Decades of Me

...a yoga teacher I know said something about the tendency, this time of year in particular, to set intentions...resolutions...that are essentially negative...centered around parts of ourselves we want to be rid of...suggesting that instead we might try focusing on good things that have grown in us over the past year or decade...ways we’ve become kinder, healthier...things like that...which I don’t find difficult...

...though I still have a bit of trouble with this whole big whoop about new year’s eve new year’s day start of a new decade thing...and not just because of that string of miserable New Year’s Eve party experiences that caused me to forsake them years ago...

...some writers have suggested that this almost-past-decade-nobody-could-come-up-with-a-decent-name-for began, actually, not with the flipping of calendar digits and immensely anticlimactic Y2K...(I mean, seriously, even if we can’t have the Apocalypse, is a worldwide digital breakdown really too much to ask for?)...but with 9/11....bringing an abrupt, if late, close to a decade of relative peace and prosperity that started early with the fall of the Berlin Wall...just like the 30’s began with the stock market crash, and the 60's ended with Watergate...or Altamont...or Disco....okay, clearly, this system isn't perfect, either...

...nonetheless, I found myself applying its logic a bit more personally...even if rushing to do so and get this post up before midnight...(yeah, I know)...

...starting in 1966...or so I’m told...there was a relatively innocent decade called childhood...

...followed, somewhere around 1978, by one that lasted only ’til '83 or so, even if it felt like an eternity in whatever circle of hell’s reserved for the lonely and despised...

...leading to what I’ve dubbed my psychedelic era...which could also be called the really really confused decade....which might be the same thing...

...and it lasted approximately ’til 1994 or so...eventually giving way to the (semi-)respectable decade...or the trying to put it all behind me decade...or the deep denial decade...

...which crash landed some time in 2001 in a period of depression so deep and dark that everything, it seemed, needed to be reevaluated...and, in order to do that, nothing could be denied...everything had to be seen and explored...opened up in a gradual process...commencing what might be called my second psychedelic era...without the artificial sweeteners...

...and I really don’t see that ending tonight...nor, truth be told, do I really think I’d want it to...

Nidra

I’ll be your mirror, reflect what you are in case you don’t know...
Lou Reed

People are always calling me a mirror, and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?
Andy Warhol

...toes fuzzy and pink...remember dipping into cold water on the Oregon coast 1987...a mellow place, even if not feeling that way inside...scents of incense, wet bark, and self-righteousness...brightly colored star fish and those long green whips of seaweed...bright blue anemones in profusion on the rocks along the shoreline where I walked...

...knees harbor nostalgia for early childhood...when they touched the earth with every movement...dumb feet dragging behind...

...like a globe representing a tortured world...churning and rumbling at the most inopportune times...my stomach is prone to self-dramatizing...

...spine like an old soldier, too long stuck on guard duty...soldiering on, nonetheless...dreaming of learning to dance, like a snake...

...fingers have a regrettable tendency to get into trouble...well, a tendency, at least...can’t say I always regret it...

...shoulders tense, hard...impregnable bulwarks...or so they’d like to think...against dangers real and imagined...past and present...and far too often unable to tell the difference...

...throat feels lonely...too much struggling to express what needs to be said...to establish connections...victim of post nasal drip and whatever crap enters through the mouth...and yet, tirelessly bringing the breath in and out...I’m learning to pay more attention to my throat...

...nose often irritated...kinda like it’s the angry talk-radio host of my face...but open to whatever comes around...taking in as much as it throws out...hard to say what its politics are...

...right forehead, this morning, from the eye on up, a dark grey cloud...though dissipating as warmth and light gradually filter through...



...artwork stolen from Karin.......okay, so she gave me permission to steal it...which if yer gonna insist on bein' all literal n' shit means that, in a purely technical sense, it wasn’t actually stolen...but just lemme feel like an outlaw, awright?...

This Actually Happened...

...there was this woman I was feeling really attracted to, and she was sitting near me...not conventionally beautiful, I don’t think...but not notably unconventional...or unusual, looking, either...though I certainly wouldn’t want to say she looked ordinary...because she didn’t....and, beyond that, I can’t say much...since I didn’t have my glasses on...and the room was kinda dim...so, really, I could hardly see her at all...don’t know for sure if I’d recognize her if I saw her again...though I’ve been thinking about her ever since...

...anyway, she was talking somewhat loudly to this other woman across the way...can’t say much of anything at all about her...but they were talking in this strange language...kinda clipped, choppy-sounding, somewhat guttural and staccato, like an early new wave song...and I wondered for a minute or two just what language it was...until, after a little while, I recognized it...realized it was English...though I still didn’t understood a word they said...

Vegetable Wisdom

...“sweet,” in the somewhat archaic definition of the Oxford English Dictionary, is that which “affords enjoyment or gratifies desire.” Like a shimmering equal sign, the word sweetness denoted a reality commensurate with human desire: it stood for fulfillment.
Michael Pollan

...my doctor told me my blood pressure and weight have increased the last three times I’ve seen him...not bad, but going up, nonetheless...which seems outrageous considering all the yoga, biking, and meditation I’ve been doing....then, perhaps, a bit less so considering all the cheap deep-fried Chinese take-out, Tastykakes, Mexican Cokes...with real sugar!...and margaritas....it really is all about balance...I’m positive about that...but, apparently, that particular balance hasn’t been balancing nearly as well as I’d hoped...

...generally speaking, that thing yoga teachers say about listening to your body is sound advice....trouble is, my body still thinks I’m a hunter-gatherer...struggling for bare subsistence against the ever-present threat of starvation...which is reasonable enough, considering that the vast majority of human beings who’ve ever lived have been exactly that...and thus far more attracted to the deep fried saber-tooth-tiger-on-a-stick at some stone-aged equivalent of my corner Chinese take-out than the organic broccoli bush frequented by those mellow cro-magnons down the way etching You Can’t Hug Your Children With Sharp Sticks onto their cave walls...

...as such, sometimes I gotta tell my body to shut up so I can exercise some vegetable wisdom...which is what I’m trying to do now...just in time for the holidays...

What is patriotism but the love of the food one ate as a child?
Lin Yutang

...went to see some bands play at this art space...technically a loading dock....it was BYOL...which at least one guy did to the point that he probably shouldn’t have been so close to the loading dock...but there were lots of snacks...including these colorful cupcakes...my friend who works at a coffee shop that sells really good, really high quality pastries asked how they were...I said they were good...but in that real old-school PTA-mom-who-buys-a-cupcake-mix-and-that-really-sugary-kinda-colorful-frosting-at-the-supermarket kinda way...which, really, is a more primal kinda good than you’re likely to experience with anything more refined...

