A Totally Marvin Gaye State of Mind

talk to me so you can see what’s goin’ on...
Marvin Gaye

...back in Philly in a totally Marvin Gaye state of mind...not tragic coked-up, shot-by-his-own-dad Marvin Gaye...mellow, spiritual, socially conscious What’s Going On Marvin Gaye...if at all possible, you should listen to that album while reading this post...as I am while writing it...flying high in the friendly skies, never leaving the ground...

...I’m a lot poorer...financially...than before leaving for the ol’ yoga retreat en Mexico thingy...couldn’t really afford it in the first place, and then the passport fiasco ultimately cost me...never mind...plus, my ipod pretty much got wiped by an inopportune wave as I wandered along through the sand listening to the Harder They Come soundtrack...trying yet again to see how close to Guatemala I could get...miles and miles of walking showing nothing ahead but long green coastline...but, in the end, that’s okay...I may not have turned into a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love...but I’m alright...

...and aaaaaall he asks of us is that we give each other love...one thing not said enough among those doing sun salutations in tropical paradises like Tulum is that, rustic as thatch-roofed cabanas and pipes that can’t handle toilet paper might seem, these paradises tend to be located in the third world, where such adventures-in-living-simply represent levels of luxury most of the locals couldn’t imagine...except from the perspective of service labor....when pondering how much to tip, it might be a good idea to repeat to oneself the following mantra: this hardworking person probably makes less in a year than I’m paying for this week-long vacation...

...what’s happenin’ brother?...much as I love to complain...and I truly do...the truth is that I live an amazingly charmed life...and it’s important to remember that...namaste...right on, feel it...

Mercy Mercy Me (Further Notes From Exile)

Pressure drop, oh pressure, pressure gonna drop on you...
Toots & the Maytals

...the Caribbean’s been kinda funny this week...not its usual placid self...incredibly windy, with waves that’ve wiped out whole sections of beach in the short time I’ve been here, battered sea walls, and, a night or two ago, caused a concrete deck to collapse down the beach, leaving these giant tree-pole-thatched-umbrella things lying in the sand....if it were always this way, I wonder if this region might’ve given the world hardcore and thrash-metal instead of reggae and calypso...

One minute after dozing, I thought that I was blazing,

My blood it was a boiling, I said it was amazing...
Peter Tosh

...a couple days ago, the sea puked up mounds of seaweed, detritus, and lots and lots of plastic trash all up and down the beach...unpleasant, certainly...then, maybe one root of our ecological crisis is that we don’t see our waste enough...we put it in plastic bags, put the bags in plastic cans, take the cans out to the street, and it’s gone...we think we’re “green” or “eco-conscious” because we dispose of our massive quantities of factory-synthesized products and seemingly limitless non-recyclable and generally completely unnecessary product packaging responsibly....who among us, in our unspeakably wasteful modern lifestyles, isn’t just asking to get barfed on by the ocean?

Oil wasted on the oceans and upon our seas, fish full of mercury,
Oh, mercy mercy me, oh, things ain't what they used to be...
Marvin Gaye

...of course, if I wanted to be a totally pretentious yoga dude...which, of course, I don’t...I could also use this as a metaphor for those mindwaves Patanjali talks about stilling in the Yoga Sutras (in some translations, at least)....first, ya gotta let ‘em rage...let ‘em spit up whatever trash is in there...bring it out to be seen....in the end, hiding your trash never works...it always winds up spread out all over the beach when ya least expect it...

The Cynical Yoga Blogger in Exile

...trapped on the Mexican Riviera...dreaming of someday returning to the land of my birth as, forlorn, I wander la playa, toes licked by the cooling waters of the Caribbean...thinking about getting some more of those enchiladas de mole and perhaps a margarita for lunch...but meager consolation in the sad life of an exile...ever longing for a home country that remains out of reach...un hombre sin pais...identificacion perdido...tears water my keyboard as I peer out the window of my thatch-roofed cabana at the pellucid blue waves and swaying palm trees...okay, admittedly, as exiles go, I’m not exactly Solzhenitsyn...

