Listen up. I didn't see one of these. I'm sorry. I wish I had. But I've been reading about them. They're native to Indonesia. Let me show you what I've found:

"Rafflesia arnoldii is the world’s largest flower having a diameter of about one meter and weighing up to ten kilograms. It is a rare flower and not easily located. It grows only once a year and blooms for around five days. According to researches in discovery news, this flower that looks and smells like rotting flesh is related to flimsy flowers like violets, poinsettias and passionflowers. Hence it also called as “meat flower” or “corpse flower”. The flower is pollinated by flies and carrion beetles attracted by its vile smell. It contains about 27 species and found in Indonesian rain forests...
 
Rafflesia is a genius of parasitic flowering plants. It was discovered in Indonesian rain forest by an Indonesian guide working for Dr Joseph Arnold in 1818 and thereafter it was named after Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles."

Shall we take that line by line?

It's a metre high, weighs up to 10 kilos, smells like a dead fox and it's "not easily located". Hmm.

It "is related to flimsy flowers like violets, poinsettias and passionflowers. "Hence it also called as 'meat flower'' or 'corpse flower'." Hmm.

It "smells like rotting flesh... was discovered by a guide working for Dr Joseph Arnold... and was named after Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles." Do you think Stamf was popular? Best friends with Dr Arnold? I wonder.

It's "is a genius of parasitic flowering plants." Yup. I reckon. 

Then I found the titan arum. Another Indonesian whopper. Online again. Didn't see it when we were there. Rank bad luck. Here goes. The flower can reach "over 3 metres in height" and "the spadix is hollow and resembles a large loaf of French bread":

See... it's HUGE.

The titan arum or Amorphophallus titanum (from Ancient Greek amorphos, "without form, misshapen" + phallos, "phallus", and titan, "giant") is a flowering plant with the largest unbranched inflorescence in the world.  

Due to its odour, which is reminiscent of the smell of a decomposing mammal, the titan arum is also known as a carrion flower, the "Corpse flower", or "Corpse plant" (Indonesian: bunga bangkai – bunga means flower, while bangkai means corpse or cadaver; for the same reason, the same title is also attributed to Rafflesia which, like the titan arum, also grows in the rainforests of Sumatra).

This is what I mean when I say that I found things tropical to be out of proportion.

In Indonesia I never saw a gecko close-up making "that sound". Come to think of it, it doesn't often seem important to see something making a sound. Hearing it seems more important.

And hearing it was important. I lay there one night in Java, before we got to Solo, on the edge of the jungle, waiting for our gecko to wind himself up and then unravel his seven geck-ohs. Perhaps 20 minutes between salvoes. I tried to record him on my phone but couldn't quite organise it in the dark. However much I waited -- alert -- I was always caught off guard. There was a lethargy that came with the heat. Everything slowed down - walking, thinking, talking, ability to press a series of buttons on my mobile phone to start the audio recording function. I only ran once in 6 weeks and I can't now for the life of me think why.

There's more room somehow when things are slowed down. More room in the spaces between footsteps and thoughts. When we were practising naming things, I often came back to naming my footsteps. Like this: as my left foot landed I would say "foot" and as my right foot landed I would say "step". This had an odd effect. I recognised my foot as "foot", but then my other foot was not named as the object "foot" but as the movement "step". One is an object; the other a movement. (Although "step" is also a noun, it felt like a verb.)

Then the two together became "footstep", which seemed like a puzzling thing. Perhaps because of being a step-parent and having step-children, I expect the "step-" to come first. There are also shades of goose-step and doorstep, which, in turn, bring with them ranks (serried ranks, obviously) of Nazis and housewives in D.H. Lawrence towns scrubbing their doorsteps in something like the same way that Balinese women sweep in front of their stalls and houses.

Usha lives in a D.H. Lawrence town. Does she scrub her doorstep? [One of the most frequent signs by the side of the road as we drove through Java advertised something variously written at Polis Bode, Poles Bodi and Polis Body. I realised it meant that they would polish the body of your car. In the same vein, I came to realise that the Sock Breaker and Shok Beker signs probably suggested that replacement shock absorbers were available.]