When you’re a kid you can eat amazing amounts of food. All I ate when I was a kid was candy. Just candy, candy, candy. And the only really clear thought I had as a kid was get candy.
Jerry Seinfeld

...which, when you think about it...or, at least, when I think about it...could be a contributing factor...along with these holidays coming up just when things have started getting cold...and living in a culture of frenzied consumption...for my habitual resemblance, by the time the new year rolls around, to the StayPuft Marshmallow Man...because not only are there lots of high calorie treats around...but some of them are supplied by my mom...or at least in the presence of my mom, along with other family members and all kinds of rituals meant to evoke nostalgia for those sweet, squishy idealized childhood experiences...and, if I’m not feelin’ it...as, often, I’m not...there’s always more sugary stuff around...

...happy holidays, folks...enjoy some high calorie crap for me...

Talkin' Nonsense With Dostoyevsky

Talking nonsense is man’s only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms. If you keep talking big nonsense, you will get to sense. I am a man, therefore I talk nonsense. Nobody ever got a single truth without talking nonsense fourteen times first. Maybe even a hundred and fourteen.
Dostoyevsky

...a guy I know shares a birthday with the guy who wrote Mein Kampf...I got the guy who wrote show me that I’m everywhere and get me home for tea...and I’m only a day away from the guy who said he shot a man in Reno just to watch him die....honestly, I don’t think this means much, but I’m not complaining, either...

...berenice left a comment on my Postmodern Yogi Bear post with a link to a story from the BBC involving a bear found sleeping in a campground in Washington state, surrounded by thirty-six empty beer cans...taken from campers’ coolers and opened with teeth and claws...need I mention that this makes me feel proud to be an American?...

...when I was twenty-one, hitch-hiked with a friend from Rome to Pompeii, where we had to leave our backpacks with this old lady in black who seemed like she’d probably been there since before the volcano erupted, to go and wander the ancient dead streets...climbing through windows where we weren’t supposed to go to see things closed off to other tourists....as we traipsed into the empty coliseum, history's weight seemed almost overwhelming...I thought wow...Pink Floyd played here...

...connections, it seems, are always tenuous...a shrink once told me small children go through a crisis when they realize they're actually separate from their mothers...autonomous, lonely beings in a frightening world....my question is when, exactly, does that crisis end?...

...if something is disappointing I know it’s not nothing, because nothing is not disappointing.
Andy Warhol

...Lao Tzu wrote when you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you....that is, with the right attitude, you can have everything you want...just like the new age people say....I doubt he was really talking about the mansion in the Hollywood hills, the private plane, or the movie star significant other, though...more likely, I think, he meant you can have everything you want when you stop wanting anything you don’t already have...

Making Imaginary Snowpeople Out of Rain

To recognize the basic goodness in everyone takes courage.
Tara Brach

...the holiday season is upon us....and I thought about being really postmodernly ironic and cute and putting a syrupy sweet Thomas Kinkade holiday image at the top of this post....trouble is, there’s kind of a fine line between being postmodernly ironic and cute and seriously sucking up the place...and that might just cross it...

...and, anyway, this is a time of year...or so I'm told...for dropping one’s cool, ironic stance and getting all warm, fuzzy, and spiritual...like so...

***THIS BWOG WUVS YOU***
***AND WISHES YOU A VEWWY MEWWY CHWISMUS***

...okay...that went waaaaaaay too far...and was kinda painfully ironic, anyway...so...perhaps an inspiring line from The New Testament?...

...I was stoned...
2 Corinthians 11:25

...alright, forget it...

...Bob Dylan came out with a Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart...and I’ve been listening to it while roasting chestnuts on an open fire, redecorating my apartment to look like a manger, and making imaginary snowpeople out of rain...all the while thinking if I keep listening to this, then maybe, just maybe, I’ll come to see it as something other than yet another twisted ironic joke Bob’s playing on his dedicated fans, like me, who he knows would buy a CD of him blowing his nose...which, truth be told, might sound better than his rendition of Here Comes Santa Claus....but, at least, the proceeds are all going toward providing food for people who need it...and that’s what it really should be all about, anyway, isn’t it?...

...(yes, I actually ended that last paragraph with something sincere...even providing a link...as if my Grinch heart grew three sizes...)

In From the Storm

If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear.
Jon Kabat-Zinn

To be awake is to be alive.
Henry David Thoreau

...was talking about how I sometimes feel nostalgic for the most tragic and horrible times in my life....when, for a while, the mind stopped drifting so haphazardly...attention overwhelmed...focused, whether it wanted to be or not, on a gaping and unavoidable pain...every unhappy moment felt so deeply and intensely as to burn with a flame that continues to glow in memory....but this isn’t a story about that...

...went backpacking in the Rockies twenty years or so ago...Indian Peaks Wilderness, near Boulder, with a friend who’d never backpacked before...and probably never did again....we hiked about six miles, mostly up, and were way above treeline when dark storm clouds appeared off above the ridgeline....I thought better get the tent up...which is what we did...this old fashioned pup tent found in my dad’s attic...and managed to clamber in just as the first raindrops started to fall, which seemed to us like perfect timing...though it couldn’t’ve been more than a minute or two before wanton winds coursing across the alpine tundra unearthed flimsy metal tent stakes, bringing thin orange material down on us like a wet cowl....which, as best we could, we held up with arms outstretched like twin Jesuses as the scene through the open flap resembled the Apocalypse as much as anything I’d ever seen...lightning dancing and exploding everywhere, wind raging in countless directions at once, cold rain hammering down....my friend said, at one point, I don’t know if I can deal with this....and I said I don’t think we have much choice...

...not that I wasn’t terrified, too...I was, of course...but also felt a curious exhilaration...crouching in the midst of this all...the insane, spectacular lightning, the wind and rain rampaging at us from all sides...the inescapable knowledge that we could die at any moment, easily...but that, right there, right then, blood was pulsing through us with a ferocity rivaling that of the storm...

...at some point, we decided it'd be a good idea to get away from the useless metal tent poles, and went to crouch by a rock that kinda sorta almost gave us some shelter until the storm passed...which it did, after a while...but by then it was dark, though the moon shone limply through the clouds, and we went back to the tent, found it completely waterlogged, sleeping bags and everything else utterly soaked and cold...and, even if I’d had the backwoods know-how and fortitude to get a fire going, there was no wood up there....then, if I’d had any backwoods know-how at all, we would’ve turned around and run for treeline as soon as we saw those dark clouds....so, with hands numb from the cold, we crammed sleeping bags into backpacks, leaving the tent stuffed between two rocks, where I retrieved it, along with various other items strewn around the area, two days later, and started the long climb down...

...not sure where it came from...except that I shared it with Mittens, our otherwise fearless Welsh Corgi...but I had a phobia about thunderstorms from early on...by my mid-twenties, it was subtle...just a dark cold feeling somewhere inside whenever I heard that ominous rumbling...but very real nonetheless....after that experience in Indian Peaks, though, the fear was gone....my friend Jeff came out to Colorado and we spent much of the rest of that summer backpacking high in the mountains...often setting up camp just below treeline so that, when the inevitable afternoon thunderstorm came, we could go and watch it from close up....and even today, when I get caught on my bike in a storm...which happens at least once a summer, usually somewhere between downtown and home...I try to avoid it, but not always very hard...it can feel like a crisp, unruly baptism...

