embodiment
1.
A few days ago, standing at my bathroom sink, I said to myself after a long inner dialogue about time, “I must embody patience.” Not practice it, but embody it.
The word “embody” dates to the 1540s, “in reference to a soul or spirit invested with a physical form”.
Cultivate, a word commonly used in spiritual practice, suggests that something exists within us, to be nurtured and grown. Embody, however, suggests that something exists externally, out in the world, and it can be given a physical form.
2.
In building Still Life Meditation, I created the space I always wanted to practice. It’s inspired, among other things, by Zen monasteries, Japanese tea houses, and Delight Yoga’s Hubert Crijns-designed studios throughout the Netherlands.
In The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton wrote:
“We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.”
A few years ago, I created an installation called Chashitsu – container of light in which I made a tea room out of a small closet under a staircase. The Japanese tea house, chashitsu, is designed in all elements to represent and inspire the values of the tea ceremony: a starkly unassuming interior, a short door through which guests humbly enter on their knees... In the ceremony itself, the gestures and words of both server and guest are so incredibly intricate that it’s impossible to execute the entire ritual with anything short of undivided attention. To name just one example, all parties walk leading with a certain foot, and cross the fabric borders of each tatami mat with a certain foot, and which foot is used depends on which direction one is walking through the room.
Protocols that are difficult to remember exist because they need to be remembered. Habit is the enemy of mindfulness. Make enough rules (founded in earnest principles), and eventually you can’t not pay attention. If each foot has a meaning, then each step has a meaning; and if, when we enter a space, we are enjoined to do it in the same way we approach places of high honor, then we act honorably therein.
3.
Despite all my earnest desires to own fewer things, my delight in books has prevented me from purging very many of them. Last night I grabbed Christopher Hitchens’ Mortality to find an exact phrase. It’s a slim volume numbering barely more than one hundred pages, but the hardcover edition (which I eagerly purchased as soon as it was released) weighs heavy and solid in the hands, its textured and debossed dust jacket encouraging the inappropriately sensual rubbing to which all bibliophiles have admitted.
I make no pretense: I love the thing. I have no illusions that all these books make me more intelligent or cultured (especially since so many of them remain unread), or that books are some high medium above the reproach of the de-clutter-er. The same paper that bears poetry also bears propaganda, and all manner of useless things. But still, I was immensely saddened to read in an article more than a decade ago that the rise of e-reader devices marked the transition toward what the author described as a “post-Gutenberg” age. It is not only handsome author photos that make me feel as though a writer speaks directly to me. Holding something, someone, his ideas in my hands – it inspires a sensation as yet unnamed.
4.
“It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.”
I think of this every month when I menstruate. To eliminate landfill waste, I use a menstrual cup: a diaphragmatic silicone reservoir that requires emptying once or twice a day. There’s a humiliating indignity to it, being made to manage one’s bodily waste. In the modern West, we rarely confront these things. Flush toilets and running showers have eliminated the need for us even to look at what our bodies slough off, let alone to (forgive the imagery) scoop it out ourselves.
We speak often of mind and body, or of the mind-body connection, as though there were any meaningful existence of one without the other. Proponents of reincarnation, eternal consciousness, afterlife, and the like often paint a somewhat judgmental picture: the glory of the transcendent being, hampered by the limitations of the human form. It’s a popular worldview, but a rather boring one in my opinion, given all the curiosities that can be known even by this puny brain. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously said that “we are spiritual beings having a human experience”, rather than the converse, and while the phrase is rarely treated this way, I sometimes think how incredibly lucky it is that a spiritual being could end up living a human life.
Not without its challenges, of course: the waste, the inefficiency, the failures of an analog mechanism that’s only had a few million years to work itself out. We all “lose” to our bodies at one point or another, from the banality of a cold that condemns us to bedrest to much graver challenges.
Yet it’s an astonishing improbability that anything could exist at all, let alone lives like ours, in bodies like these ones. How surprising it is that we, in our discontent, find ourselves wishing for different ones all the time. Sitting “inside” this wondrous machine, yet the rain falling outside is the same water that created it.