But my point was that there was time, in between speaking "foot" and "step", for all sorts of things to happen. It felt more like the space between waves, when there's time for the first to swirl up and about and between and then drag its way back through the shingle like a cartoon character failing to hold on to a cliff edge by his fingertips before the next one draws itself up to its full height and crashes down like it was the first wave ever to think of doing such a thing.

So, in an odd way, by slowing things down, the heat brought some things into proportion, although my overwhelming feeling was that things tropical were out of proportion.

But I also tried to imagine how the gecko made that sound. Was he rubbing his legs together like a cricket? If he was croaking, how did he make the winding-up noise at the start?

I never saw. Then, home with close-up e-magic, I found that they do it with press-ups, like this:

It looks uncomfortable. As if he's being coerced with a bicycle pump perhaps. But -- though it seems ungracious, having borrowed him to show his method -- that's not the sound I'm after. Here's the sound as I remember it with the double wind-up:

Now I remember that when we went to visit Susannah and her husband in Solo in their marvellous, rickety, inside-out house, they had a house-gecko. They maintained that it gave advice -- or at least maintained a sort of running commentary on affairs in the house. Sometimes they were convinced that it was saying, "fuck-you, fuck-you". At the time I couldn't accept this. A gecko wouldn't say anything like that. Well, it wouldn't say that. Why would it? Geckos are gentle and exquisite creatures, surely? And it doesn't even sound right. The first vowel is definitely an 'eh'.

But then in Bedulu we saw a lovely old lady (well, about my age actually) carrying things to her stall wearing a "FUCK TERRORIST" t-shirt. I wanted to stop her and say, "No, no, you're lovely, I can see you are, do you realise what your t-shirt says? You don't want to be saying that..." But her island was bombed, and geckos slaughter the local wildlife all night.

I think my projections were well out of proportion.

• I am a confused child; I get mixed messages from people; things are not consistent

• I am a man who wishes to be seen to be an experienced traveller

• I remember an odd jumble of experiences along with explanations that I came up with at the time for why they happened.  Then, as now, I think my explanations are often wrong. But I still make deductions about how I should behave next time, based on those wrong explanations.

• Sometimes I am wilfully blind. Or stubborn.

• Things appear to matter to me sometimes when, on the face of it, they don't. 

• I can be as shy and embarrassed as I was when I was 7 for no apparent reason.

• I have no idea what my face is saying some of the time. It's talking and I don't know what it's saying. (But I imagine that other people know exactly what their faces are saying.)

• I have conversations with myself.

• I mind terribly about odd things.

• I think I'm ready to die when I'm clearly not.

• Sometimes I hear myself talking to someone and the words and tone are scarcely credible. The acting is terrible some days.

I seem to carry around with me at least as many characters and personalities, men and boys with attitudes, girls with dreams and aspirations as there are in this entire TeamJava. If all twelve of us have twelve "innards" let's call them, that's a gross of us. And all 144 could be judging the other 143 during any one day. That's 20,592 inter-judgemental relationships. And some of my lot are forming judgements every 10 seconds or so. That's potentially millions of judgements every hour. Millions.

For example, working in the corridors at Borobodur, I found one of my twelve (who bears an uncanny resemblance to both my parents and my brother) working himself into an apoplexy of righteous indignation at the size of the Americans' bottoms, at the Russian tourists in high heels, at those who looked at the site only through their cameras, at the fat Western men with tiny, female, Asian companions, at the fatuous remarks made by almost everyone sooner or later, at the bad parenting, at the chomping, slurping hordes in this sacred place...

How despicable those tourists are. Surely my bottom is tiny, my clothing respectable, my feet bare, my looking attentive and aware, my wife appropriate, my speaking measured, my eating perfectly attuned to my needs, my parenting skills unrivalled...

Why I really believe I could be enlightened quite soon, you know. But my innards are far less reliable. They can be attention-seeking, shame-inducing, pompous. The list is endless. There's that one - give him half a chance and he'll be picking up rubbish bins and crawling under rubber mats and making a frightful scene - trying to be noticed without really being seen.