Laughing Matter

...Shakespeare had one of his characters say All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players...which would indicate, by dramaturgical standards of the day...reaching back to festivals of Apollo in ancient Greece, when theatre first emerged from religious ritual...that life is either comedy or tragedy...

...Bob Dylan, some time later, wrote there are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke...which would appear to indicate wide support for the comedy thesis...though how you take that might depend on your definition of the word joke...seriously...

...someone I knew well seemed to view life...or at least his own life...as something like a Greek tragedy....little to do but keep up a noble bearing, marching on toward a preordained doom with moral uprightness and dignity...knowing that even therapy and religious faith can only do so much to cure the inevitable tragic flaw....and that a joke is something inherently trivial, and often inappropriate...as life is no laughing matter...

...Ken Kesey might have said always star in your own movie...which could present a few more options in terms of genre....I’ve tended at times to see life as a dark comedy...like Heathers* or Dr. Strangelove...since, when tragedy seems to be attacking from all sides, tempting one to curl up into a ball and pretend not to exist, laughter can smell an awful lot like victory**...

Laughing at our mistakes lengthens our life. Laughing at someone else's shortens it.

Cullen Hightower

...Shakespeare also wrote a play called Henry IV...then a sequel and a prequel to cash in on the popularity of one of its characters...that’s not a joke, by the way...let’s face it: Shakespeare was no more aesthetically pure than George Lucas or Mick Jagger...or whoever created those brilliant Mentos commercials...and you have to decide for yourself whether I’m joking about the brilliance of Mentos commercials.....anyway, the character, Falstaff, makes no claims to purity, either...he's a drunken, amoral buffoon...though he often speaks truths that could only be uttered on stage safely by a fool....anyway, at one point...I think it's in the sequel...he responds to mockery with I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men...takes it as a compliment, that is...and there might be something to be learned from that...

For life is quite absurd, and death's the final word

You must always face the curtain with a bow.

Forget about your sin - give the audience a grin

Enjoy it - it's your last chance anyhow...
Eric Idle

...ultimately, it’s all there...the tragedy, the comedy, the tragicomedy, and everything else...but allowing for improvisation, and not at all bound by classical unities or conventional plotting....and, like any poem, wide open to interpretation....

...maybe it all comes down to matter...we are matter...and things matter...and yet we laugh...making us, essentially, laughing matter....these are the jokes, folks...



* just googled Heathers...turns out Winona Ryder says a sequel’s in the works....I hope that’s a joke...

** yes, that was a darkly comic reference to Apocalypse Now and the smell of napalm...

Surfacing...with Court and Spark, Enlighten Up, and my new chair from IKEA..

He who knows does not speak. He who speaks does not know.
Lao Tzu

...I have very little to say...so this is gonna go on for a while...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 1:1

...have always loved Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark album...despite always disliking that really slick L.A. production kinda sound....but, then, that’s kinda what Court and Spark’s about: she trades her guitar player boyfriend with the madman’s soul for the city of the fallen angels...as her friend David Geffen gives up feeling unfettered and alive in gay Paris for stroking the star maker machinery behind the popular songs...turning to surfaces because depths and ideals have gotten too painful....and yet, it turns out the superficial life sucks, too...since, even at the most stylish and faceless people’s parties, the old emotions and desperate search for love and contentment keep welling up....so, in the end, she ends up with jazz and the therapist’s couch....I can relate...

...speaking of surfaces...finally saw Enlighten Up!...okay, actually, I’m watching it as I write this...while also eating my dinner...yeah, I know, not mindful at all...though, for what it’s worth, my dinner’s vegetarian...unlike my lunch....so it goes....anyway, this filmmaker sends this guy who has no particular interest in spirituality on a spiritual quest...which, to me, seems somewhat self-evidently silly...and—big surprise—he doesn’t end up having a spiritual experience...not even after sampling this vast yogic smorgasbord, ranging from your most fundamentalist religious kinda scenes to your most crassly superficial gym class kinda scenes to your most totally style-conscious new agey kinda scenes...not to mention all the disagreements about the history and definition of yoga, as well as the ubiquity of practitioners who don’t seem to know or care....raising, I'm told, all kinds of major, troubling questions...

...whatever...personally, I got into the yoga thing because I thought practicing in ways that made sense to me, and avoiding those that didn't, might have a positive affect on my life...and, as it turns out, it has...in some ways I didn’t anticipate, even...so I’m gonna keep doing it...no big whoop...

...gotta admit, though, in recent months I've mostly been trying to counteract the effects of sitting on the crummy beaten up futon couch in my apartment...lumpy as a gigantic, lopsided bag of potatoes on top of a bent frame...but, what the hell, it was there when I moved in...and filled a need, as I’d just returned the easy chair I’d been using in my last place to the dumpster where I found it....seriously, there was nothing wrong with it, then, other than a stain...and my chair before that one was this old recliner, which was basically okay except that I kept finding nuts and bolts and things every time I cleaned under it...I mean, lots of them...like more than you’d think would even be part of a chair in the first place...so, it seemed like only a matter of time before it collapsed, causing untold injury...and, when I saw the one with the stain out by the dumpster...which couldn’t’ve been placed there more than a few hours earlier...y’know....anyway, it started falling apart, as well, and most likely wouldn’t have survived the trip to the new place, and so began the physically abusive relationship between the old futon couch and me, which lasted until...

...one rainy Saturday morning...when I got in the car and drove to..............................................IKEA...yes, dear friends and readers...IKEA...and, before I left, made a vow never again to shop anywhere other than IKEA....if they don’t sell it at IKEA, I don’t want it....am even quitting the yoga thing in favor of whatever traditional Swedish equivalent to yoga they offer at IKEA....this blog will soon be renamed Whatever Traditional Swedish Equivalent to Yoga They Offer at IKEA for Cynics...which, I believe, will make it the first and only whatever traditional Swedish equivalent to yoga they offer at IKEA blog on the interwebs....and, thus, more cutting edge than ever...not to mention written...like this post right now...while sitting in my new IKEA chair...with matching IKEA footrest...and ooooooh is it a cool chair...and really not difficult to assemble at all...

....only trouble is, now I gotta make the rest of the room worthy of the chair...which could take a while...

