How easy it is to be drawn from attention to the world around me.
Not wanting to be irritable, I find it almost too much effort to talk to the people around me about quotidian things: who missed a meeting, who was supposed to sweep in the dining room, where the lost keys are.
But am I supposed to forget about these things and be a swirl of spiritual attention?
A friend is going to a canning workshop this morning. He said: you could come with me. I said: I don’t know how fasting is for other people, but for me I don’t have it in me–I don’t even know who I am right now.
Who am I then, uncoupled from the basic foundational human desire: to feed oneself, the root of any desire. Am still human? Or is a part of me reaching towards the arena that isn’t?
And if that’s the case, then the fact that the fast is a daily routine, ending each twilight, does seem like spiritual ADD. Reach for what’s beyond, come back, reach for what’s beyond, come back.
In yoga practice we learn to associate an inhale and an exhale with each movement through a vinyasa, but in still held postures we also find the flow of breath–inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. Inhale lengthen, exhale stretch deeper. There is a constant pulse to breath, as there is to the circulation of blood through the human body: rush out, rush back, rush out, rush back.
If our entire life is one side, our entire death another, if the entire daylight fast is one side, the entire night another, what if it moves even more subtly into the constant day-to-day. That the shift between spiritual attention and physical attention to the facts of the world, to be able to maintain that balance, is the entire point?
Tempting to think so, but I think there is no “entire point” to fasting. It’s the oddest of puzzles: that which has a hundred and one solutions.
Last night one of the cats spilled a cup of water on my books. I was so distraught I could have wept. A day of equipoise and blissing out in the fast did not so much evaporate from me as suddenly stand out in sharp relief to the parts of me that were still very tied to material existence.
Another benefit of the fast: you learn who you are and who you really are. And who you really are is not always as close or as far to who you are as you imagined. But you never really know, do you?
But I think one of the things I need to learn is how to do both. As the month progresses, I will have to learn how to fast and how to sweep the dining room and find the lost keys.