A part of me wants to draw this topic, doodle it in big loops and spirals. One of my favorite doodling games as a kid was to draw an organic shape, like an amoeba or a paramecium. Then I’d scoot my notebook to Carmen Chavez and she’d have to draw a face inside my shape. What part was the nose? The mouth? Possibly a body. We laughed the most at the banana-nosed creatures.
Circles for nostrils, circles for eyes. A person’s mouth forms a circle around certain notes when singing. Thinking now of a pie hole for a mouth, a description I’ve heard when talking about old, toothless mouths. I realize now I have no idea what it means. What is a pie hole anyhow? Don’t pie crusts have slits?
I slow-walked, for once following the instructions just as they’re laid out in the post. Here’s what happens when I walk. I notice that the rug I pass over doesn’t have circles on it. Wonder, since the rug is from India, whether the circle is too sacred to put onto a rug. Which would mean, if you did, that feet would walk all over the circles.
Once I took a bus ride from Delhi to Agra, the time I bought the rug, and I took off my pink shoes, folded my legs and made myself as comfortable as I could. I rode in the cab of a luxury tour bus with four other travelers, plus the bus driver, plus the bus driver’s helper. It was a big bus, a wide cab. I got the very frontmost spot, right up against the windshield. Had the bus crashed, I would have died instantly, like an insect.
But what I want to say is that when I crossed my legs, sitting like Buddha, the bus driver and his assistant yelled at me. They motioned, NO!, the shrine!! I was showing the bottoms of my feet to the shrine, who was an exotic part-elephant-part-woman statue that sat on the dashboard of the bus, just beside me, with fresh marigolds all around her. I immediately uncrossed my legs and placed them awkwardly to the side, as if I were riding sidesaddle.
Circles. What kind of circle would I be? I remember hula hoops, my waist zipping round and round, arms out to the side, mouth open in concentration (although not like a pie hole) and the hoop going going going going until I lost my mojo and it withered slowly down my legs.
Now I see my handwriting has gotten loopy, the o’s big. I could draw little smiley faces inside them. The 1960s and 70s seemed like circle times in life. Today, the first decade of the 21st century, strikes me as angular, an edge wanting to get its circle back.
-related to Topic post, WRITING TOPIC – CIRCLES
We have begun a very circular year, 2008.
What a whimsical flight. These practices so far are so much more structured than mine tend to be. Maybe if I do it more often, they will get longer and make more sense.
I could picture the scene on the bus and the doodles. It is a topic that wants to be drawn. I thought of needlework at one point.
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I think you’re right about 2008. I’m hopeful.
Are your practices more stream of consciousness? I once did writing practice with a poet. Well, we were a group, and one in the group was a poet. I noticed that her writing practices were abstract, very free flowing. Very poetic, almost like a giant prose poem, if that makes sense.
It is a visual topic, or at least it was for me. It still is. I’m still picturing craters on the moon, Mars, the balls of my feet, for some reason, and my round little toe. The smallest toe. Spinning on a bike. Wheels rolling…
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That makes a lot of sense. That’s exactly what they are for me…streams of consciousness. (Thanks for mentioning it). Almost all of my free or guided/free writing experiences have produced that kind of writing; sometimes it is stories or dreamlike sequences. I tend to write prose poems though I have been leaning toward fiction and essays, they are still fairly short.
As I was writing about circles, I kept thinking of an image from a video I saw over at a friend’s site: a delicate scuplture made from twigs that was hanging from a tree branch like a curtain. The artist was working on it and the wind was lifting it gently. It had a hole in the center. The image fascinates me.
Here is the link to the video.
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… I just wanted to share a thought that was occupying me prior coming to your blog and reading the post. I was thinking about a smile. What is it? As we can take a bath, so we can learn to smile. We will look fine then, but that would be the artificial smile. The last is impotent to smile at itself and look not wise. Yet there is another smile. This smile comes from the heart and needs no reason for shining. When the smile comes from the heart, it smiles at herself too – even if the reality looks just threatening. That smile can’t be learned and it resists exploration. It never looks dirty – our clothes may become dirty, that’s natural, but not the inner smile that questions anything but fly in gratitude and joke even at itself…. maybe, my Lithuanian-English makes my emotions the cloudy mumblings to ear, but I hope you have caught what I wanted to say. Thank you.