Timeless Wisdom du Jour

...one way to see how mindful you can be is to bike to yoga class in a cold winter rainstorm...then try to get through the class without thinking constantly about how much it’s gonna suck to put your soaking wet socks and sneakers back on for the ride home...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 15:357

Silence is the mother of truth.
Benjamin Disraeli

Death is the mother of beauty.
Wallace Stevens

...truth and beauty are a couple of heartless, ungrateful bastards who can’t be troubled to send so much as a lousy Mother’s Day card to silence and death...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 643:278

The universe is not only stranger than we think, it's stranger than we can think.
a Hubble scientist, quoted by Barbara Crooker

...all is impermanent...except perhaps for that lingering scent of fish in the microwave...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 316:239

...it's better to give than to receive...but both beat the hell outta having to go Christmas shopping...
Swami Yoganandasutkatasanatikkamasalakaliyugaroseannadanna (author of much maligned 19th Century commentary on Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 316:239)

Life is both dreadful and wonderful.
Thich Nhat Hanh

Whelk Procession

...a line of broken whelks placed like some holy procession the day before Thanksgiving...where, a couple weeks ago, water whooshing back to sea created a kind of sand ridge intersecting the shoreline....some say anything can be a sacred object....I don’t know, but see no particular reason to disagree...

...too cold to go barefoot...battered hiking books press down in wet cold sand...some seepage through worn out soles...but hardly more than the idea of wetness and cold... though that might change if I don’t keep moving....barely anybody else out but the metal detector guys...one in Bermuda shorts, though I’m wearing three layers, and the strong icy wind makes me doubt I’ll get anywhere near the point...but no worn out soul, as yet...still walking... dark tumultuous, thoroughly ominous cloud roof looming above yet ending in a straight but bumpy line just a foot or so above the horizon, where there’s no blue but an odd species of luminescence...clouds, still...but glowing...bare gilded outlines in white light....rotten wooden pilings so dark against the water lapping down below...all that light and dark in sharp distinction but what lines are in between gradually fading...

...had a deep sad thought last night...like someone wrapping me in a chilly, damp quilt...but then watched it dissipate, like a winter rainstorm...

...in better moments I think I’m on the road to enlightenment...then drop the pretense, think maybe I’m just not depressed...though, really, at this point, I can’t say the distinction matters to me much...

Every Last Leaf (Autumn Rivulet #5)

heard the people who live on the ceiling scream and fight most scarily;
hearing that noise was my first ever feeling that’s how it’s been all around me...
the Clash

...had a friend named Michael when I was seven or eight...first kid I ever met whose parents were divorced....he told me, I remember, one time when we were playing up in the treehouse my dad built in the woods behind our house....didn’t know many kids who talked about serious stuff like he did, either...

....at some point, heard my mom telling somebody, another adult, something his mom told her...about how she’d had to quit her job to look after the kids because the sitter’d been doing something sitters aren’t supposed to...which I didn’t think too much about at the time...

...another time I slept over a couple nights...don’t think I’d ever been in house like that...really bare and run down...toys lying around, mostly broken...holes in the walls his mom plastered over herself...said some bachelors lived there before, and apparently punched the holes with their fists....he lived there with his mom and two little brothers, and this guy who was living with his mom...dark beard, ponytail, tattoos, kind of quiet, soft-spoken when he spoke at all...had a workshop in the basement and an ashtray shaped like a hand with a middle finger sticking up at the back....nowadays, I’d call him a biker, though I don’t remember if he actually had a motorcycle....Michael and one of his brothers, a year or so younger, looked a lot alike...skinny white kids with long stringy hair down to their shoulders...first boys I ever knew with long hair...but his other brother, who was maybe three or four, had dark skin and an afro....Michael said he just came out that way....the first night I had dinner with them, that brother spilled some milk, and their mom turned red, stuck a big fist in front of his little eyes, said see this? this is gonna go right in your face...

...late that night, hearing footsteps in the dark hallway, she shrieked, high pitched and threatening, through the door...then opened it, said oh, it’s you in a voice turned gentle and soft, and pointed me toward the bathroom...

....the next day, Michael and I jumped up and down in a pile of leaves his brother’d raked up, scattering them all over the yard...his mom yelled at both of us, said we’d better get up every last leaf...so we started raking....then, after a while, eager to get back to playing, I said I doubt she really meant ‘every last leaf’...with a nonchalance that grew naturally in my world...but he kept working...he was in his world, and he knew it...

...just happened to remember this story, recently....sorry if it's a bit dark...

Things I Don't Have

John Muir once declared that he was better off than the magnate E. H. Harriman. “I have all the money I want,” Muir exclaimed, “and he hasn’t.”
Clifton Fadiman

A thief can only steal from you, he cannot break your heart....
Gram Parsons

...Thanksgiving just around the corner, thought I’d take a minute to offer a few words of thanks for things I don’t have...

...most diseases or major injuries, of course...no alimony to be paid or outsized mortgage unlikely ever to be paid off...no price on my head, charges filed against me, warrants out for my arrest, alcoholism, addictions to hard drugs, loved ones on death row...no job I hate or marriage I hate...no broken bones...no broken heart...(for now, at least)...

...no desperate daily struggle to find sufficient food, safe drinking water, or shelter for bare survival...no particular need to hide from invading soldiers or death squads, nor to sneak across the border, nor seek asylum in an unknown land...

...and yet not a lot worth stealing...no Van Gogh etchings requiring fancy security systems and astronomical annual insurance premiums...no Dead Sea Scrolls or first editions of Leaves of Grass I’d be afraid to touch, much less ever read...no vast mansions with countless rooms, and the endless hassles and expensive upkeep such places entail...no particular taste for fine cuisine, fine wine, or fine cocaine...no oil wells, diamond mines, or poppy fields...no third world plantations likely to be nationalized if the rebels manage to take the capitol...no politicians doing my bidding only ’til a bigger donor comes along...no legions of fans demanding I get back together and tour with hated former bandmates...no paparazzi showing the supermarket check-out world how flabby and out of shape I look in a bathing suit...no vast corporate empire with so many holdings, so many underlings, and so much money that you just know some trusted employee’s ripping me off for millions at this very moment...

...no weapons of mass destruction...nor any real potential to build weapons of mass destruction at any time in the foreseeable future...no ties to international terrorist groups...no guns...no bombs...no poison gas nor deadly biological agents...no hidden kilos of heroin or weapons grade plutonium...no suitcases full of hundred dollar bills, marked or unmarked...no slaves...no maidservants nor oxen for neighbors to covet...no exotic pets that’ll take a bite out of me while I sleep...no abusive friends or lovers I spend time with only for fear of being alone...

...no fear of the dark...no desire to go on American Idol, star in my own reality show, be elected President of the United States, win the Tour de France, or be sixteen again...no desire to murder, rape, molest, or seriously maim...not nearly as much anger or hatred as I used to carry around with me...fewer enemies, fewer people I’m unwilling to forgive....no belief that I’m inherently better than anyone...and I’m working on getting rid of the belief that I’m worse...

...might sum it all up with thanks for nothin’, but suspect I’d be misunderstood...because nothin’ has always been underrated...

Dogs (Three Different Ones)

...what often happens when hiking with human friends is I’ll get a cool idea...like hey, let’s bushwhack through those pricker bushes, across that swamp, and up that rockslide...only to meet with sardonic responses like huh?! or what?! or why the hell would I wanna do that?!....in sharp contrast, my dog friends answer with characteristic enthusiasm: yeah!! great idea, Jay!!! let’s do it!!!! you rule!!!!!*...which is why I'm always happy to go hiking with a dog...