Oh well, I suppose I shan't be enlightened so long as they're trailing around with me. Perhaps they'll grow up and leave home soon?

When the rice gets ripe (which will be twice a year with organic cropping and three times a year with fertiliser) the grains fill up and become heavy, causing the stalks to lean over.

On our bike ride down the mountain in Northern Bali, our guide -- Ketut (which is the name given to the fourth-born child in a family of the lowest caste) -- told us that "Fill up and bend over" was the translation of a Balinese saying. The saying covered rice, life as a whole and Balinese flags (called umbul umbul and not to be confused with mumbul, which means to rise, take off or bounce -- the Mumbul river runs through Ubud in Bali).

Here they are:

The last of the four cunningly combines the bike ride, where we learnt of this saying, a row of suitable decorations from the recent festival of the ancestors -- Galungan -- and a woman from Malaysia embodying the whole bending thing. Uncanny really. Actually, the decorations are called penjor and here's how to make them:

"The basic material of a penjor is a curved bamboo pole. The pole is then decorated with yellow coconut leaves, pala bungkah (roots - sweet potato or cassava), pala gantung (fruit - cucumbers, oranges, bananas), pala wija (cereal - rice, corn), plawa (leaves), traditional cakes, 11 Chinese coins, and a small shrine with some offerings.

All materials for a penjor constitute peoples' basic needs, signifying that we should take care of those things. In addition, livestock sacrificed for the ceremony are believed to become better creatures in their next life."

That's a handy belief about the sacrificed livestock. 

Anyway, I think that "fill up and bend over" is a fine aphorism. When younger, there was a bench near my home with a plaque dedicating to a man whose name I can't remember. Beneath his name were the words, "He liked to lead walks in the Golden Cap area". At the time I used to scoff at the modesty, even banality, of this statement. Now I think it's rather fine in its ordinariness. But, on the whole, I should prefer my bench to say, "He filled up and bent over".

If it were true.

Actually, I did practise it in several places in connection with nuts especially. This coconut in Goa Gajah was rotten and the stink when carrying it around reminded me of Rafflesia Arnoldii - insofar as you can be reminded of something you've never smelt. So the repeated filling up and bending over in this case was intended to wash the foetid aroma of dead fox out of the coconut.

Come to think of it, there may be another metaphor lurking in there. If I see activities like movement, gardening, anything repeated really -- even the leading of walks in the Golden Cap area -- as being designed to purify myself of the foetid aroma of dead fox, it lends some sense of purpose and context.

In which case the obituary could be expanded subtly to say:

"He liked to fill up and bend over in temples"

If it were true.

I'm sure a botanist would know why it is that so many things in the tropics have their roots showing. Well, it must be partly to do with the climate. No frost.

For example, there was the big tree at Goa Gajah that we practised under on the last morning. This one on the right with Thérèse in it. It has these extraordinary roots like old lizards that hardly bother to go under ground at all. There must be other roots that do go underground or it would fall over. But what's the point? They can't be getting much nutrition out here in the baking open.

Then there was the banyan tree with its roots hanging down from the sky in torrents. It's clear enough what they're up to -- trying to get a foothold so the tree can extend itself, grow, renew and multiply. It's a nifty reproductive approach, provided the locals don't come and trim your roots every year. I think Usha swang or swung in the one at Mendut.

Talking of reproduction, I was thinking about the enormous effort that a coconut has to put into it. Months of growing that nut, filling it with up to a litre of coconut milk, dropping it on the ground and then the agonising wait for one to settle somewhere it can grow. An acorn or a sycamore helicopter would seem much simpler. A cloud of seed from a willow simpler and more effective still. Still, coconut palms are doing fine (presumably with some help from their human supporters). But surely they could get by with something less exhausting? [By the by, it seems to me that all mammals are coconuts in the extraordinary effort they expend on their offspring. But perhaps just as well. Imagine if we walked round like dandelions spraying babies everywhere. Suddenly population would be a real issue. Hmm.]

Ah, I think there's a point looming through the rooty fog: what's my coconut equivalent? Instead of slaving over an exhausting 5-pound coconut, how could I produce a few hundred acorns or a few million dandelion seeds? I don't mean for reproduction; I mean in the effort I put into daily life activities. Where is my effort out of proportion?