...nonetheless, a week ago today, my passport disappeared somewhere between customs and the Coconut Bar at the Cancun airport...necessitating a series of $95 each way cab rides between Tulum and Cancun and a Kafkaesque obstacle course of desks, forms, and fees...and that was just the first of two necessary visits to the open-on-occasion U.S. consulate in Cancun...in the end, realizing there was no way to fulfill the goals of my yoga retreat and still be allowed back into the country of my birth on schedule...like, I should be home, now, and yet that Caribbean wind keeps blowing through my window and my shaggy sun-bleached hair...

...as you might imagine, this did at first have a bit of a negative effect on my quest for inner peace and self-realization...but not, in the long run, much of one...in fact, like the ear infection I had last year, I think it might’ve been useful, in a roundabout sense...the angst it brought up keeping me out of la-la land...at least enough to allow for a certain continuity...to where daily life flows in and out instead of being escaped from...

...listen, everybody loves orgasms...orgasms are great...the more the better...but the fact is that they don’t last very long and most of the time...for the vast, vast majority of moments in your life...you’re simply not having one...and a yoga retreat, anyway, is not an orgasm...

...guess that’s obvious...but, anyway, the point is shouldn’t be one...though, yeah, if you offered me a week long orgasm in Mexico, I’d certainly take it...

...the point, though, is continuity, and applicability...am I just getting blissed out and then going home to the same old shit or am I in some way going forward?...is personal transformation happening in any meaningful sense or is it more like Bruce Banner turning into the Hulk and then going right back to being Bruce Banner...except his clothes are all ripped up...except the part of his pants around the crotch...even though pants are generally tightest around the belt, and, when they get too tight, the button at the waist’s the first thing that goes, somehow the Hulk’s privates always remaining private?

...this is a terrible analogy...and I’ve lost it, anyway....I’m talking about the distinction between coming here and being mellow and hugging everybody and sharing my deepest inner torments and listening with interest and compassion to everybody else’s inner torments and generally being blissed out and then going home and being as depressed and anxious and indecisive as before, and doing all that shit and then actually having it carry over in some way...which is not to say it didn’t at all last time, but there was a pretty big chasm in between...ultimately, Mellow, Centered Tropical Yoga Retreat Dr. Jay needs to be accessible even when not on a yoga retreat, or he’s really not worth much...

Floating Glowing Beings of Pure Love

Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh (originally titled Night Filled with Floating Glowing Beings of Pure Love) (would I lie to ya?)

The first word in this song is discorporate.
It means to leave your body.
Frank Zappa

...two days ‘til the yoga retreat...as before any trip, I’m worrying about stuff going wrong...last year, the plane I was supposed to be flying had a cracked window...thanks to a piece of wing breaking off and hitting it on the way up from Miami...had to wait eight hours for another plane to arrive from London...this year I put in a request for Sullenberger, but the airline couldn’t make any guarantees...

...but what about the inherent problems in things potentially going too well? What if I become too enlightened? What if I discorporate completely and end up a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love?

...yeah, yeah, I know what they say...

Before enlightenment chop wood and carry water.
After enlightenment, chop wood and carry water.
Wu Li

...but ya never know...

...in working with addicts, it should be a bonus...who needs cocaine or heroin when you’ve got a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love on call?...for dedicated readers of Yoga for Cynics, however, the question will be: can a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love maintain a blog? Does a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love have the tangible digits necessary to manipulate a computer keyboard?

...of course, with or without new posts, visiting this blog will be highly beneficial, as it will likely carry kinda the opposite of a virus...all e-mails, tweets, etc. received on affected computers will be filled with kindness, good tidings, and boundless affection....please note, however, that web browsers could have trouble accessing racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise hateful or disempowering content...not that they can’t...they just won’t want to...

...then, should I remain in corporeal, generally unenlightened form, never mind....the next post’ll be up by April’s Fool’s day...

Questions to Meditate On...Or Not...

This is the third Yoga for Cynics post in the past week or so that’s featured the word not prominently in the title—could my need for this yoga retreat in Mexico thingy be any more stark?

In the immortal words of Neil Young: tell me why is it hard to make arrangements with yourself when you’re old enough to re-paint but young enough to sell?

What the hell does that mean?

Before Mexico, I’m taking a shorter trip...to New York City....could anything be more appropriate before a yoga retreat than a visit to the world capital of angst?

In the words of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: work and work for love and sex, ain’t you hungry for success success success success? Does it matter?

