage presence, directorial skill and just plan old hutsbar on display that night. There were quite a few pieces that are hard etched in my mind for years to come.

When I had sat down earlier in the day to put together my piece an interesting thing occurred. Being the elder member of the stompers this year I had done a bit more work on this particular question of self examination. Through many hours of ‘Just Sitting’ and contemplating this very question I had come to realize that, not only the answer, but the very nature of the question, changes as we progress through our lives.

As I sat I found a poem forming unbidden in my mind. Back at school I had written huge amounts of poetry. Long rambling affairs that, thankfully, are lost to time. So I began to answer the question from the viewpoint of who I have become but in the style of a long gone fifteen year old who was sure he knew what it was all about.

Here is that poem:

“Who I really Am?”

An explanation is eight verses.

I have said it before,

I’ll say it again

After all of this time

‘Still don’t know who I am

I have read and I’ve listened,

To philosopher’s, guru’s and fool’s.

I’ve done all the courses;

Worked with most of the tools.

A virgo, A Shinto.

A monkey. A nine.

All convenient labels,

For those who want to save time.

A tool using mammal,

With an oversized brain.

Who still keeps doing the same shit,

Over and over and over again.

I am not this physical body.

Though, I’ve really enjoyed what I’ve got.

But there is not a single cell I me.

That was here when the boy, Craig, grew up.

I am not my Brain either.

This conscious mind. It’s not me.

These senses, they cannot be trusted.

All this I was taught, too well, by LSD.

So, I’m composing this little ditty.

To perform and display who I am.

I’m trying to create a big finish…

But I fear it will be rather lame.

I don’t know where this life will lead me.

It’s been fun so far; I’ll trust luck.

So again to the question, Who am I?

I don’t know and I don’t give a fuck.

My first New Year.

While not my first New Year, what follows is the first one I have a solid memory of and therefore the first in a sense. While many have followed much more active and spirited, none has been quite as strange as this.

I was somewhere between 10 and 12. Being the last child, my parents were rightly enjoying a night off from us as my brother and sister were both going to friends’ places for the night. So I was put to bed as my parents headed off to a party, to return home in the wee hours. I simply did what any young lad would do. Waited for ten to fifteen minutes after they left, got up turned on the TV and sat down with a selection of sugar and ‘stayed up till New Year’.

After working my way through the commercial stations, is it just me of is Tv coverage of fireworks displays the most boring thing that can be filmed. “Oh look, another green streak of light on the tv, wow…”

I ended up on the ABC. Some b&w war film was playing, cool. I soon realised that is was a film about B52’s and nukes so it couldn’t be WW2. So why was it in colour? No, I wasn’t a film buff at that age but many a long Sunday afternoon had been spent watching enough WW2 films that I did have some clue there.

As it wound it’s way to end I worked out that everything hinged on the fate of one damaged B52 was what it was all about. The sight of a pilot ridding a nuke down to its target was the first thing I never forgot about the film.

The second was, as the streets around rose to the sounds of car horns and general screams of Happy New Year, the final scene unfolded with hundreds of nukes exploding around the world to the strains of every Englishman’s war time sweet heart “Vera Lyn” signing her big one “We’ll meet again”

I sat alone in the house on the first New Years I was alone and I watched the end of the world while everyone cheered in the back ground. I have always wondered if the timing of the ending had been deliberate on the part of some ABC program director.

I think I was 17 before it all made sense. I had fallen for Kubrick films and was working my way through them as I could track them down. Someone let me a copy of Dr Strangelove, I had herd of it but was unsure of the story. I just knew it was one of his war films.

It didn’t take long for me to work out it was that film.

I had never told anyone about that night. How could I have seen that film when I was fast asleep…

It may have been the first time I realized my own mortality, not sure. It was however, I think, the first time I trying to encompass the idea that, we humans could actually wipe everyone out. That was what I had trouble sleeping about for the next couple of weeks.

The Effect of place on memory.

I was helping a friend last Easter. She was holding a yoga retreat in Springbrook in the hinterland of the gold coast and I was going to be on staff for the four days. One of the other teachers gave me a lift from the train station to the retreat centre. As we drove through Mudgeeraba, a small hamlet on the highway that had been a timber town in the good old days, I was surprised to see that my grandparent’s house was still there. It was supposed to be knocked down not long after we sold it 20 years ago.

A coupe of weeks later I was down at the coast again and decided, out of curiosity, to drive out to the old house and have a longer look. While the house was still there the township had changed, almost beyond recognition, from the sleepy little town I had spent summer holidays in. The post office was now “The Old Post Office Café” and there was a post office shop in the new commercial development a couple of blocks away.

When I arrived I was in for shock, the place had not changed at all. The old shed was still out the back etc. Well, it had changed a bit, the veggie garden beside the shed was gone and the place was filled with cars. The house was on a massive block, two titles if I remember correctly, and was being used as a small used car yard. I walked onto the property and looked around.

The shed had been a semi-mythic place for me as a child. Huge (not so big now though), dark and almost filled to the brim with all manner of tools that gave the place a unique smell of dust and rust. It had been a place of discovery and mystery for me. My grandfather was working for the local council at the time. Close to retirement, he had been a farmer for most of his life, the job was more a chance for him to get around the area and chat to the locals or so it seemed to me at the time. I would dive into the stacks of junk in the shed and come up with some tool that I had no idea of its use.

