Life, Ritual...

Not exactly the Bamboo Forest of my childhood, but this will do!

As a child I lived in a convent with many other children; and no way to escape the crowd, the noise, the praying, and the unexciting and insipid moments of the life of a child in a convent.  I found a secret place and every day at sunset I visited the nearby forest of bamboo where I would lie down and listen to the steady rhythmic heartbeat of the earth, or perhaps it was my own heartbeat.  For eleven years I performed this daily ritual; even in the rain I could feel this pulse as though I were connected by a root like umbilicus to the dark core of the earth.

The forest in a child’s mind, in my mind is in the middle of a mystic setting, a majestic realm, a kind of a kiva, a womblike vessel.  This enclosure had all the power of an ancient temple; it was a place of dying and becoming.  I was the sole priestess to decide my own fate.  I learned a way of being in the world and in transition.  Something within me changed as the earth underwent its own transfiguration and as the day’s activity gave way to the long, slow respiration of the night.  I have never been the same since I left my bamboo forest, my soul is floating between being a child and being a woman and not knowing which way to go and don’t get me wrong because that’s the beauty of it. 

I now realize that the sacred space I created for myself, the room in which I do my writing, and put down thoughts; the room in which I write my secrets, the room in which I play endless games on line; the room in which I meditate, the room in which I often think of my life as really a reconstruction—a reactivation, if you will—of my childhood space “my bamboo forest.”  When I go in there to be alone, I am surrounded by books that have help me  find my way, and I recall moments of reading certain works such as Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre that were particularly insightful to my “irrational” undeveloped mind.  When I sit down to do my routine, I pay close attention to little ritual details—where the notepads and pencils are placed, where my blankets are stored, that sort of thing—so that everything is exactly as I remember it having been before.  It’s all a sort of “set-up” that releases me when I am home, when I am in my own space.  And since that space is associated with a certain kind of performance, it evokes that performance again.  And the performance is play; the performance is the art of living.  The performance is my reflections on the art of living; and yes, I do not live like most earthlings. 

Today I need to think, to clear my mind and to go on from here and while I am clearing my mind I can have a great meal at the Sand Castle by the beach in St. Croix with my best friend Ms. Elle Murphy...

  

Tomorrow I will do the same and go from there.  Each day is a new day and I have the power to change my day from bad to good and vice versa.  I have the power to get up in the morning and decide to be happy instead of gloomy.