In Meditation one morning, I had an internal visualization about the anatomy of a seated human that causes a diamond to form at the base of the pelvis and another diamond at the top of the head.
The diamond at the bottom is formed by a sit bone (ischial tuberositiy) on either side, the tailbone (coccyx) at the back and the pubis symphysis up front.
The fontanel of a newborn, likewise, is a diamond shape formed by two curved parietal bones on either side and the frontal bone, with a diamond shaped opening among the bones until they fill in during the first year of life. The bones grow together and form sagittal sutures — like interlocking puzzle pieces only more intricate.
While sitting, but before meditating, I orient by taking an awareness inventory. The routine goes something like this: Earth, sky, front, back, right side, left side, outside and inside. I can feel each part come alive, or not, as I bring conscious awareness to it. When it’s hard to get consciousness into any part of me, I simply note it. Oh, not yet fully awake. It helps to do a few simple yoga poses to wake the body up before sitting in quiet. Some days are easier than others to be conscious of my entire body.
This particular morning, I was keenly aware of the diamond shape as I oriented to Earth. My pelvic floor felt alive and the shape among all the bones was particularly clear in my visual cortex, perhaps because of increased sensation that comes of sitting on a wood block. When I moved my awareness to the top of my head for the sky orientation, a similar diamond shape presented itself to my awareness.
Even though our adult skulls no longer open to sky, after one parietal bone presumably slid over the other to allow our big head to navigate through the birth passage so we could emerge, and the bones knit together during our first year of life, there is still the slightest imprint of what was there before the calcification process was complete. It feels like a diamond.
The significance may be of no import to anyone but me, but it delighted me to notice that correspondence of our central skeleton’s two diamonds top and bottom! It’s bound to be a rich life with diamonds fore and aft.
I then went on to recognize an imaginary diamond shining from the breast bone like that on the sculpture of a maiden carved to be mast-head of a ship, and the shape made by the trapezius muscles of the back. More correlations of paired diamonds. (It was a busy mind sort of meditation that morning!) Then, I dropped into a lovely weightless ease of being upright with no drag from the body. The diamonds lingered.
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When I was in sixth grade, Rhonda Dunstan and I would draw crosses and then draw lines between each of the points. The finished product was a diamond shape. Perhaps diamonds are a girls best friend — on the baseball field and in God’s Eyes - made of two sticks with yarn wrapped around them. (I swore I’d never own a real diamond because of the huge kerfuffle in my household when I was about nine-years-old. My Grammy Maxwell, a widow since before I was born, had recently remarried and somehow lost her new diamond ring down my mother’s sink. They never found it and there was as much grief and upset about that ring as there had been around my best friend Angelika’s mom dying that same year. And anyway, most gemstone diamonds that I’ve seen do not have that iconic cross-with-points-connected shape.
Kites we flew on kite staff had that same pleasing shape. My friend Katy and I built a kite at her house in Pacific Palisades. The handy part of having parents who don’t pay much attention to the play of their young ones is that we children got to explore deeply how to do things and how not to do things. Katy and I built this kite by using a hack-saw to cut off two strips of plywood from a hunk we found in her carport. We nailed the shorter piece to the longer piece so it made a cross shape and covered it over with newspaper held on with lots of Scotch tape and rubber cement. I remember the smell of the friction-burnt wood and the rubber cement. We tied torn-up rags on as a tail and found a ball of yarn for kite string. We laughed and laughed. That sucker must’ve weighed seven or eight pounds and we couldn’t hold it aloft long enough to catch a wind without muscle fatigue. We needed a gale force wind to catch it and carry it aloft. Woe to anyone who was in its path when the wind died.
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Our mailbox at this time of year is filled with cards of all sorts — including funny ones, secular, religious, utilitarian, heart-felt, skinny and fat santas, reindeer, trees, dreidels, creches, and giant diamonds in the sky above the lowly manger in Bethlehem. There are my sixth grade stars! What fun to revisit them and to wonder if that’s how they came into our consciousness and how we came to replicate them compulsively on our paper-bag book-covers, notebooks and nearly every paper we turned in as homework. Rhonda and I seldom had to do the cursive homework. Our handwriting was that good!
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Over the weekend, my husband and I watched a four-star (four diamond?!) movie called Okja. It is wonderful, but not getting the press it deserves. I highly recommend it for story, acting, directing, special effects and timeliness. Mostly, it is a heart-warming and inspiring tale. Not for children, but about a female child with gumption and a very intelligent creature.
May you enjoy WHY-A-CAT-TOY*
*Whatever Holiday You All Celebrate At This Time Of Year!
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