...dogs don’t necessarily get the yoga thing, though...which, for some, might raise the question of whether they’re waiting for yoga or past it and mastering it...to misquote Walt Whitman...either way, it can make things difficult when dogsitting...as the dog in question might see getting down toward the floor as indicating a desire to play, and respond in kind...or, perhaps, there's a logical argument there, like what the hell do ya need downward facing dog for when ya got the real thing right here?...

...and, certainly, plans to begin the day sitting quietly, incense burning, Monk & Coltrane playing low in the background, may be derailed when it turns out el perro has other first-thing-in-the-morning priorities....then, I’m still far from convinced that an early morning dog walk can’t be as good a meditation as any...


*free translation from the original dog

Morning Haze

been thinking about
thinking about thinking, and
winter’s coming soon

...Massachusetts was a lot colder than Philly’s been so far this fall...saw some white on the mountaintops driving in, as well as remains of a snowman...or snowperson...snowbeing...on Kripalu’s back deck....still, had to get out and take a brisk hike down through that chilly air to the lake as soon as I arrived...causing already irritated early November sinus passages to just about scream...

...was surprised the next day to hear somebody mention his head had been hurting all morning...somehow, it never occurred to me that I might not be the only person in the entire place with a headache...

...y’know...when yer in a totally mellow spiritual holistic type setting like that, ya just tend to assume that everybody else is positively blanketed in wellness and good feeling...at least I do....then, I also tend to think I’m the only person in the yoga class thinking about lunch instead of fully inhabiting whatever asana experience we’re supposed to be having...the only person at the party feeling lonely and out of place...the only person on the sidewalk lost in worry instead of striding purposefully toward success success success...

...of course the irony is that I’m anything but alone in feeling that way...and the same goes for all of our headaches, our awkwardness, our doubts....and, certainly, if there's one thing we're never, ever truly alone in, it's our loneliness...

The Highly Prestigious and Karmically Significant Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love Award

...before getting this post started, I think I need to say something about a controversy currently raging on other blogs with yoga in their titles...that is, the highly acrimonious subject of competitive yoga...which, to many, is a bit of an oxymoron...so, let me just say right now that you won’t find any of that here....that’s because I happen to be the least competitive yogi on the web...one might even say the World Champion of Non-Competitiveness.............and if there's anybody out there who thinks you’re less competitive than I am, all I can say is bring it, bitch...

...ahem...as loyal readers know, now and then this humble blog receives awards from fellow bloggers...(with very little money changing hands...usually)...and, generally, that involves passing on the award to other deserving bloggers...known as blog love...which I’ve been far too uncooperative and un-loving to do....and so, the time has come to atone...(even though I’ll no doubt end up doing more harm than good by forgetting people who really deserve awards)...so, since nobody’s actually given me any awards lately...drum roll, please...

...Yoga for Cynics is, like, totally thrilled to present the highly prestigious, karmically significant, and not at all tacky Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love Award... redeemable for 15% off orders of $100 or more at participating International House of Yoga™ locations...honoring blogs and bloggers about whom I can think of something funny to say at the moment...

Holly's Earth to Holly is kinda like the blog version of that mellow friendly house where your mellow friendly friends live with their mellow friendly dog...you wanna stop by without calling first, you wanna hang out, you wanna borrow CD’s, you wanna crash on the couch...it’s all good...

Brooks' appropriately titled Yogic Muse is where half the posts here started out as comments...seriously, if this blog ever started making money, I’d worry about a lawsuit if Brooks wasn’t so full of that yogic lovingkindness and stuff...

Melinda's Melindaville offers such well-written, often hair-raising first person accounts of drug abuse, prostitution, and other really serious stuff that all the jokes I can think of are coming out way too offensive...

Iranian poet Human Being at Thus Spake the Crow appears to be further out there than I am...which I find kinda threatening...

Clutterquake is Lydia’s other blog...and it's getting the award instead of her main blog ‘cause that’s how edgy I am...

Seeing Eye Chick at Apocalyptics Anonymous is seriously pissed off...do not fuck with Seeing Eye Chick...she will fuck you up...

Lisa at Ecoyogini practices yoga in Canada, kinda like Roseanne at It’s All Yoga, Baby, which means...jeezus, I’m right on the cusp of making some lame-ass joke about curling, Celine Dion, and locust pose...which means my well of creativity is just about tapped....so that’s all for now...we return you to your previously scheduled internet activity...

Seriously Pushing the Boundaries of Acceptable Outthereness

If you can start the day without caffeine or pep pills,
If you can be cheerful, ignoring aches and pains,
If you can resist complaining and boring people with your troubles,
If you can eat the same food every day and be grateful for it,
If you can understand when loved ones are too busy to give you their time,
If you can overlook when people take things out on you when, through no fault of yours, something goes wrong,
If you can take criticism and blame without resentment,
If you can face the world without lies and deceit,
If you can conquer tension without medical help,
If you can relax without liquor,
If you can sleep without the aid of drugs,
Then you’re probably a dog.
Quoted by Tara Brach, from an unknown source

...so...drove up to the Berkshires for a weekend at Kripalu...did some yoga, got lost in the woods a couple times, hot tubbed, and took part in this radical acceptance thing led by famous mindfulness person Tara Brach...in which I had a series of really really intense experiences...like, the kind where, attempting to describe them to people back home, I appear to be seriously pushing the boundaries of acceptable outthereness....then, I’ve kinda been doing that my whole life...

...biking downtown for a yoga class Monday morning, though, I was surprised at how easy and enjoyable it all was...the yoga class itself as well as the ride....though only my intention was particularly different...

....setting an intention is something yoga teachers like to talk about at the beginnings of yoga classes...at which point grumpy yoga students whose names won't be mentioned grumble silently about some bullshit positive affirmation I’m supposed to come up with...often ending up with something along the lines of hopefully feeling just a little bit less crappy so I can make it through the rest of the day...which is perhaps closer to desperation, if undeniably real....this time, I was simply there because I felt like it...nothing to do but enjoy...

*photo of my friend Fargo (who has no blog of his own, but is okay with that) gratefully stolen from my friend Aviva*

From the Muddy Shore of Lake Mahkeenac (Autumn Rivulet #4)

...picnic table on the muddy shore of Lake Mahkeenac...water rippling grey, below gray skies...so many shades of grey...enough, I think, to make a distinction between gray and grey almost meaningful...though the specifics are rather gray....always so hard to find meaning and distinction...and so easy to get lost...

...I don't intend to get lost in the woods, generally speaking...it's just that I don't try very hard to avoid it...and rarely regret when it does....mud seeping into my boots in a marshy stretch, less solid to walk on than it looked....trails keep disappearing into fallen leaves this time of year...no telling what might be underneath....anyway, you're never really having fun until you get dirty...

...walls are easiest to walk through when you've forgotten they're there...momentarily, at least...and think you're going somewhere else entirely...there may not, in fact, be any other way...