I was just starting to get somewhere with this... treading more lightly on the earth in various ways, when I discovered The Coconut Research Centre. It could, admittedly, be a mite biased, but it says that:

"Published studies in medical journals show that coconut, in one form or another, may provide a wide range of health benefits: 

• Kills viruses that cause influenza, herpes, measles, hepatitis C, SARS, AIDS, and other illnesses.
  
• Kills bacteria that cause ulcers, throat infections, urinary tract infections, gum disease and cavities, pneumonia, and gonorrhea, and other diseases.
  
• Kills fungi and yeasts that cause candidiasis, ringworm, athlete's foot, thrush, diaper rash, and other infections.
  
• Expels or kills tapeworms, lice, giardia, and other parasites.
  
• Provides a nutritional source of quick energy.
  
• Boosts energy and endurance, enhancing physical and athletic performance.
  
• Improves digestion and absorption of other nutrients including vitamins, minerals, and amino acids.
  
• Improves insulin secretion and utilization of blood glucose.
  
• Relieves stress on pancreas and enzyme systems of the body.
  
• Reduces symptoms associated with pancreatitis.
  
• Helps relieve symptoms and reduce health risks associated with diabetes.
  
• Reduces problems associated with malabsorption syndrome and cystic fibrosis.
  
• Improves calcium and magnesium absorption and supports the development of strong bones and teeth.
  
• Helps protect against osteoporosis.
  
• Helps relieve symptoms associated with gallbladder disease.
  
• Relieves symptoms associated with Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, and stomach ulcers.
  
• Improves digestion and bowel function.
  
• Relieves pain and irritation caused by hemorrhoids.
  
• Reduces inflammation.
  
• Supports tissue healing and repair.
  
• Supports and aids immune system function.
  
• Helps protect the body from breast, colon, and other cancers.
  
• Is heart healthy; improves cholesterol ratio reducing risk of heart disease.
  
• Protects arteries from injury that causes atherosclerosis and thus protects against heart disease.
  
• Helps prevent periodontal disease and tooth decay.
  
• Functions as a protective antioxidant.
  
• Helps to protect the body from harmful free radicals that promote premature aging and degenerative disease.
  
• Does not deplete the body's antioxidant reserves like other oils do.
  
• Improves utilization of essential fatty acids and protects them from oxidation.
  
• Helps relieve symptoms associated with chronic fatigue syndrome.
  
• Relieves symptoms associated with benign prostatic hyperplasia (prostate enlargement).
  
• Reduces epileptic seizures.
  
• Helps protect against kidney disease and bladder infections.
  
• Dissolves kidney stones.
  
• Helps prevent liver disease.
  
• Is lower in calories than all other fats.
  
• Supports thyroid function.
  
• Promotes loss of excess weight by increasing metabolic rate.
  
• Is utilized by the body to produce energy in preference to being stored as body fat like other dietary fats.
  
• Helps prevent obesity and overweight problems.
  
• Applied topically helps to form a chemical barrier on the skin to ward of infection.
  
• Reduces symptoms associated the psoriasis, eczema, and dermatitis.
  
• Supports the natural chemical balance of the skin.
  
• Softens skin and helps relieve dryness and flaking.
  
• Prevents wrinkles, sagging skin, and age spots.
  
• Promotes healthy looking hair and complexion.
  
• Provides protection from damaging effects of ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
  
• Helps control dandruff.
  
• Does not form harmful by-products when heated to normal cooking temperature like other vegetable oils do.
  
• Has no harmful or discomforting side effects.
  
• Is completely non-toxic to humans."
  

Crikey. Even dandruff. Now, instead of berating the coconut for its wasteful excess and careless inefficiencies, perhaps I should reframe and love it for its extraordinary medical generosity. Perhaps, in the same way, my own excesses and inefficiencies are unnecessarily disapproved of? Underrated?

And then my Java buddy sends me this from David Whyte:

 It's exactly the right thing to say to me at exactly the right time.