Are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards people you'd normally turn to for a critique of materialism?

Is to be or not to be really the question?

Why is a person with love considered a loser in tennis?

Is it possible to snort crystal meth mindfully?

Do you think there are people who fantasize about masturbation during sex?

Written in a shelter register on the Appalachian Trail in a very wet month of May, 1992: if April showers bring May flowers, what do May showers bring?

In the words of a guy named “Rudi” in Stephen Cope’s The Wisdom of Yoga: in the end, we all have to write our own scriptures, don’t we?

Not living in the here and now at all...

...in less than a week and a half, I’m gonna be on a yoga retreat on the Caribbean Coast of Mexico...sleeping in a thatched roof cabana on the beach, most likely barefoot all week...gettin’ very very mellow...in the very place where this blog was kinda conceived...though I didn’t realize it’d been conceived for some time after that...then, isn’t that how it usually goes with conception?...hmmm...seem to be getting into that weird birth imagery again...then, a couple of certifiable women left comments to the effect that it was okay the last time....less acceptable, perhaps, is the fact that the yoga retreat is my latest excuse for not living in the here and now but instead grumpily counting down the days until I’m gone...not as bad as killing for peace, but in the same rhetorical neighborhood...

...for the trip last year, got this cheesy cheap little travel alarm clock that, as it turned out, made considerably less noise than the waves and birds...so, having arrived late the night before, I wake up to see that I’ve already missed the first half of the morning meditation thing...and, having promptly thrown shorts and a t-shirt on and run over, I see that everybody else is there...lookin’ like totally serious yogis....the yoga retreat’s barely started, and I’m already blowing it...yeah, it took me a little while to get into that yoga retreat state of mind...

...at the end of the retreat, having hugged everybody and gotten all touchy-feely for the last time, I headed for the airport, where I was promptly asked if I’d give up my seat, enjoy a free night at the Cancun Hyatt, and fly out the next day....as it turned out, I didn’t think going back to Philly that day was the best idea, anyway...

...some time later, having downed a number of rather large margaritas, I found myself in a hot-tub behind a gigantic hotel...listening to Peter Tosh on my ipod and trying to explain the concept of a yoga retreat to these two dudes from LA with pot leaf necklaces and somewhat incongruous Mardi Gras beads...we gotta find ourselves some sluts, they said, throwing into stark relief just how far I’d come in a few short hours...later, back in Philly, my friend Kara said I bet right then, in another hot tub at another hotel in Cancun, there were two women saying 'we gotta find ourselves some assholes!’...and she could be right...

Plunge

...not far from where I live, there’s a place informally known as the dog beach...just a small stretch of rocks and mud along the banks of legendary Wissahickon Creek, where denizens of West Mt. Airy, state of mild late-winter ennui, USA take their dogs to swim....was sitting on an old stone fence by there a couple days ago and watching this guy throwing a stick in the creek for his black lab to chase...the way the dog plunged into the water as soon as the stick was thrown, every ounce of weight and strength and monomaniacal purpose directed toward the goal, regardless of whatever stood or flowed between...sheer propulsion refusing to accommodate or even acknowledge water as something separate...oblivious to all else...fully engaged, entirely focused...every fiber of dog pluuuuuuuunging deep...to the extent that dog was inextricable from plunge...and me thinking when did I last plunge like that into anything?

...when the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published, there was no author named on the title page...just a drawing of a casually dressed guy with a beard on the page facing...however, anyone willing to plunge deep into the first long poem, Song of Myself, got to Section 24 and found Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son...a poet plunged so deeply into his own poem that he emerges, briefly, as a specific individual with a name and place he's from, if also everything, only halfway through...

Shuffling Through the Chaos

I used to be lost in the shuffle. Now I just shuffle along with the lost.
Anonymous (but quoted by somebody in my high school yearbook)

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.
Bob Dylan

Carolyn, the legendary laughing yogini, was kind enough to give this humble blog an award, referring to it as a "reality” yoga blog, and praising it for being honest and funny....to plagiarize my own comment on her blog, which I hope she’ll forgive me for (nobody said anything about being original)...I think reality, honesty, and humor go hand in hand...humorlessness pretty much requires you to impose a strict and all encompassing order on reality, denying absurdity...while humor is about looking at absurdity and saying if ya can't beat it, join it....

