Bone

I have always been drawn to bones and antlers. I'm not sure if the attraction began before, or after, we studied Georgia O'Keeffe in my art history survey class in college. Either way, O'Keeffe's perspectives of the infinitely blue sky through a pelvis or skull speak to my own fascination with the physical and divine, tangible and intangible.

One summer when I was a little girl, a whale washed up on the beach in front of my family's home. I was devastated by the whale's death and decay. Someone carried sections of the skeleton up to the farm and tied them along a fence where they have been ever since. My children now climb along the bleached ribs and vertebrae. Like the bones in O'Keeffe's paintings, the whale bones pull me into a place of deeper knowing I can't quite put my finger on, that makes me want to simultaneously lie down and fly.

I've come to know this deeper place on my mat where I speak bone: pelvis, scapula, occipital, patella, coccyx... On my mat, I find the same simultaneous energies holding me together: the Earth below my feet and the Heavens above my crown. Again and again and again, I bow down to my metatarsals, and with an inhale caged by my ribs, a pressing down through my fibias, I rise up with humeri and sternum open to the Heavens beyond, honing humility and possibility at once. The work of proprioception never ceases as my skin and guts, knowledge and experience, continue to shift and evolve, ever reminding me of my fleeting miraculous nature.

Pip and Phoebe have come to know about my fascination with bones through my coveting of all things skull and antler (it is such a human instinct to try and possess the intangible). I've told them I am going to get a tattoo of a cow skull on my forearm; every time we go for a walk, I remind them to look out for fallen antlers. For as long as I can remember, I've dreamt of finding fallen antlers.

And then, yesterday, when I couldn't write, I went for a walk, outside, called a dear friend, and low and behold, there it was, directly in my path: a newly fallen antler, partly buried, in the newly soft ground. A gift? A reminder? A sign? A knowing.

After a quick google search, I know the 3-point antler is from a young buck because of its small size. I know it is made of bone (as opposed to horns on bovine animals that are composed of the same material as fingernails and hair), and that antlers can grow up to an inch per day, among the fastest growing animal-tissue on the planet. I know that once this buck's pedicles are healed, he will grow a new set of antlers, each a little bit bigger than the one I've taken home, which he will shed again, next March.

I can't help but think that while this antler was growing over the past year, so was Blue Light. The 3 points hearken the movement, counseling, and collective arms of this community. I see this antler's placement in my path as a metaphor for the cyclical nature of things. It is not a forging ahead, my friends; it is a coming back to our mat, to our homes, re-aligning our bones to what we know now, and rising again, like a new set of antlers.

Happy last days of winter.

Please note there are no live classes Wednesday through Friday this week.

As always, thank you for reading.