Baz Kershaw, formerly Professor of Drama at Bristol University, has talked about the way in which our experience at a zoo is 'over-determined': signs, paths, maps and guides structure the route we walk; information notices structure the way we look at and experience the creatures; cages, enclosures and access points structure the way we observe and what we observe - and all this in addition to the particular memories and experiences we may bring, the cultural associations and responses that we may carry with us, and so on. Cities have a similar effect: there are explicit and implicit rules about where we can go and where we can't; where we can stop, stand and sit and where we must walk; what we can look at and what we can't; even how fast we should walk or on what side of the pavement. More of this here.

Temples are no exception.

We celebrated New Year, me and Ibu Doktor in bed with shivering flu at the witching hour.

Before here were fat, exquisite, Javanese dancers pretending to do western disco, shamans from Makassar, a sort of ghost dancer from Venezuela, contortionist Balinese dancers, Indonesia's foremost composer making bird noises, the guild of kris-makers (those wavy knives) with their 9-foot signature weapon in a scabbard that had to be carried by four men (surrounded by the cigarette packets of their sponsors); a traditional Javanese dancer (all fingers and hands) dancing the temple myth; her famous male equivalent singing O Sole Mio rather like I would and banging an orange sort of drum; a full gamelan orchestra broadcast round the temple by two banks of speakers, each bank had 10 speakers and each speaker was 5 foot square and also needed four men to carry it (and each bank had its own tent to fail to protect it from the inevitable monsoon); a mobile gong on four wheels being carried round the temple (not suited to wheels) by yet another group of four young men. And us. 

There were a number of triumphs. Some of our number were featured in the local paper today and several were eagerly interviewed by journalists. For my piece, I emerged from a disused side entrance wearing my Moroccan nightgown (I has forgot the name; it's not gandora), applied earphones and swept the path for five minutes, absorbed in my own world. Then, on becoming aware of an overlooked, lizard-like creature, I put my headtorch on its head, untied my belt and wrapped it round the beast (it being a fertility temple, all the beast have prominent penises and this one became entangled in the belt) put a furled banana leaf on its back and then spent some time imitating it. I also padded its broken foot with a discarded basket. 

I received a polite ripple of applause and no interview requests but I was very happy that I had done it rather than saying no and then spending two days imagining that I could have done something that would have brought the audience to its knees weeping with joy and incredulity. 

My preliminary conclusion is that my recent history (book, performances, marriage) has been something to do with trying to start to shed the (unspoken) idea that I am incredibly special (but unnoticed) and trying to behave as if I am just ordinary and then respond in proportion (without shame or fury) when I find that I am indeed ordinary.

Mark Epstein's Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective was a companion on the trip. There was no time to read.

But the title was a constant reminder of a series of unsettling questions about myself.

Of course I'm clear that there is no fixed and determined sense of self. I'm not stupid. I am a constellation of selves over whom I have only a modest amount of control. In my previous language there are child and parent ego states (visible when I become sulky, bossy, aggressively critical, seductive, ashamed, etc.). These frequently get the better of me and, when they arrive, it can be difficult to remember that I can do anything about them. Joyful and Candy, for example, who have worked with my sulking self for a number of years, have developed skillful ways of checking whether I want to carry on sitting in the corner of the room, achingly trying to draw attention to myself and trying to be ignored at the same time.


Until they say something, I can still be unaware that I have been occupied by sulking self. Once I realise that I have, I can still forget that I have any choicing/choosing in the matter. Like the Bulgarians, who were occupied by the Turks for 400 years and attribute their general incapacity to do anything much as a nation to the legacy of "The Turkish Yoke", I tend to feel helpless. Persecuted. A powerless victim.

So far, so good. The problem, of course, is with the "I" in all these sentences. I say that I've grasped the ifdea of no fixed and determined sense of self, but my language doesn't reflect that. Though I don't apparently "believe" in it, I talk always as if there were some authentic self in the background.

When I say that it sometimes feels as if I'm sitting in the back seat of a car and I suddenly realise that the person driving is a baby, it presumes that the "me" in the back seat is qualitatively different from the version of me in the driving seat. Rather than just a different manifestation of my fantasy of myself. (But there we go again; who is the me having the fantasy of myself?).

