ON WHICH INSTRUMENT ARE WE STRUNG?

Two views of our world: 1) humans are the center, or 2) each living being is just one tiny element of the life on earth all around us.  Clearly, and we can feel it more than ever now in our recent isolation, #2 is reality. Each sentient being is its own tiny center, like a small seed.

It is the excessively self-centered vision that has gotten us into trouble, not just politics or culture. However, If we can feel ourselves as part of nature, part of the ever renewed birth-life-death-birth cycles, there we can find equanimity even in extreme circumstances.

I've been thinking about bows - in hunting and in music. 15,000+ years ago there were murals depicting shamans with bows surrounded by all sort of animals. The bow is one of the first musical instruments. It is also one of the first weapons. And symbolically and biologically it is a taut string spanning a vertical axis - a world 'spine' - connecting in its own way heaven and earth. It is significant that Hippocrates said - "get thee knowledge of the spine." Through yoga, through bodywork releasing tension around the spine, creative movement, chi gung, etc. - we can always find and feel that living axis and access to heaven and earth - through sky, land and water - that we share with all beings.

It is significant that in Zero Balancing we view deep currents of energy as flowing through the bones and the soft tissues surrounding them almost like bowstrings. We engage the body with curves, in thoughtful arcs and 'bows', that help restore the feeling of a connection to a world, transcending the narrow sense of self.

I recall a passage from my favorite love song of Rilke -

"But all that touches you and me
brings us together like a bow
That makes one voice from two strings.
On which instrument are we strung
And which musician has us in his hand?
O Sweetest Song!"