*blogcasting live from the coffee shop, Kripalu, Massachusetts*

Autumn Rivulets 2 & 3

...keep finding myself in conversations like this:
Complete stranger: Whadja think o’ [somebody who apparently plays baseball] in the seventh last night?
Me: Uh...he was great...
Complete stranger: Whaddaya mean great?! That douchebag mighta cost us the series!!
Me: Oh...right...yeah...he sucks...

Chilly November
Philly’s in the world series
And I just don’t care

...was reading this newspaper article about somebody who, it said, had an unfinished life...which is the kind of thing you say about people who die before their time....as if life were a novel...and a conventional one, at that...a coherent narrative with proper beginning, middle, and end...exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, denouement...and something seems very wrong when it doesn’t turn out that way...when the final chapters we were expecting turn out to be missing....maybe it ends halfway through a chapter, a paragraph, a sentence...leaving no neat, cozy message to tease out in English class...except maybe that life and death have no interest in the stories we create...the leaves are gonna turn and fall whether our summer plans have been completed satisfactorily or not...

Autumn Rivulet #1

I’m in the here and now and I’m meditating, and
still I’m sufferin’, but that’s my problem...
Van Morrison

...as long as you’re breathing, there’s more right with you than wrong with you...
Jon Kabat-Zinn

felt a cool autumn
breeze upon waking, though no
window was open

Notes from a Postmodern Yogi...Bear

...always been a big guy...bit on the hairy side...kinda slow and lumbering...with a sweet tooth...and a grouchy temper....have been referred to as that big lumberjack guy...but, far more often, as a bear...uso, in Spanish....apparently, if I were gay, that’d make me part of a subculture...but, then, I’ve generally fit in with subcultures only slightly better than with the larger cultures they exist on the fringes of, so maybe it’s just as well...even if it was kinda cool for a while when the grunge look came along and I was suddenly fashionable...but those things never last...

I turn into a bear every so often. I feel myself becoming a bear, and that’s a struggle I have to face now and then.
N. Scott Momaday

...have seen seven bears in the wild...the first, in the Tuolumne Meadows campground in Yosemite, was huge...seemingly fearless as it ravaged campers’ picnic supplies...turning to show its teeth and moving as if to charge when people got too close...which was certainly all the message I needed...though, after a while, a ranger came along, picked up a few pebbles and got the bear running with a few well aimed throws at its gigantic furry ass....the other six were along the Appalachian Trail...mostly crashing through underbrush at great speeds to get away from apparent danger...me....and then, maybe a week after the last, in the wilds of New Jersey...really...saw a few in cages, also just along the trail, down below Bear Mountain in New York, near the Walt Whitman statue...where tourists from the city shot me ugly looks, assuming, apparently, by my backpack and dirty, hairy thru-hiker's appearance, that I wasn’t the kind of person they wanted anywhere near their picnics...

And the number one threat to America is... Bears.
Stephen Colbert

...modern society wasn’t built with bears in mind...that much is clear...a culture of frenzied production and consumption looking ever askance at hibernations of any length, as well as the furry wildness of bears, in general...

“Well,” said Pooh, “we keep looking for Home and not finding it, so I thought that if we looked for this Pit, we’d be sure not to find it, which would be a Good Thing, because then we might find something that we weren’t looking for, which might be just what we were looking for, really.”
A. A. Milne

...haven’t been too productive lately...somewhat indolent...attempts at decisive action like swimming through viscous sludge...struggling a bit, and then sinking...down through the floor, into the earth...to hibernate, like postmodern bears do, with the i-pod, DVD player and cheap greasy food from the Chinese take-out place down the street...but also books, yoga mat, and meditation cushion...making me a postmodern yogi bear...and I’ll crawl out when I’m good and ready...

So meet a bear and take him out to lunch with you
And even though your friends may stop and stare
Just remember that's a bear there in the bunch with you
And they just don't come no better than a bear
Lyle Lovett

The Only Kind of Spirituality I Have Any Interest In...

...so...as has been reflected here...I’ve been doing a lot of yoga...and a lot of meditation...and reading a lot about mindfulness...and have been writing about it...which might, in the eyes of some, make me a really spiritual dude...

...anyway, tonight, I went out and got really, really trashed...obnoxiously so, in fact...which, to some, might seem a bit of a contradiction...in fact, I’ve been known to see things that way, myself...walk the walk if you’re gonna talk the talk, as they say...

...truth be told, though, I really never meant to indicate that I’m into into any of this yoga or meditation or mindfulness shit because I’m any more spiritual or peaceful than anyone else....to the contrary it’s because I’m just as...if not more...fucked up as you are...

...and ultimately, this is the only kind of spirituality I have any interest in...the kind that says we’re all struggling...you, me, and the Dalai Lama...and we’re all trying, and we’re all worthy of compassion even as we fuck up...and no matter how many times we fuck up...and that, ultimately, that’s what that namaste thing people say at the end of yoga classes means...in addition to indicating that you can roll up your mat and go home...that we’re all worthy...that anybody’s as holy or sacred as anybody else...no matter what...no exceptions...whatever we believe in...or don’t...and however we might behave at any given time...

...and, with that, namaste to all...

*thanks to my blogger artist friend Ed T. gave me permission to use that Buddha image up there a long time ago*

This Cool Thich Nhat Hanh Quote I Found

...found this cool Thich Nhat Hanh quote, and almost immediately decided it was gonna be in the next Yoga for Cynics post....since then, have spent a helluva lotta time trying to write stuff to go with it...which hasn’t been working out so well...

...two nights ago, the weather changed, bringing cold, persistent rain, and an equally persistent pain in the forehead...and I wasn’t feeling all too motivated or inspired before that, either....so, then, maybe half an hour ago, decided to just use the quote, make it the entire post...but maybe throw in a photo so there’d at least be some original content...and, actually, found two I thought would work....one, of a flower, combined with the quote, would’ve ended up looking like a motivational poster...

...truth be told, I hate those things....better, I think, to be honestly negative than dishonestly positive....then, the other one, kind of a still life with my bare foot, would’ve come off more like one of those cynical demotivational posters that’ve been cropping up on the interwebs lately like fart jokes at a drunken wake...and that really wasn’t what I was going for, either....after all the postmodern irony of the past few decades, I sometimes wonder if we mightn’t need to be painfully sincere for at least an epoch or two to right the balance...though, admittedly, I’m not gonna be the one to start that movement...

...right now I’m lying on the floor...typing with one hand whilst my head rests on the other...really oughtta be getting to bed...but ate dinner too late...though that was the result of going to a jazz concert at the Art Museum...Sonny Fortune...used to play sax and flute with Miles Davis...which isn’t bad for a cold, rainy night...

...lately, I’ve been studying mindfulness...but I keep getting distracted...which is not to say that it isn’t all worthwhile...

