cosmicomedy
by lavinia plonka

Where does my body end ~ or ~Are there really guardian angels?
It’s happened to everyone once or twice—you suddenly feel someone standing behind you even though there was no sound. You think perhaps you’ve encountered the elusive sixth sense. But then an hour later you forget the feeling and literally crash into someone while walking down the street.

None of this really made any difference to me until the other day when I was frantically trying to accomplish too many tasks in the garden. Our wood chipper had lain idle for months, piles of dead branches growing around the back yard like a witch’s bumper crop. It was time.

I hate goggles. They make my eyes sweat and fog up. And my husband Ron had taken the car, where I had left my sunglasses. It was risky to feed this mechanical beast without eye protection. Well, just be careful.

How can you be careful about random flying particles? Theoretically, you can’t see them until they’ve already hit you. But my lust to transform these piles of debris into aromatic little piles of gardening gold blinded me to the perils of projectiles.
The first time it happened, I figured it was chance. Just as a sizable chunk of wood was about to enter my eye, I blinked and actually retreated just before contact. Weird, I thought. How could I have possibly known it was coming? Then it happened again. And again. Eventually, I completely forgot my resolve to be careful and gleefully shoved larger and larger masses of branches down the chute, chortling as they were reduced to pulp. Even then, something knew when my eyes were endangered and protected me.

Like any gardener, I have had my share of dirt fly into my eyes from a weed suddenly giving way. I’ve gotten bugs in my eyes, up my nose. I’m not protected by some force field. And yet, this day, it seemed as if there really was something there. As if my body didn’t end with the flesh I perceive as my own, that there really is an aura, or some kind of astral body that can detect things my coarse self can’t sense. I started feeling cosmic.

On my refrigerator is a polaroid taken of me at a new age fair. My face has the startled look of someone posing for a passport picture, with weird flames of green and orange obscuring my hair. It cost $5.00 to get your aura photographed with this “special” camera, and another $20.00 to get it analyzed. After listening to the photographer tell several people that their aura indicated frustrated creativity and depression, I decided to live in mystery and walked away. Now I wondered. Can this aura sometimes feel danger and help me react? Why now and not other times?

Or perhaps that wasn’t it at all. What if there really are guardian angels standing guard over us, and mine had decided that today was not a day to go blind? I envisioned this robed being dashing around me deflecting errant wood chips, knocking them out of the way with expert wing flicks. When he missed he would send a sub sonic shout to warn me so that I would blink just in time. There is a commercial running right now for Capital One where a slovenly, half assed guardian angel allows his charge to get clocked with an I-Beam, land in a garbage dumpster and get burnt at a tanning salon. The only time he’s efficient is when he reminds her to use her Capital One card. Perhaps this is why President Bush told us all to go shopping after 9/11 – it’s a conspiracy from above. In any event, I was suddenly filled with gratitude that my angel is an over achiever instead of a consumer.

Or perhaps I had entered a different dimension, where my perception of time and space had subtly altered enough to quicken my reactions. “That’s it,” I thought, “I’m in an altered state. Like those stories of mothers lifting cars off of their children. Or those people who do transcendental meditation and then levitate. That wood chip is moving in slow motion, just slow enough for me to detect it and blink! It’s no guardian angel, Grasshopper, you now Ninja warrior using super Chi to repel wood chip.”

Of course, modern science is busy explaining that this phenomenon is merely the result of my sensory perceptors working in concert with my visual receptors sending information to my cerebral cortex to duck! Flinch! Blink! These are the moments when perhaps I use part of the legendary 9/10 of my unused brain….
The wood chipper ran out of gas. I grabbed the gas can and tipped it into the tank, watching the iridescent swirl at the lip of the tank. I suddenly felt something. I hadn’t noticed the leak at the edge of the nozzle and now a generous amount of gasoline was pouring down my jeans, soaking my leg and foot.

I guess my guardian angel went shopping. Or my astral body went on break.

When not testing the boundaries of perception, Lavinia explores the profound links between brain and movement teaching the Feldenkrais Method® to help others find optimal movement. [ Ashevillemovementcenter.com ]