Mark Epstein is a help here. The point, he says, is to try not to get caught up either with the notion of self or with the notion of non-self. Both are a distraction from the middle way. Both lead one to lurch from idealising grandiosity (sense of I, me, self) to emptiness and despair (sense of I, me, self as false). This, he reminds me tuttingly, is the narcissistic dilemma.

I think that moving is also helpful. The camera clearly shows that there is someone moving. Though I'm still as surprised by the sight of myself moving (why am I leaning forward like that? why have I always got that expression on that face? where is the spontaneity?) as I am by the sound of my voice on the answering machine. Heaven knows what I would make of my smell or taste. But I am familiar with my touch and with my words on the page.

Anyway, the camera shows that there is someone moving. And I long ago realised that that's about as much as one can say. (Moving in a beech wood in Dorset and experimenting with taking very slow and deliberate footsteps, I discovered that there is no guarantee that my foot will go exactly where I tell it to go. It may hesitate unexpectedly, wobble and land an inch or two away from where I had intended.

This shouldn't surprise me. Neuroscience tells me that:

• actions are frequently set in motion some time (tenths of a second up to several seconds before I consciously decide upon those actions
• electrical patterns in my brain frequently show when I'm going to make a mistake in a routine task (clumsiness, stumbling, fumbling) several seconds before it occurs - and easily long enough in adavance for me to make a correction, if I were only aware of the presentient signals.

So there's someone moving but it's far from clear that it's me. At least, it's far from clear that I'm in charge of the moving self.

Epstein reports a client exclaiming "I am a gerund" on realising that she was not a fixed object of any sort "that no substantive agent worked in her being", but constantly in the process of becoming something that never actually became anything because it was always becoming something else. 'Being' is a very good word, if we take it literally. So is 'moving'.

When I stop moving, I shall stop becoming and I shall stop being.

So moving is the perfect Buddhist metaphor and the perfect demonstration of this point. I can move or I can let the moving move me. I can follow my movement with my eyes or my movement can follow the looking of my eyes. I can drive or I can be driven. And I can do both with various degrees of attentiveness. But if I can give my movement my full attention and if I can minimise my reactions and responses to my movement, minimise the opinions and judgements that I form about it, the all sorts of interesting things can reveal themselves (but precious little spontaneity yet).

But I'm still not sure about self-soothing. How's that going to work now?

The day we moved outside on Prapto's land, starting from the steps, I finished up by Maria. For some reason I was feeling a bit guilty about not having visited her at any point during the week. With hindsight, it seems appropriate to have been feeling guilty about Maria. I looked up Catholic Guilt and found that the technical term for it is scrupulosity, derived (like the word scruple) from the Latin scrupulum -- a sharp stone.

Apparently Martin Luther had it bad. I read that:
"he suffered from obsessive doubts; in his mind, his omitting the word enim ("for") during the Eucharist was as horrible as laziness, divorce, or murdering one's parent." 

Crikey.

Anyway, I was at Maria's grotto when a very large, very dark blue butterfly appeared and settled on the rocks at the edge of her grotto. I froze, so as not to disturb the butterfly or frighten it off. Such a precious moment... mustn't waste it by greedily moving too close. So I waited. And waited. Eventually, concerned that this was movement practice and I was trying not to blink, never mind cart my whole body around, I moved a little closer, thinking that the butterfly would be startled into flight. It stayed, as still as a dinghy on the Dead Sea. I inspected it carefully, emitting tiny internal gasps, as if to make sure that I realised how beautiful this butterfly was.(Just as one mutters 'wow' to one's companion when watching an awesome sunset, so that they will know that you're appreciating it properly.)

Prapto said "slowly, slowly" and I began to feel anxious. I needed to finish but didn't want to leave the butterfly. I move briskly, knowing it would be alarmed. Moved my head to within inches of it. Not a flicker. Had it died? Oh god, what would that mean? No, surely it would fall over if it had died? Perhaps it had specially sticky feet that would hold it upright? No,because then it would get stuck to things.

