Petaluma is a lovely place to spend eight days working. The Earthrise retreat center at The Institute of Noetic Sciences sprawls on ooodles of acres of oak-tree studded rolling hills. The sheep I mentioned last blog made a big impression on me and on all the students and assistants at this final leg of a three year training program. The drive home afforded me that "doodly-doo" time to think and noodle with ideas. I jotted some of them down while driving. Maybe next time I'll use a hand-held device to record thoughts rather than try to write 'em! We'll all be safer for that!
To the anonymous drivers on the freeway:
Nice playing leap frog with you down the FIVE -
skirting around the Big Boy Tonka Trucks
who lumber along behind one another
like elephants holding one another's tails.
You, the green Lexus SUV,
we've played do-si-do a dozen times in the past two hours -
not once nodding in recognition that it IS all a game....
yet there's comfort in the familiar and this truth is stranger than friction on the road
where tires worn thin by miles of black stone and tar shred and shed their skin with a BANG!
leaving behind their hide for others to avoid rolling over
and catapulting into the air like heavy black crows
and, though I'm hungry for something to munch,
I don't dare stop for lunch on the hunch that the truck
that's full to the brim with garlic and seems to be
the slowest moving elephant of all,
will catch and pass me and I'll have to pass it all over again...
plus I'd miss trading glances with the Lexus Lady and comparing my vanilla white Escape SUV
with her greenie sexy Lexy
yes, indeedy...
************************************************************************
“Bless your Heart” is a phrase I picked up from Dr. Nelson in 1995. Saying it to people I meet steeps me again in the warmth of his slow and expansive manner. He made quite an impression on me during a three week intensive yoga teacher’s training. He was 82 at the time, and I 47. He was learning yoga for himself - to straighten out his body and immerse himself in the divine through meditation.
He told me the history of how he came to be the first African American dentist admitted to the New York Associaion of Dentists - back in the day. One lunch hour, he entrusted me with the task of removing his extensions which were long white and black braids woven into his own black and white hair. He felt light-headed once they were removed. It was odd tossing it all in the trash as he asked me to do. I thought it could've used a ceremony.
His southern drawl fell cozy on my ears like a warm shawl on an October evening, so I have often wanted to share that cozy comfy feeling with my circle of familiars periodically over the intervening 17 years. I have said, in an admiring tone, to someone who has just innumerated to me her various volunteering venues, “Well, Bless your Heart!” I always mean to conjur that all-accepting, warmth-exuding true appreciation that Dr. Nelson’s exclamation carried. I realize it has truly become one of my favorite phrases.
Imagine my slow to build laugh when, the last night of my work week in Petaluma, I witnessed a skit which was part of the culmination of the three year Somatic Experiencing training which I’ve been assisting this year. At Stage Night, a Southern Belle of a certain age explained that very self-same vernacular expression as she gave us a tour of Southern Bell Speak - which is similar to Valley Girl Speak - only with fewer “like”s and fewer “you know”s and a lot more batting of eye-lashes.
“When I want to say to someone,” she elaborated, “‘Well, ain’t you just wearing the sh-t ugliest dress!’ I simply bat my eyelashes and say, ‘Well, Bless Your Heart!’ Or, if I want to say, ‘F--K off’, I say, ‘Well, Bless Your Heart!’”
Driving home, I wondered out loud if Dr. Nelson was using this sweet phrase to convey a big ol’ F--- Off! to everyone he met. I laughed and blushed at the thought. I doubt it, because he said it almost as much as he said ‘Namaste,’ and he was such a polite and gentle man. Namaste, roughly translated from Sanskrit, means:
I honor the place in you in which the entire universe dwells. I honor the place in you which is of love, of truth, of light, and of peace. When you are in that place in you, and I am in that place in me, we are one.
Butter my butt and call me a bisquit! Ya learn something new every day! (I learned this one from the Southern Belle... NOT Dr. Nelson!)
Namaste to aaaall y'all! and Bless Your Heart... Dr. Nelson style.
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