...of course one thing about absurdity is it’s hard to identify...I mean, just because something doesn’t make sense to me, that doesn’t necessarily make it absurd...though it might make me a bit absurd if it’s something everybody else seems to understand...which seems to be the case an awful lot of the time...

...I’m not really into the transmigration of souls thing...generally far more interested in finding out if there’s really life before death...nonetheless, I’ve read the Tibetan Book of the Dead...and suspect that if there really is a bardo...a place in between lives...there’s gotta be some kinda Bardo State College where they offer courses like How to Be a Functioning Human Being 101...and, if so, I must’ve been sitting in the back of the classroom drawing pictures in the margins of my notebook when I should've been paying attention, particularly during lectures like How to Make Sense of Other Human Beings...then, looking around, it appears at least I wasn’t alone back there...

...the things I do understand that a lot of people don’t tend to be unanswerable questions...or questions with so many conflicting answers that you certainly can’t come to anything like a definite conclusion ...except to say that there isn’t one...and that’s where I tend to be good...I get that both a and b are kind of true and kind of false and kind of neither...confusion is kinda like the air that I breathe...which might actually be a good thing...and a bad thing...and neither...

Not Saying Anything

Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
















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Falling Apart Like Poorly Molded Jello

we continue to be born every minute
Thich Nhat Hanh

he not busy bein' born is busy dyin'

Bob Dylan

...I try to reinvent myself constantly...or maybe it just happens, whether I want it to or not...either way, it's harder than it looks...particularly since any particular invented self tends to be hard to see...and starts to wobble and fall apart like poorly molded jello when I try to poke at it a little...to make sure it’s actually there...substance is most certainly elusive...though parts do seem to get stuck at times...feel a bit too solid and unmalleable...as such, it’s hard to know exactly what I’m working with...or, perhaps more to the point, who’s doing the working in the first place...

That Nelson Mandela Quote

...that Nelson Mandela quote in that last post had been sitting in my YogaforCynicsworking file for some time...that file’s kinda the womb of this blog....are you comfortable with me using that kind of metaphor?....I’m not...so I won’t do it again...anyway, I’d meant to bring it up when I had something more to say about the subject...without sounding preachy...

...there was something I wrote about a year and a half ago...just some personal writing...would never end up in a public forum...and that's a good thing...I charted a kind of emotional autobiography in the form of a kind of bar graph...yeah, I find strange ways to spend my time...a timeline at the top and then, along the side, seven levels of happiness and misery: 1) Nirvana 2) Life is good 3) Life’s okay, and I’m pretty optimistic about it getting better 4) Mid-line: life’s bearable 5) Life kinda sucks, but not too bad if I can keep myself entertained 6) Life sucks 7) Hell...

...the bar graph fell apart, and I started writing things out...like Seventh grade: big fat 7...and elaborated...writing out names, with four letter words as a kind of punctuation soon giving away to flat-out hatred and damnation...rage and hatred pouring onto the page...and it was rush...got me pretty wired, in fact...did a bit of yoga to try and mellow myself out...and then, unbidden, started thinking of other experiences...when I’d been nasty...cruel... inexcusably vicious...caring about nothing apart from making sure that whoever I was dealing with would feel as bad as I did...and I felt like shit...and then it occurred to me that if you don’t wanna hate yourself, you can’t hate anybody else either....that’s been recounted here before, but it seems worth mentioning again....

...another interesting realization was that my 20’s—in between spectacular backpacking trips...and other kinds of trips...were a pretty miserable time, while my boring studious 30’s weren’t bad...not so many good stories, but some good friends, mellow good times, and a lot fewer mornings mumbling fuck upon opening my eyes...which says something about spectacular experiences...they’re cool, but, ultimately, it’s the day to day life that counts...

...and that goes for hatred, as well....it’s way too easy to declare yourself an irredeemable asshole because, after so much yoga and meditation, you’ve failed to turn into a glowing floating being of pure love...on numerous occasions in the recent past yelling at friends and family, giving the finger to people on the street, fantasizing about doing horrible things to inexplicably popular talk radio personalities...not that I’ve done any of that stuff myself....

...the important question is: what’re ya gonna do now?