Embodiment – (for Michael)

“Only from the heart can you touch the sky” – Rumi

I had a tooth pulled last week. One of those big ones way in the back. Hurt like hell, throbbed a lot, narrowed my awareness like a sudden smack in the face. I thought, so this is embodiment, but it wasn’t really, it was just feeling the sensation of intense pain located in a specific point in my body. I wanted to reduce the intensity, but clenching and tensing like a knot seemed to only make it worse. Then I remembered, to ‘embody’ means to shift out of the everyday, near exclusive thought mode of constructing stories about the pain, such as the fear of it, and what my mind could imagine about it, and instead, open up to all the senses – not just the point where the hurting was. That way I got a sense of more space, a background of aware-spaciousness within which the tooth was throbbing. And it worked, the pain took its rightful place in a much larger constellation of things happening in my body (visually, hearing, taste, touch), along with my awareness of the open space that all this was suspended in. This was embodiment…

THIS
By Ken McKeon

For Michael Gray

Basic as this is…

A spread of bright sunlight or fogged in totality,
Dumb blank stare or all lit and ripe,
Scraps of last week’s dried up bread,
Or a properly grilled filet mignon
Complete with fries and a savory wine sauce…

The contraries share in it,
And it’s the path

Found, say, in a slight sense of throat rasp,
A just now sensory show-up, a real bother,
Dealt with easily, tea sip or lozenge suck,

Usual moves, common and prudent,

But now, just for a lark,
Do the unusual,
Beam into the raspy bothersome edge
A rod of felt light true golden-ness
A deft play of harmless scrimshaw acumen,
Pointed as a needle, precise as a dot,

Awareness directly isolates discomfit,

And moves on in, a deft dentist with a drill,
Then a light for all, an easily suddenly sent shock and awe,
But hold on, for there’s then a bloom, and this

Booms out its noiseless star shine radiance,
Unheard of display of

An internalized constellation flipped through systematic
Mind blown wonder, a big mind, a one shot wonder,
A how about that firework display,

There might, there must, be more to see here, so I’ll take a look,
You too, and let’s get back to one another,

Conference in lounge chairs set on a lime green beach,
Bordering a glowing pink sea, meet the next noon, time of

The several suns, the many skies, so oddly pleasing, pick
As you like from the song full charms of this lark trilled morn,

I’ll do the same, and we’ll meet up,
I guarantee it, for

I’ll be there too, waiting for you.