Falling Down

Haven't written for a while. I've been getting up at ungodly hours to catch a carousel of public transports to the out-most perimeter of the urban-sprawl-south. To get > edukated.

I have one week left and during the lull, on the bus this morning to nearer destinations, I was thinking about falling.

How many types of falling are there? More types than flying? You can fall in love, fall from grace, fall in line, fall *for* a line, fall *out* of line (what's with all the lines?), fall out with *somebody*, fall asleep, fall short, but mostly what I was thinking about was just plain old fall down.

When small children fall, they seldom get seriously injured. Now that could be because they are closer to the ground, but I think it has more to do with being relaxed. They just sort of flop down and, if no one's looking, get back up and carry on. As we get older, and start anticipating how much that might hurt, we tense our bodies in an attempt to stop what's happening. Of course, trying to shield ourselves through musculature doesn't really work; but we use this turtle shell strategy for many perceived threats. William Reich once called this our character or body armor. We habitually "store" anxiety, locked into muscle. (Which is why a deep massage can change your life.)

But we can *learn* to fall skillfully. Martial artists, gymnasts and others discovered ways of rolling and dissipating force that proves even more effective than the toddler's method (and they don't have the tendency to bonk their heads at the end of the fall, for example, as a consequence of being *too* relaxed.) They learn to intentionally redirect force rather than to automatically resist it or blithely absorb it.

It got me thinking about other things that might fit this pattern. Like, once it was natural.. Then it was controlled. Usually two poles at the opposite end of a line. We look for natural again retreating into the past. But we could use "controlled" to get to a "natural" state of simple observation without judgment. And spiral out of paradox. Einstein once said you can't solve a problem on the same level it was formulated. Paradoxes can collapse if we move perpendicular; the apex of a triangle tugging the line into a plane. From innocence to cynicism and on to a different innocence based on knowing that you don't know rather than simply not knowing. Subtle distinctions shifting perception to another level. But it seems to circle.

There's an odd saying, in the martial arts, about before discovering the Way a mountain is a mountain, a stream is a stream. While you are learning the Way, the mountain is something different than a mountain, the stream something other than a stream; then when you are on the Way, the mountain is just a mountain, the stream just a stream.

So why take the trip in the first place? I think it has something to do with a spiral, like many things in nature, from seeds of the sunflower to clusters of the milky way. In the spiral, a point can be in the same location as another but on a different level. And the spiral and triangle have some deep symmetries. Nature is a crafty soul, but I think her deepest lessons often reside in the shapes of things, rather than their content. Maybe a single pattern, like condition, counter-condition and resolution above the line can be found in 10,000 different things. Perhaps the Taoists are right, knowledge is about accumulating more cruft, while wisdom is about reducing to just what's needed to engage the present more fully.