If you truly want to be at peace, you must be at peace right now.
Thich Nhat Hanh

The Line Between Solitude and Loneliness Is Often Difficult to See

the line between us is so thin I might as well be you...
Robyn Hitchcock

We live as we dream, alone.
Joseph Conrad

...the line between solitude and loneliness is often difficult to see, and nearly impossible to map...in fact, it’s all too easy to spend much of a life stumbling and lurching along that line like a drunk pulled over at three in the morning, falling clumsily to one side or the other...

...kinda like the tug o’ war between belonging and standing out from the mass...the desire to fit in and the fear of denying, or even losing, parts of oneself, becoming smaller, or less than one could or wants to be....crammed into a narrow, proscribed mold for the sake of acceptance...like a puzzle piece, others pushing in on all sides, each in their own very narrow, form-fitted space, proscribed yet snug...no wiggle room, nowhere to move to...except, perhaps, for those along the edges, but they face the outside with straight, rigid borders...

...hmmm...not sure what I think of how that last metaphor ended up...don’t know if I agree with myself at all...

Any definition is a limit.
Wendell Berry

...yoga, they say, is something that encourages opening to every aspect of oneself...along with a radical acceptance of those around you....but any identity, including that of yogi can easily slide into only more dogmas and narrow roles...exclusive cliques based on brand names, beliefs, or hard butts...or the idea of being open and accepting...but that doesn’t mean it has to....words can have many definitions, some far more or less limiting than others...and maybe some can slip outside their definitions completely...


*this post started as a comment on Brooks’ aptly renamed Yogic Muse blog...and the artwork up there is by Liu Bolin...google 'im*

It's About Time

Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.
Steven Wright

Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world--and never will.
Mark Twain

... There are times I feel I'm new and different...like the past is just a series of harsh cocoons I’ve sloughed off...left in a pile I can sort through if necessary, but no more parts of my self right now than banana peels and apple rinds tossed in yesterday's compost...leaving me nothing to do but grow....and there are other times I feel like I’ve never left high school...or nursery school...or my first experience of unrequited love...or my second...or third...or tenth...or that gradual, mostly forgotten disillusionment that comes to all of us when we realize our parents aren’t actually omnipotent, omniscient, or even omnibenevolent...

...just as I was writing that, got a spam e-mail, advertising products meant to temporarily ease the downward pull of time on male sex organs...which, if I’m to believe the official date and time, was sent at 8:55 on September 3rd, 1938...

...a little while ago was in the car listening to some early Stones...Aftermath...that collection of classic rock n' roll riffs, bad vibes, crude misogyny, and angst released just in time to mark the birth of the late 60’s love generation...not to mention my own birth....and opening, on the American version, at least, with Paint It, Black...which has that legendary sitar riff, followed by Charlie Watts’ drums pounding like the heartbeat of someone nearly consumed by dark anxiety...and I can’t listen to it without thinking about just how goddamn good it ain’t easy facing up when your whole world is black sounded when I was sixteen...which, at this point, makes the song a refreshing reminder of how much better right now is than those fabled best years of my life....and how, all in all, my thirties were better, if less exciting, than my twenties...as my twenties, for all their problems, were almost infinitely better than my teens...so, though my forties haven't been without difficulties so far, they still have a long way to go, and I seem to be on an upward slide...

The Cat Story

...was sitting a couple mornings ago...doin’ that daily meditation thing...been pretty good about keeping that up these past three months or so....anyway, the landlady’s cat, Zeke, started meowing like crazy on the stairs just below my door...telling me he wanted to go out...but I couldn’t help him...not at that moment...because I’d just started...had nearly half an hour to go...and I’m trying to be somewhat disciplined about this...so, I kept sitting there...for a minute or so...then two...and the cat kept it up, too...until, suddenly, it occurred to me...wow...I’m using meditation as an excuse to be less compassionate...and I got up, opened the door, went downstairs, and let the cat outside...

Containing Multitudes...

...full disclosure: though technically a native of the big city, where I lived until just before my fourth birthday, when the family moved to the country...which can’t be blamed for being so quickly and easily swallowed by intractable forces of urban blight, white flight, and omni-ravenous sprawl...I am, in the end, one of that peculiarly modern tribe often held up as representative of just about everything wrong with American life today...a suburbanite...

...though, given the state of lonely misery in which my formative suburban years were largely spent, at least I can attest to never having been a very good one...


...for a long time, identified as a country mouse...and a rather militant one, at that...at one point, living amidst the screaming multitudes with their noise, anger, fear, and madness exploding it seemed on every corner of Boston or San Francisco, wrote a short story describing the tall buildings as tombstones for the forests, meadows, and multitudinous life they replaced...concluding with an ominous yet, to my mind, optimistic rumbling...

...and, in time, did my best to get away...backpacked all over the Rockies and southwestern deserts, lived in cabins, trailers and tents...hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine....and all that was certainly good...the fresh air, the trees, and the peaceful feeling I still can get tromping along a trail through the woods...but there was always some element of escape in it...of needing to run away from people...dreaming, at my worst, of a day when I’d never have to see anybody, except on periodic supply runs...

...so, the gradual emergence of the city mouse came as a surprise...as, kicking back in northern Arizona, I found myself longing for live music, bookstores, museums, and that strangely vibrant feeling of walking-down-the-sidewalk, life’s machinery rushing by at a sometimes frightening pace on one side, tall, deep, and unmoving on the other...the dance of diversity and discord, with its near-infinite commingling and conflicts...of which, it must be confessed, I am an inextricable part...

Thoughts Swimmin' By Like Dolphins

...ever try to take pictures of dolphins from the beach? by the time ya hit the button, they’re gone...so, then, ya start pointing the camera in the general area where you saw them and start clicking, hoping one will appear, and maybe even jump, at just the right moment...which doesn’t usually work so well, either...but, at least you can end up with some nice shots of water...

...my car inspection’s due this week...and it’s gonna cost me a bundle...including the annual couple hundred bucks necessary to make the check engine light go off...only to come back on a week later, and stay on until I fork over another couple hundred dollars next year....I’m thinking about pointing out that I live in the eternal now...so the distinction between this year and last year doesn’t mean anything....somehow, though, I doubt ya can get an inspection sticker with now on it...

...a lotta people’ve been pissed off lately...and not just at town halls and the MTV Awards....I’m talkin’ about the mellow incense-scented environs of the yoga blogosphere, where fierce and sometimes hurtful arguments about corporate sponsorship, lascivious gurus, and the relative merits of divinity and solid abs seem to be poppin' up like poison ivy in a Zen garden....as an ongoing effort to be more compassionate and understanding, and hence less combative, is an essential part of my whole yoga practice thingy, I try to keep out of the fray...at least when the argument’s about yoga...though even that can sometimes be difficult as a one armed handstand...like, sometimes, people are so lacking in compassion and understanding I just feel like smackin’ ‘em upside the head...but I don’t...so that’s at least a start...

