病気〔吐き気〕—Life (out of) Balance

こんにちは

Ko knee she wah my fellow weaklings. Chewing the gray, feathery air of Shanghai left me with the grunge that has felled my energy like a pack of wolves hanging onto the ankles of an elk, still kicking. Still, breathing...

Really, that's what life comes down to, as all the tai chi in China reminded me. We breathe, we live. Most of us don't do that daily deep, abdominal breathing that matters. Most aerobic sports are thoracic breathing. But what happens when we fully fill our lungs, extend our abdomen? It's something you jazz musicians know in that beautiful sub-history of, especially, woodwinds, where Rahsan Roland Kirk could do the circular breathing that shows the listener no caesura for breath, as he played three different tunes on three saxes at the same time, and another on his plastic noseflute. Or of course there is the best-known example, Dizzy G playing his trumpet, his cheeks puffed out like a squirrel gathering nuts against winter, releasing stored air while taking on more. It was like my parlor trick as a young Humpty Bogart, during those few years where I smoked, when I taught myself to French inhale/exhale through the nose at the same time with my nasty Gitane.

Anyhow, try taking a few really deep breaths right now. If you did, you'll feel the swell of the sea that's out the window in front of me now—those chaotic intrusions of wave-form that can only be the Pacific. Sickness brings us back to basics, like breathing, or noticing the sea's breath, these waves. I rode them, feverish and coughing through the night, in my cabin. The more I study the maps of currents, the more interested I become in the way waves demonstrate energy. For example, if you haven't tried this site that shows wave patterns in the world's oceans, give it a short visit:

http://www.oceanweather.com

I won't mention that other book I love so much, Theo Swenck's Sensitive Chaos, but it's on/in my mind again.

We had no internet in Japan, as some how the microwaves of the ports interfered, so I'm behind on this blog. But after somehow analyzing the 90 student papers I now have in my back-pack, I'll catch up. Maybe I'll up-date older entries, for, as David Antin says, "only the past changes." For instance Thailand, that erupted again after we left, and where Thaksin's thugs try to displace the last government, probably equally corrupt.

But let me end where I began, with a twist of this Moebius strip: sickness makes us sit down, pulls our vision down, took my top-heavy western consciousness down to the beauty/sadness of the perfectly timed cherry blossoms, drifting slowly to the ground, where my exhaustion focused upons ants and children—small things, often without a voice. I picked up coins, even at the base of mighty Mt. Fuji, where the altitude clogged my head and ears and I made my quiet, thoughtless peace with gravity, which keeps us from floating away with the crows of our fantasies and fears, dreams and projections.

It's hard to get our overworked cerebellum around the notion that we are linked by breathing the same molecules Leo Da Vinci and our forebears once inhaled. But breathe carefully, my land-lubbing amigos, and you will feel the earth turning, its gyros always busy. Swirl your Maker's Mark around in its glass, giving it oxygen, and hold that note—whose importance no other singer of jazz ballads has yet noticed—with extra wind. In the worst of times, when all we long for is to no longer feel sick, and where we face our own mortality, we regain the gift of breathing, see that life is profoundly simple in one way: in and out; in and out...