Then, moving on the stones in front of the temple at Kalasan, exploring just a few of them, placing my feet clearly, becoming more confident, seeing how to look up and at the horizon while confidently stepping on these stones, a dragonfly joined me. It settled beside me, over a minute or so became completely stationary, and then stayed like that for almost ten minutes. After a little while studying it, and reminded of the butterfly at Maria's grotto, I began to move without worrying about disturbing this jewel of a creature. It was still there as we moved back to gather round Prapto after the exercise.

Finally, at Goa Gajah, I went to move by the pool and was joined by two sapphire blue dragonflies. They stopped long enough for me to observe and then moved on a little, Just a few inches. They rested for long periods with their wings tilted forward. At first it looked uncomfortable but they obviously were happy with it, so I tried. Tilted my wings forwards. It was OK. I felt a curious surge of pleasure at discovering the action.

After some time moving with them, having at first hurried to seize the moment in case they flew away, I began to relax. I could move away a little and come back, sure to find the dragonflies. I briefly wondered what this series of events (butterfly, dragonfly, dragonflies) could mean, then came to my senses and realised that it didn't mean anything. If I wanted to attach meaning to the events, then I could. But Mrs Universe had not instructed the insects to visit my movement sessions at Morning Briefing that day.

Still, I wondered if Prapto had sent them.

It seems that there's some balance to be found between "carpe diem" where thecarpe means to pluck, seize or snatch and trusting that wonderful things will endure long enough for you not to have to pluck, seize or snatch them. For me it relates to the weather. I still feel quite unsettled on a beautiful summer's day in England, feel I must "make the most of it", get out into it, enjoy it. Because later on it may be raining. The Indonesian climate cured me of this almost instantly. It would be raining later, almost certainly, but it would still be as hot as a blanket tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day. I could relax.

Learning about moving from a sense of being 'among' and learning about having a sense of the other's 'being' -- whether that other is a human, a tree, a statue or a rock, I was struck by David Abram saying:

"We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us."


Abram also talks about chiasm - the criss-crossing of the left and right hemispheres of the brain and of messages from the left brain to the right-hand side of the body. (This includes the discovery -- well it's new to me -- that people with a leading left ear have trouble following sequential instructions. And now I read that we listen with our skin.) Then Abram says that chiasm can occur between our body and the surrounding environment. I like that idea.

Thinking more about this idea that the body can sometimes know how it is going to move long before we 'instruct' it to move, I thought that movement is less susceptible to interpretation. At least the way we learn about it.

For example, in psychotherapy, if my therapist and I deduce that some dreadful behaviour of mine relates to my mother's expression when I walked into the sitting room wearing my muddy boots, I can (rightly, in my opinion) discount the whole thing as a fairly crass interpretation based on tenuous hypothesis and Freudian conjecture.

But, if I'm moving and I experience myself becoming tense in a particular situation, or moving to the edge of the room, or being drawn by the loom of an oak beam or a tired human -- well there's really no arguing with that. So Mark Epstein says:

"We tense up around that which we are denying. Our selves are constructed out of a reaction against just what we do not wish to acknowledge."

On language, Abram has a lot to say about the move from an oral to a written language:

"Writing used to be a handicraft. But written language introduces the possibility of reflexivity and some distance from the ideas one is speaking."

This feels like evidence that some speaking (as well as chanting, yelping and the like) can be a natural component of movement.

"Because the written word has a timelessness that speech has not, the literate self acquires a sense of timelessness, detachment and transcendence."

Finally from Epstein, a cultural thing:

"The starting point in the West rarely is an enmeshed self; more commonly it is an estranged one. [He has been saying that the Eastern self is enmeshed is a web of family, hierarchy, caste and other group expectations.] The emphasis on individuality and autonomy, the breakdown of the extended and even the nuclear family, the scarcity of "good enough" parenting, and the relentless drive for achievement versus affection in our society leave a personally too often feeling cut off, isolated, alienated, empty, and longing for an intimacy that seems both out of reach and vaguely threatening.. In Tibet, said Sogyal Rinpoche, a positive sense of self is assumed. It is inculcated early and supported through all of the interdependent relationships that are established by the web of family. If  a person cannot maintain this positive feeling about himself, he says, he or she is considered a fool."