Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer

Shoulder Stands and Bird Doo

“Best breathing yet.”

My yoga instructor tells me that my breathing has been good today.  It’s been said that if you’re in a posture but not aligned with your breath, you’re not doing yoga, you’re just stretching.  Today I conjured Vader.  Tomorrow’s practice, who knows?  Every day is different.

Every day is a yoga practice of sorts.  Metaphors abound on and off the mat.

I’ve been given new postures to practice.  A completely new and unexplored realm, the dynamic inverse world of shoulder stands.  Ee gads!  Hesitant, I told my instructor that I was nervous.  Not sure I could get my legs up in the air properly.

“After everything else you’re doing in your practice…this is easy,” he says.

He was right.  It wasn’t that bad.  Just new and unfamiliar.  New positionings for me to attune to.

Speaking of positioning.  Besides being blessed with the addition of new postures in my yoga practice, it seems my feathered friends would also like to bestow their gifts upon me.

Post shoulder stands and beach time, I rolled up to a stop sign with my window down to the tropical air.  Suddenly, it felt as if someone had thrown a fistful of wet sand at me.  A damp and grainy splat had hit my bare leg and smattered the inside of the car door.  With a closer look, I realized that this was not sand, but rather a large deposit of fresh bird poo.  What are the odds?

courtesy of labasta

Bewildered, I stuck my head out the window and looked up, seeing nothing, of course.  My bird friend was swift in flight and long gone.  Amazed at the angle needed to achieve this perfect aim to reach me, I took the droppings as a sign of good luck.  They say bird poop is a blessing and that offering seemed destined for me.

Someone taught Jeb the Italian slang for feces.  For the rest of our car ride home – me with drying bird doo on my leg, Jeb in the backseat – he goes bilingual.  In some allegorical call and response, he delightfully announces “turd'”with a rolling ‘r’ and an Italian accent.  Then follows it with “stronzo!”

There we are, driving home.  Shoulder stands and bird shit.  Me, I’m still breathing.  Deep in the excrement and smiling.  Somehow feeling blessed.

Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer · 2 Comments

Dreams in the Key of Life

WIth the light shining longer these days, it feels as though I’ve overslept by the time I stir at 5:45am.

Already there is rising sun and chittering birds.

My head still sunk to pillow, I steep in the remnants of my dreams.  No plot or setting.  Just the image of an ankh made from the wood of a Hawthorn tree.

I leave my bed and burn the incense.  Brew the coffee.  Writing time gives way to researching Egyptology, this key of life.

Still mysterious in its meaning, the ankh is thought to encompass both the male and female and symbolize eternal life.

As the mauves of early morning transform to orange and gold, I realize that no masterpiece of words will be crafted today.  Obligations pull as the sun fills the sky.

I remind myself that the Archives are simply a recording.  Some days more mundane than others.

This morning, it’s a cryptic dream of ancient origins that will segue me into Honey Nut Cheerios and a school lunch prep.  Inside these cells of mine that walk through school fund-raisers, yoga postures and gas station fill-ups, there lives a wealth of layers.  Am I just a filter through which lifetimes and dimensions beam?

What’s more real?  Writing a check to the electric company or a dream of the key of life?

Questions that may never be answered.  Just a recording here today.  6:21am on May 19, 2011.  One mother at the computer before her son awakes.  Sitting on an island in the middle of the Pacific, drinking coffee, dreaming, and writing as if any of it matters.  Somehow, in some small way, I can’t help but believe it does.

Posted on by Jessica Dofflemyer

Living the Bridge

It can be hard to bridge the realms.

Yesterday I stood with headphones and a microphone in the studio of Kauai Community Radio asking every listener to make a phone call and donate money to the station.  Across the board from me was the host of an eclectic show that features music, musings, poetry and inspired words to enlighten.

This DJ is ringing bells and calling in the angels while I’ll repeat the phone number to call.  Usually, this radio show is stretching toward the realms of the Divine.  Today, I’m grounding the conversation in tallies and cold hard cash, making requests for thousands of dollars.

The host reads Hafiz, reminding listeners of the The Friend.  When the poem is complete, he mentions that inside the book jacket, the translator, Daniel Ladinsky, has made a dedication to avatar, Meher Baba.  As we’re live, on the air, he hands me the 1937 photograph of the guru, standing in Cannes, France.  He is by a tree, smiling in white, hair flowing.   So often when I gaze upon photos of this man, waves of sensation run through my body.  A visceral reaction that defies rationalization, one I have never fully understood.

courtesy of http://www.avatarmeherbaba.org

I stand looking at the saint, reverberating in the high prose of Hafiz, and I repeat into the mic that the radio station has less than two hours to reach its goal of $50,000.  I announce the phone number again.  I mention the tax-deductible aspect of their donation.  I try to bridge the worlds of the practical and the ethereal as the host rings those om-engraved chimes one more time.

He cuts to music and I stand with Meher Baba, black and white, in France.  The phones are ringing in the studio and volunteers are bustling about.  What is it about this man?

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Rex had been staying at his ashram in India for months before landing back on the island into my arms, so many years ago.  Like many devotees, he carried multiple photographs of his guide and I was surrounded by pictures of the man that gazed at me through the rose and sandalwood incense Rex burned in his honor.

On Rex’s second day back home, the day we conceived Jeb, it was Meher Baba that gazed at me from a necklace around his neck, smiling in unconditional love as spermatozoa met ovum.

The phone rings again in the KKCR studios and this time I answer.  A woman with the last name of Amsterdam calls to say that she wants to donate to the station because we mentioned Meher Baba’s name.  I take down her address, phone number, email and the amount of money she wants to give, filling out the appropriate form.  Is this what it looks like to bridge the worlds?

At high noon, the radio station’s fund drive has officially come to a close and in about 2 hours we’ve raised over $2,000.  Peter Gabriel is singing that in this moment he “feels so connected” and the program host’s spirits are soaring as he lip syncs along, rejoicing in the accomplishment.

Next week it will be back to Persian poetry and excerpts from the We’Moon Calendar.  He can gaze upon the face of Meher Baba or any other saint with no need to mention monetary sums.

As for me, I’m usually at home with Jeb on Sundays.  Not always listening to the radio.  Often cleaning the bathroom or building Legos.  Making bridges of my own between that ecstatic day of conception – March 13, 2003 – and all of the practicals necessitated to live the fruit it bore.  One of Meher Baba’s more well-known quotes comes to mind as I ponder living this link.

Don’t worry, be happy.