What do you think? Is there any relationship between the thoughts that came prior reading your text and the circles? If so, what could that mean? Are we tightly connected between in spite of our unawareness of that?
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I checked out your blog, Ivy, thinking you might have posted your circles practice. I didn’t find it but I enjoyed your Seven Things You Should Know about Being a Poet.
Thanks for the video link. What a beautiful, fragile circle that was. I loved watching his response when it crumbled. I noticed your comment on that post, and I, too, love that kind of natural art. The hanging twig circle was like lace. Did you notice when it fell, there was a circular cloud in the sky? You could barely see it. Or maybe it was my eyes playing tricks.
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Tomas, what a delightful comment. I’ve had that experience, where I visit a friend’s blog and read or see something that was in me just prior or just as. Perhaps that’s why we’re drawn to blogging. We are validated so often, whether our experiences are happiness at simple things, sadness, frustration, or confusion. The universal quotidian.
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Thanks for your response on 7 things. I did post my circles response today, fragmented as it is.
I am glad you looked at the video. It is such a fascinating sculpture, and process. I didn’t notice the circular cloud. I’ll take another look.
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ybonesy, I enjoyed this practice. Even though we’ve been writing together for years now, I always learn new things about you when we practice together.
I was drawn to certain themes you touched on:
1) circles on Indian rugs, to walk or not to walk
2) not showing your feet to the elephant goddess (was that Ganesha? I think she’s the Hindu goddess of wisdom, remover of obstacles)
and this (#3):
I’m noticing you also write often of feet. All of these are rich themes, ripe for more writing practices!
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There is a circle in the sky after it falls. Once I saw it I didn’t know how I could have missed it. Its like a dark ghost emerges from the collapsed circle.
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ybonesy – what a wide ranging set of associations you managed to pull out of yourself for this writing – amazing!
“circle times in life” makes me think about how i tend to vacillate between thinking of ‘time’ as a circle that unwinds into a spiral and then reforms its circularity because that might be its true nature. G
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It’s a subtle difference. The spiral suggests movement forward; the circle doesn’t necessarily. Now that you’ve brought up both images, I’m finding that I vacillate, too. The spiral makes sense in that all things age; hence, we are moving forward. Yet, we do so in circular ways. Maybe both are true.
Cool that you saw the circle in the sky, too, Ivy. Sometimes if you look at something (like the twig circle) long enough and then it disappears, you see a ghost image. For a minute I thought maybe that was what I was seeing. But it is a cloud, isn’t it?
QM, yes, it was the Hindu goddess Ganesha. I couldn’t remember her name when I doing writing practice. She was so pretty, a sort of gray-blue. I remember doing writing practice from India. Or was immediately afterwards? I lost all those practices when my old Dell melted. Do you remember those practices?
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yb, I know what you mean. I remember faltering in my own Circles practice when I couldn’t remember something about my first bike. I wrote what I knew at the moment (and mentioned that I was faltering) then kept going.
I DO remember those practices of yours about India. They were very alive. That seemed like a pivotal trip for you in some way. Things seemed to be shifting. I wonder if I have your old practices somewhere buried in my email files (?). Not sure. Are you looking to reclaim them? Or let them go?
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ybonesy, BTW, I saw you got to use one of your favvorite words – quotidian. Wasn’t it you who said you loved that word?
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yb, isn’t a pie hole where you stuff in the pie, to eat it? 🙂 funny image.
I also smiled reading about you supplying the shape, and Carmen surprising you with the features. How creative! It sounds like a party game, or some family fun (don’t y’all have those family fun traditions? I remember my first post of yours was about that topic).
The detail about the feet reminds me of when I was at an ashram in TX. They warned us ahead of time not to show the soles of our feet toward the “altar”. I know wasn’t an altar, but I’m not sure what to call the area where the guru spoke. My feet fell asleep while listening to him! I sure did want to stretch out my legs straight ahead!
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I like this one. A practice I will definitely do. Thanks. I like the images of nostrils and Buddha, hula hoops and loopy handwriting.
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