Another session with Michael Alexander, my favorite Russian bear. Okay, the Russian accent (remember, only audible in my ears) is wearing off. But we did talk about bears this time, i’ll tell you in just a minute. First there were his massaging hands, and as they touched my neck and shoulders, he laughed once more: “Such tiny shoulders and so many knots and tension – still carrying all the problems of the world around you on them?” I do my usual response: “It’s getting better, it’s definately been better since the last massage.” As he seems to be using all this force on my shoulders (“Hmmm, i can’t make them respond to my usual tricks…”), his fingers pause on one spot in particular and he says: “I know there’s supposed to be a muscle in there, only it feels like a bone.”
As i lay on the table slowly moving in a state of full relaxation, i start visualising the bone, the bones, my shoulders and back as a bone, and before i know it i see myself as a turtle. Yes, i think, it makes all the sense of the world, to have that kind of shield, that kind of house, always with you. And yes, to move with that kind of slowness. My mother used to call me a slug when i was a child, because of how slow i can do things (do you remember, mama? and imagine this, i’m actually at a university now which has a slug as its mascotte. the yellow banana slug, of which i desperately, desperately need to find at least one by the time yoran comes to explore the territory… his disappointment would be unbearable). True enough, but make it a slug with a house on her back, make it a turtle. And then there is the new animal in my life, Chaim, a kind of turtle. Considering the power of visualisation, i’m sure i shouldn’t have been visualising becoming a turtle when the bear was using all his might to loosen up muscles that felt like bones on my back. But there was nothing to be done against it. I sense the beginning of a whole series of fables featuring the turtle and the bear coming out of these massage sessions.
And zen (and later Leta told us that Michael was a practising Buddhist) and bones brought another animal to my mind: a mad ram. Once more, strangly enough, memories of the Trans-Siberian/Mongolian Express came back to me in that room. Ulan Ude, the last stop and big city in Russia before the train crosses the border into Mongolia. Not far from the city, a monastry which is the centre of Buddhism in the Russian Federation. We go to visit the monastry, in the middle of a landscape that already hints at the vastness of Mongolian horizons, all of us feeling much in need of a zen moment. Remember that strange moment, Lotte and Wim? As soon as we enter the grounds of the monastry, a ram on the other side looks up from the grazing and the other things the rams were doing, and starts running wildly straight to me to slam its horns against my knee. Again and again and again. Causing much laughter around me, while i was getting really angry & disturbed by the animal, until one of the monks came and took the ram away. That kind of crushed my hope for a zen feeling that afternoon, meant the beginning of an enormous bruise on my leg, and was perhaps a bit of a lesson that one shouldn’t connect a hope for some kind of zen feeling too strongly with an actual space such as a Buddhist monastry.
But back to Michael. At the end of the session, I told him that maria and i would go camping in Yosemite next week. “Ah, Yosemite,” he smiled, and talked about how beautiful it was, how he loved to go there. Was it my first time, he asked. No, i replied, i had been there as a child, but i was only 6 years old, so it would be discovering it all over again. (Oh my god, now that i’m writing this i suddenly think of the possibility that the same thing might happen as with revisiting the house were we used to live in Tarrytown, NY: that everything looked so much smaller than in my memories. Oh, imagine, the rocks and trees in Yosemite might turn out to look small after all…) I add that at the time my sister and i had been excited by the idea of meeting bears, but in the end we didn’t. Ah bears, he replied, you never know in Yosemite. A good friend of mine, he continued, was once taking a shower on one of the camping sites, one of these open air showers, and all of a sudden she looks up and sees the paws of a bear on the metal construction holding the curtain, and a bear’s head curiously looking at her. She started screaming her lungs out, which scared the bear who tried to get away as fast as he could, clumsily tearing the whole shower construction down, leaving the woman not only frightened and screaming, but also standing naked on the camping site… Oh those bears.