How will You be Practicing this Week?

 

Welcome to Practice week!

What happens when you hear that word? Do you groan in anticipation of the work required or do relish the opportunity? Some practice is pure joy while other kinds can feel like pure torture. Do you dislike being a beginner?  Do you want things to be perfect even before you start?

What might change if you were to consider, as January suggests that “There is NO perfect.”

There is NO perfect
by January Handl

As a child and I sit,
our legs “v’d” together,
facing the same direction, bottoms on the ground.
We pull one shoed-foot up close.
I begin to show and tell,
the intricacies of tying one’s shoes
with words like:
make an “X”
tuck it through,
pull it, now
2 bunny ears then another X
pull it through
and “TA DA!”
then warning (from my past experience with beginners)
that the laces will probably
come untied soon;
that like most things worth mastering
first is ignorance (I don’t say it this way to the children)
then is awareness and yearning for self- mastery
then an “expert” whether it is natural law, direct encounters, an older, more experienced being,
or words/pictures
shows “a” way (there are often many, and children teach me more all the time)
then we try
and fail
and try
and fail
and try
and partially succeed
and try
and try
and try
and pretty soon we forget that
it used to be so hard,
and we re-learn this when we teach it to another
when we become the “expert.”

So it is with my spirit
My practice of trying again
Returning to breath,
Returning to ritual
Returning to surrender
No perfection
Just glimpses of self-mastery
not able to let myself off the hook,
nor judge too harshly when I fall off the wagon
headed Home.

We have a special treat today! Two poets! January has brought along her friend and colleague Penny Vieregge, Gazebo’s 85 year young health and first aid teacher who shares these reflections on practice. Enjoy!

 

The music pages of Bach are worn, thin.
They barely stand upright on the rosewood piano.
My friend, a Benedictine monk, opens his shabby case.
His hands caress and fit together the pieces of the silver flute.
He lifts it to his lips, gently exhaling his warm, moist breath.
My fingers know the opening chords.
My brain has embodied Bach’s indications..the phrasing and pacing

Only he first heard.
My inhalation and Romuald’s whisper through the air.
We lean forward, the opening phrases play themselves.
Absolute zero of the mind
When the glue holding ego disappears.
We flash into Oneness
And recall no other way.

~~~~~

My pressured hand against this sheet.
This pressured sheet against my hand.
Equal pressures
grow
and
sing.
And yes, I think I understand this pressured life.
What I put forth meets equal answering.
So, we grow
Life’s Force and I
Equal
Pressures
Balancing

 

Penny shares what can happen when the Practice of Bach is thorough. “A flash of Oneness” becomes available. When we are in sync with the practice the work and the results are in full balance.

A child must practice their letters in order to learn how to write them. I notice however, that my own daughter dislikes the rote copying of the alphabet but can be lost for hours if she is working on a story of her own. In the end she gets the needed practice of her letters but her context for doing so makes the process entirely different.

What will you be practicing this week? How will you make that practice empowering?

This week our initiative is to steer our practices in an empowering directions. Lean towards the balance and oneness. Know that there is no perfect. Have your methods empower, and enjoy the process!

“You don’t learn knife skills at cooking school, because they give you only six onions and no matter how hard you focus on those six onions there are only six, and you’re not going to learn as much as when you cut up a hundred.”
― Bill Buford, Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany