Essentialize Yourself by Kelly Davis

“I have always loved the desert. One sits down on a desert dune, sees nothing, hears nothing, yet through the silence something throbs and gleams” –The Little Prince

In order to combat the painful fluctuations of my mind and emotions, I sought to identify with an irreducible beauty. This irreducible beauty provides a safe space. It would be my altar. Thus, in this sacred space my mind and emotions would be negated. It would be impossible to tear it apart, dissolve it, or deem me unworthy to have it. This irreducible beauty is sacrosanct.

We, as humans, have a subjective and a reflexive understanding of the world. It has been said that we are, ‘god experiencing itself.’ This concept begs to knit together the subjective and reflexive capacity of our consciousness. I went through a period where I desperately longed for divine love. I eventually realized: that if we are God (which is divine love) then I am the manifestation of that love. This is how I am god experiencing itself, I am the experience of divine love. Thus, I discovered my irreducible beauty.

If I were to assign an image to that irreducible beauty, the irreducible beauty of divine love, it is a vast liminal space. The space of transition.

The space of manifest.

The space of the desert.

If you were to cut me open stratigraphic canyons would fall out of my bones, followed by rivers and red rocks: the desert. I am attracted to, I am, the irreducible beauty of the vast, liminal, specifically desert space. This is because these places are inherently transient, evolving and resilient. These spaces radiate divine love. The desert was and still is the backdrop of my upbringing and now of my reality. The desert is my altar, the desert is me.

In more concrete intersections, the liminality of the desert manifests to become my-self. I am a gender-queer dancer, these orientations do just that, they orient me in the flux of becoming. This becoming can be summated as this: I am a radical desert, queer liminal space that moves through this given topographic spatial, temporal reality. Sometimes as a man. Sometimes as a woman. Sometimes as a rock. Sometimes as a yucca. But always, always, as the manifestation of divine love.

Kelly Davis is a current 2016/2017 Sani Yoga Teacher Trainee. Kelly, a daughter of two archeologists, is a desert coyote from Bluff, Utah.

This post emerged from a writing assignment in which Maggie Siebert, our lead instructor for the training program, asked the trainees to "essentialize themselves" using the prompt "who am I?" in order to distill ourselves in our most basic element. For example, who would we be if we didn't define ourselves by our job, hobbies, and the many things we engage in daily?