Gem Show
Upon return from the Tucson International Gem Show, it came time to make a post and yet I was devoid of crunchy ideas to discuss. Then my friend in Malaysia directed me to her recent post about gemstones. What a read! Rocks. Jelly Fish. Butterflies. Birds. And gurus. She wrote the ultimate post about gems. How sweet is this twinkling universe. And it sparkles even more ways than that. The right person calls at the right time. The book opens to the telling page. The song comes on to the radio from your mind. The students in your class say something that is a segue to your next point.
Speaking of which, the day after the return from the fantastic Tucson International Gem Show I got to meet 31 new spectacular students. I worry about Day #1 in class because you can always pull in a ringer. But neither class had one. Two roomfuls of happy minds, eager to work together to learn something. We were blessed by crispy weather, a few insightful jokes, and several of those twinkling segues. My strategy for these classes is to keep finding ways so that I and we return each week with joy. During class, at one point I said something – one of the many things I ‘throw out there’ – after which I might either recoil from my boldness or stick up for it. That night, I found myself trumping it up. I stood there after saying it (I do not recall what) and I said with my inner body, “Yeah! Yeah, thas’ it, thas’ right, you got it. thas’ how it is.” As I stood there I had a flash that I was taking the physical stance and inner attitude of my travel mate with whom I had just spent a week in Los Angeles then Tucson then Los Angeles again. I had his height, his posture, his testosterone, and his satisfied grin. His spirit had somehow taken over my body for that moment. I didn’t think more of it at the time, because class is like a whitewater river and you just gotta go with it. Then, the next night I was quietly watching “The Danish Girl” on my big screen from a prone position on my couch. In “The Danish Girl” one man has his body taken over by his inner girl, Lily. In the middle of the movie, my phone rang. It was my Tucson travel mate who was calling to say that we had just spent so much time together (a week) that he found himself taken over by me, making my gestures! He would gesture and then say to himself, “Hey, who was that? That was Soren!” He could not remember the particulars–just that sensation of that DNA merge. Bingo!
Whoosh. A week before we two had lain on that same couch watching (or sleeping through) “Mozart in the Jungle.” It had come to me so highly recommended that it was easy to be disappointed, and sleep is welcome when you watch lukewarm stuff in a prone position. So we slept and woke up after the fourth episode. After we dismissed the series, my friend asked, “Where did Utah get its name?” We talked and talked about this. You-Taw? Could You-Taw possibly be the way it was originally pronounced? Or was it OOO-taw? Or ooo-TAW? We talked and talked about the word Utah until I finally asked him, “Do you think about this alot?” He said, “I think about it all the time.” We googled it to discover the native American Ute tribe, and got into a sidebar about how to pronounce Ute. Would that be OOOt? or OOO-tay? or … ? I grunted, “UHOO t.” You gotta get that sound right out up from your first chakra, straight from the sex. That’s what you’re throwing out to the others as a native: UHOOt. We decided on it. Over time, then, UHOOt became Utah. Now you know.
In Arizona the shuttle driver takes us to Tucson International – after days of looking at gems, and I say something to the driver about TUCK’sen. He replied, “I’m glad you pronounced it correctly. Most people say Tusse-son. But it’s TUCK’sen.” He launched into an exegesis about the indian tribes, how they pronounced TUCK-sen and even an Indian tribe that spoke wholly via whistling! The whistling carried far across desert and hill.
So that’s a jellyfish right there. You’ll read my friend’s post to understand the jellyfish reference. Think how often you have a shuttle driver who folds right into your personal narrative. Successful taxi and shuttle drivers all over the world must have part of their DNA strand devoted to The Enlightened Seque because so often people tell stories about how their drivers got them here or there in their minds as well as in their trips to airports.
Welcome to a sparkling universe.
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