...I’ve been told there’s an equivalent to the Golden Rule in every major religious or ethical system...which attests to the fact that people in every society throughout history have needed to be reminded not to act like assholes...and, in the end, there’s really not much to do but keep trying...and try not to be to hard on yourself for not always acting like Gandhi...particularly since, as his biographers can attest, Gandhi didn’t always act like Gandhi, either...

After the Equinox

still life drifting past
the autumnal equinox,
and I just can’t deal

...got done what absolutely had to get done, put everything else off ‘til next week...whether that was wise or not...got in the car after dark and drove east...crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge a little after ten, getting to the ocean some time after midnight...all to wet toes in salt water before sleeping...

alone by the sea
except for that young couple
fucking in the sand

It Can Take a Long, Long Time

It’s so easy to slip, it’s so easy to fall
and let your memory drift and do nothing at all...
Lowell George

...life is more an art than a science.
Ganga White

reading yoga books
listening to Miles Davis
and sipping red wine

...have had a relatively steady daily meditation practice for the past few months...after many failed attempts over the years...and suspect my relative success this time is due, largely, to ignoring most of what I’ve read or been taught...for now simply working on the ability to sit still and resist temptations to go and do something else...

I practice compassion towards friends and enemies

but all these motherfuckers tryin’ to hate on my serenity...
Arj Barker

...and yet, somehow, even with all this meditation and yoga, everybody’s pissing me off lately...particularly myself...but everybody else, too...excluding, of course, people who read this blog...usually...and, of course, I’m far more bothered by people who don’t...who, clearly, have failed to study the ancient and revered Yoga Cynic Sutras sufficiently...particularly Sutra 53.657: Those who do not read the Yoga for Cynics blog* will endure one billion incarnations as dung beetles**...but that's really not my point...

...ancient wisdom (fake and otherwise) aside, pissed-offness doesn’t come from nowhere...and only festers when pushed back in...though tending to breed when let out in company...so it’s gotta be faced, and dealt with...which can take a long, long time...namaste for now...

* The use of the word blog in this sutra, millennia before the invention of the internet, has made interpretation quite difficult for scholars. Until recently, the term was usually loosely translated as harsh etchings on rocks.

** Various third, fourth, and fifth century commentaries (as well as a couple of sixth century commentaries, but they’re crap) point out that the billion incarnations refers only to those who fail to read the blog at all. Those who read it occasionally average far fewer dung beetle incarnations. Regular readers, of course, are rarely more than a post or two away from transcending form completely and becoming Floating Glowing Beings of Pure Love...

It'd Be a Lot Easier to Find Lost Glasses If You Could See Clearly

...it’d be a lot easier to find lost glasses if you could see clearly....that’s gotta be a perfect analogy for something...

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
William Blake

...bought an unlimited pass at a local yoga studio and ended up going to twenty-five classes in a month...concluding this past Saturday...which brought up a number of insights, including: that’s a helluva lotta yoga classes...

It is by riding a bicycle that you learn the contours of a country best, since you have to sweat up the hills and coast down them. Thus you remember them as they actually are...
Ernest Hemingway

...Sunday morning biked sixty-five miles...pre-coffee...fifty of them as part of this Bike Philly thing...which I joined in support of some of the women-in-recovery I work with...though they did the more intelligent and mostly flat ten or twenty mile routes instead of the knee-breakingly hilly fifty...plus another fifteen or so getting there and back...which also involved a really big hill...bringing on thoughts like: that’s a helluva lotta biking...

...not that there's anything to complain about in any of this...'cause there really isn't...

How You React...

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
Epictetus

...a long dry summer ending, finally...at Hemlock Lake, down a brutally steep, glacier-carved hill from the trailer I was officially living in for the summer, water was so low it created a beach you could walk along for miles, into areas you couldn’t normally get to easily...saw a bald eagle, maybe three or four miles in, resting on a branch maybe twenty feet above...

...actually for most of July and August lived an hour north of there, at a friend’s house in Rochester...matters professional, personal, and really really personal having unleashed something that had been bubbling underneath for a long time...leaving pristine isolation too frightening to deal with....then, the same could be said for life in general, but that wasn’t quite as easy to get away from...put the dissertation on hold, along with some bad habits, got into yoga for the first time, and that, along with therapy, and the wonders of modern psychopharmacology, seemed to help...but only so much...

...apparently was feeling better somewhat, enough to be back at the trailer that morning, if getting ready to head into town for a few days...had a writing center meeting that afternoon, a class to teach to medical students...Liquor, Drugs, and Literature...came up with the title and course content myself...and was looking forward to picking up a copy of the new Bob Dylan CD, Love and Theft, released that morning....phone rang as I was walking out the door...my mom...asked if I knew what was happening...which I didn’t...

...everything was cancelled, but I drove to town, anyway...spent the afternoon at a friend’s house...nursing a migraine, she kept watching the news, while another friend puked in the bathroom...I took her dog for a walk...it was just another day to him...got stopped by a T.V. crew...said I thought it was important to be absolutely sure who was responsible before talking about striking back at anybody...or something...never saw it, but a couple people who did told me they appreciated whatever I said....gotta admit, there was some comfort that day in knowing everybody else felt as fucked up inside as I did...

We begin where we are and how we are, and whatever happens, happens.
T.K.V. Desikachar

...was going to yoga classes with a guy named Francois Raoult...great teacher as long as you appreciated his sense of humor....was wondering, hoping he was gonna mellow us all out somehow...lull us into some cosmic mellow head space far removed from all that... tell us it was all ephemeral, and didn’t matter, anyway...and actually make us believe that...

...instead, he said something to the effect that there were, in fact, very legitimate reasons for the anxiety we were all feeling...but that didn’t mean we should let it paralyze us, or prevent us from functioning...

...and that was the key...no mystical la-la land to escape to...nothing to do but deal with exactly whatever it is was we had to deal with...

shanti shanti shanti

Early Morning Haiku

hammering next door

momentarily blocked out

by the garbage truck

It's All About Balance

...went to a wedding night before last and woke up yesterday morning more hungover than I’ve been in years...two parts 7-Up, two parts champagne, and a whole lotta Southern Comfort makes a helluva fruit punch...then back to yoga class in the evening...it’s all about balance...

...last wedding I went to was a little over a year ago...two hours and three lengthy dissertations on the proper godly nature of marriage...some people these days think they can redefine marriage, but you can’t redefine marriage, God decreed what marriage is...man on the top, woman—having blown her chance at self-determination in the Garden of Eden—meek and submissive on the bottom...guy behind me let out a deep MMHHH! of spiritual satisfaction every time his inherent mastery over womankind was extolled....and these, I thought, are my relatives...

...this time, just over the bridge from West Mt. Airy, State of Caffeinated Reverie, U.S.A., two young cousins of the bride determined who would read vows first by rock-paper-scissors...and, in a spirited mélange of Quaker meeting and Jewish ritual, journal reading and storytelling, nods to Chagall and classical ballet, and quite a bit of heartfelt creative anarchy, the deed was done....and this, I thought, is where I live now...

...for Sarah and Jason...long life & happiness...