“Pop! What’s this for?”

“Well bring it here so I can see it lad. What you have there is…” and he would tell me at length about my latest find. I would usually only get a vague idea of what he was talking about but it didn’t matter.

“This reminds me of the time…” He would then be off on one of his stories of times past, ancient days to one such as me. A time where horses still worked the land, but only just, they had all but disappeared from the roads and soon too for the fields. Days of no television and no power. I loved his stories and wish I had put them down on paper.

The side door was open, inside bent intently over vice a man was rewiring a starter motor. Patiently, deliberately, he wound the copper wire; oblivious to me standing there almost looking over his shoulder. I didn’t want to intrude, to break his flow. So I stood there and took it all in. The old dark wood, massive doors with hinges as wide as my forearm.

The shed was full again with stuff. Tools and what looked like projects started and put aside to be completed for another day. I remember it had taken us at least two days to clear it out when Pop came to live with us. The shed was big enough to park four, possibly six at a squeeze, cars; but there was only room to inch in the tiny old 323 that Nanna and Pop had at the time. There were enough tools there to give half a dozen workshops a good start in life. Wire tensioner, saws from tiny fret saws all the way up to two man cross cut jobs, awls, planes – both metal and wooden, picks, shovels, augers, plum bobs, axes, mattocks and lots I stuff I hand never gotten around to showing to pop for him to explain to me. I stopped counting at six hammers and that was the complete ones, there were at least that many heads without handles as well. I don’t know where it all went. I was too young to worry about such things, or to muse on what effect such an event was having on my grandfather; what was it like to see tools one had used to shape and create a life, many of which had attached to them memories of people and places long gone, be taken up and removed from your life as well?

The guy working in the shed noticed me, after a time, and turned to ask what I wanted.

“Just having a look around, you see this used to be my grandfathers place…”

I went on to explain how it had been a long time since I had been in the area etc.

“Ah, Tom Burton, my mother used to live across the back lane over there. She know him and Eddie quite well.”

We chatted for a while about this and that; he had been using the shed for a workshop almost since the day we sold the place. Slowly refilling it, with the clutter of a lifetime, that had been emptied when we left. I thanked him for his time and let him return to his work. I smiled as I turned away, the shed was still there and someone was using it to fashion things in wood and metal with their hands. Pop would be so pleased.

I turned to the house. The old back landing had been enclosed. I stood there for a while just taking it all in. The owner came over after a while to see what I wanted; I didn’t seem to be interested in the cars. I gave him the same speech I had the guy in the shed and was surprised to find that this was the same man who had purchased the place fro us twenty years ago. He had planned to develop it but it had ended up staying as a car yard. We chatted for a while and he asked if I would like to come inside and look around, which I did.

Beside the old back door was the old wooden clock face with the sign above it saying “Sorry, we are out. We will be back at” and you would let the visitors know when you would return. There used to be a pen and paper attached, for your visitors to leave you a note. A relic from the days when people never locked their doors. Well not the back door anyway, anyone who knew you always came round the back. The front door was only for strangers. As we stepped in the kitchen, I was suddenly ten years old again and half my height. The place was the same, nothing had been changed. The same lino on the floor, paint on the walls and those off green doors on the cupboards with the funny little circular air vents in them. I felt as if all I had to do was close my eyes and when I opened them again it would be 10 am and we were arriving for a Sunday lunch with Nanna and Pop. As we walked in the back door, nanna would be sitting at her usual seat at the kitchen table getting things ready for lunch. Pop would be either out in the garden or if it was summer in the next room waiting for the cricket to start on tv.

Nanna died when I was quite young. Cancer. The word still brings a chill to the heart and the slight intake of breath now, but a generation ago it was much worse. With all the advances that have been made in treatment since then, I think that the big leap has been made in early detection. Through better methods, greater awareness and vigilance. When it was finally picked up, it meta-sized so long ago and her body was so riddled with it, it was hard to tell where it had started from. It was not a question of treatment, but simply of time. She passed in the night, a couple of days into her first stay in the hospital.

I remember coming down for the funeral. We walked in the back door, as usual, but she was not there. Everyone settled down to talk, to exchange the memories one does at a time like this. I was restless, I found myself aimlessly walking around the house, then outside. My father found me not long after, standing alone at the side of the house with tears streaming down my face. I known she was gone, on an intellectual level but it had had no concrete meaning till then. While they had often been to our house I had never been there and not seen her. Dad found me about an hour after we arrived. I had been unconsciously looking for her, wandering around the house; trying to see if she was still alive, somewhere. When I could not, the loss became real. I was out in the back yard crying with my whole being, the way only a child can. I had lost relatives before but had been too young to really understand it all. That was when I said good bye to her. The actual funeral, sitting in a strange church, had little effect on me.

All this had come spinning back to me in the moments I had walked into the kitchen. I pushed down the lump in my throat and continued the tour of the old house; other rooms brought back memories but nothing like the first steps in the kitchen. I thanked the man and made my leave.

I have many photo’s of her to remind me but the one I wish I had would be of her, sitting at the kitchen table, peeling veggies, smiling and looking towards the back door as her grandson walked in.