Turning

"When I was dancing” said Yves, our bio-dynamic builder who danced and was friends with Margot Fonteyn “I would start turning, and I would keep turning until I was simply ‘tournant’ - a thing turning in space. Now I am a builder and that is still how I work.”

The house is in chaos. There is packaging all over the living room floor, newly gessoed boards on jam jars on the kitchen table, invoices all over the room-with-an-identity-crisis (office cum bedroom cum bathroom cum meditation cum practice cum writing room cum cats’ killing room cum mouse morgue - whatever). There are piles of laundry serving as cat-nests and there is no space for lil’ ol’ me.

“Can you pick C up from the station? That way I can have some space for myself in the house” ; “ I need to get to my yoga class I simply have to have some space!” ; “”Today is the hundredth day of our hundred days of meditation and there’s nowhere to sit and besides I will be in the car if you don’t pick C up from the station” ; “Could you move your packaging out of the living room, I can’t breathe” ; “I can’t move my bow in this room which used to be my space” etc.

I started thinking about this ‘self’ and this ‘space’ this ‘self’ apparently needs. I started wondering how it is that people remain spacious and live as a family of nine in a shack. Gradually (with the help of meditation and yoga, admittedly) I began to catch a glimpse. I was supposed to be in my yoga class, and meditating along with my virtual sangha for our two hundredth day, and practicing, but I was driving to the station to pick up C. I started to think about where I wasn’t and how everyone around me had forced me into this corner of where I didn’t want to be (why couldn’t he post his painting later, she catch the bus…). I began concentrating on my breathing, becoming aware of my fingers touching the wheel, bearing my fellow meditators in heart and mind when suddenly it happened – I was simply where I was. The world kept turning. I kept turning with it and there was so much space!

I met C at the station with open arms.