June Dispatch: The Elements, The Field, and the Knower of the Field
Hey Galaxy, the Midwest weather is warm-ish, and it feels to me like I’m in a serious state of communion with my outdoor surroundings. What an opening sentence, but I really mean it: in the winter and the high summer, there are all these steps that we need to take to prepare ourselves to be in nature, or even just be outside of a building. Whether it's winter layers or summer sunscreen and bug spray, sometimes getting ready to be in nature takes prep work. But right now, in late spring/early summer, I feel like all I need to do is throw on “enough” clothing, slip my feet into sandals that are not flip flops (hello to those of you who worked on your feet in my classes in the last week of May, I’m looking at you…), and I can slide out my door into the natural world. There’s no moment of bracing against the cold, or gasping at the humidity - it feels easy, and very symbiotic. I’m enjoying running in this weather, and when I choose a route, I try to make sure I split my time evenly among the elements: a little time on the river trail under the shelter of trees and running on the soft earth, a little time along the lake, taking in the watery expanses and feeling the cool wind blow over me, a little time under the fiery warmth of the sun, and an occasional run at night, where the false separation that the daytime sky provides disappears, and I can see that what actually exists beyond the world I inhabit is space, not blue sky.
The idea that nothing really separates my life as an earthling and the universe around me is one that makes me both awed and slightly cowed. I don’t always feel comfortable with concepts of one-ness or unity. I’ve talked in the past about how boundaries and resistance are actually important experiences to lean into when they come our way, because they create an awareness of where we are in space, and allow for growth. But right now, I’m leaning into the feeling of flow, and ease, and intimate dialogue and unity with all the elements that make up the natural world and space beyond.
Which is why I chose the Elements as our June theme. It seems like the right time of year to acknowledge the literal and symbolic building blocks that make up the world around us, and that, no coincidence, make up US.
The Bhagavad Gita talks about the elements that make up not just humans, but the entirety of human experience in Chapter 7, Verse 4:
bhūmir-āpo ’nalo vāyuḥ khaṁ mano buddhir eva cha
ahankāra itīyaṁ me bhinnā prakṛitir aṣhṭadhā
Earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, intellect, and i-sense are the eight-fold parts of my material energies (Prakriti).
Krishna goes on to tell Arjuna that there is another nature beyond the nature of these material energies that sustains all beings in the world, and even the universe itself. Sometimes we would call this Purusa, and these two terms, Purusa and Prakriti are used throughout the Yoga Sutras to define a similar understanding of these two existences.
But in the Gita, there are what I consider to be two more poetic, evocative, and simply beautiful terms for this distinction: kṣhetra, The Field, and kṣhetrajña, the Knower of the Field.
Reality is the earth under your feet, and it’s also the burrows, roots, animals and insects that exist in the world under your feet.
Reality is the water you float upon, and it’s the underground topography that embodies something like the opposite of a mountain range, plunging depths that no one on earth will probably ever be able to fully explore or understand.
Reality is the blue of the sky reflected onto the blue of the water, and that humans had no words for the color blue until relatively recently.
Reality is the feeling of touching another person or thing, and then remembering that there’s always a small, atomic-sized distance between those two things.
Reality is anything that feels solid, and also the atoms that make it solid, that consist mostly of space and vibrating/orbiting particles.
Reality is more than one thing at one time, and reality is subjective to our own sense-mechanisms.
So when yoga says things like each of the elements is represented by a finger on your hands - I think it’s symbolic, but I think it’s also reality. And when Carl Sagan says that we are all literally made up of stars, I know it’s symbolic, but it’s also reality. And although I love to celebrate that there’s just one Anna who has ever existed on earth, I can also celebrate that what I think of as the person Anna is also an organism that is inextricable from the earth, water, fire, air and ether, mind, intellect and i-sense that exists as a part of “the field.”
So as I enjoy the ease of this flowy symbiosis that exists in early summer, I’m learning that there’s nothing that really needs to separate us from the world around us. We can just flow in and out of it, lie down on it, float upon it, feel it blow our hair around and watch it twinkle in the black sky above us. We can look at our hands and imagine fire embodied in our thumb, air embodied in our index finger, space embodied in our middle finger, earth embodied in our ring finger, and water embodied in our pinky finger. We can form shapes with our hands that channel all these energies and create what we call mudras, or “seals,” so that the world is reflected in our hands, just like the world is reflected in all of the asanas we create that mimic nature.
I’ve always considered the Joni Mitchell song Woodstock to be one of the best pieces of art to come out of the Zeitgeist-y hippie movement, and it’s even more amazing when you realize that Joni Mitchell didn’t even attend. She had a previously-scheduled appearance on Monday on the Dick Cavett show, and her manager advised her to stay home, so she wasn’t in any danger of missing it. So instead, Joni watched it on TV, and listened to her lover Graham Nash tell her all about performing there when he got home, and she wrote a masterpiece.
Reality is Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young performing at Woodstock, and reality is Joni Mitchell hearing about it and writing “Woodstock.”
The field and the knower of the field.
We are stardust (billion year old carbon) We are golden (caught in the devil’s bargain). And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
Anna
What I’m Reading…
If you’ve never dug into the poetry, meditations, and sermons of John Donne, and I’m assuming that’s a fair number of you, I’d like to take this opportunity to recommend him. A contemporary of Shakespeare, Donne was alive at a time where the written English word was experiencing an absolute exponential creative explosion, no exaggeration. People were writing the most creative works in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean era, and a lot of it is really fun, and still incredibly vital. What I love about Donne is that he reinvents and reimagines himself several times throughout the course of his life in a way that I find inspiring. What I also love about Donne is that he can write a dirty, dirty love poem. The book Super-Infinite by Katherine Rundell is an investigation of Donne via the body of his writing - much of which had to be hunted down and re-assembled, because he was not widely published in his lifetime.
Donne’s life was one of struggle, love, sex, God, death and using his powerful connection to the English language, and particularly poetry, to understand the world around him, and the turbulent waves of his life experiences. Katherine Rundell makes Donne so real, I think I developed a sort of rock star crush on this poetry-writing hunk. I mean, look at him! Total Babe. Highly recommend this book, and if you’re a Donne poetry fiend like I am, lmk your favorite John Donne poem.
