Random Acts of...Something

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines...
Walt Whitman

...some years ago was teaching this advanced-level college writing class...the head of the department said nobody was really sure what the course was supposed to be, and they were planning on discontinuing it after that year...which meant, basically, I could do whatever I wanted with it...

...I encouraged the students to write in unconventional ways...about whatever they felt like...which, for many of them, turned out to be stuff that was highly personal...sometimes shockingly so...

...one wrote about her relationship with her boyfriend...specifically their sex life...I don’t remember the details, though apparently something in her boyfriend’s behavior, as she described it, was so revolting it inspired me to write this guy sounds like an asshole in the margin...which was incredibly unprofessional, not to mention rude, so I promptly scribbled it out...

...my rule, when taking back a comment on a student paper, is to obliterate it...leave nothing but a black smudge...but, this time, apparently, it remained legible...

...not that I was aware of that, at the time...in fact, forgot all about the paper, and the student, until a year or so later when, in a different town, teaching at a different school, I got a letter with her name at the top of the return address...figured she was probably looking for a recommendation...

...opened the envelope to find a card with a Stieglitz photo and a Whitman quote...see above...

...along with a completely unexpected litany of thank you’s...for some reason, she said, she’d felt comfortable writing about her experience in my class...and, in the process of writing, and reading my asshole remark, along with whatever else I wrote (which I don’t remember at all), came to realize she was in an abusive relationship...which led to her getting out of it...

...she said I’d made a difference with her...and her letter made quite a difference with me...

...and yet, when I consciously try to change the world, very little seems to come of it...

...so...do you think it's possible to practice random kindness and senseless acts of beauty by calling somebody an asshole?

Meanderings of a Cloud Stalking Moron

I’m set free, to find a new illusion...
Lou Reed

...had a dream a couple nights ago...was in this place kinda like a cross between a yoga retreat and a mental institution...of course, I’ve been on yoga retreats, but not in mental institutions...but it had that institutional look...very clean and orderly...quiet...no incense, Mexican blankets, or electric kirtan music...but also no bars or institutional smells...lots of well tended greenery to be seen through the windows...no bars or anything...and that mellow happy yoga retreat vibe...wanted to call some friends to come and join me, but didn’t know how to contact them from there...and how do you invite people to a yoga mental institution, anyway?

Don't play what's there, play what's not there...
Miles Davis

...was watching Lost In Translation...which I love mostly because the most important line in the movie, spoken by Bill Murray into Scarlett Johannson’s ear, is inaudible....there’s also a major sex scene that never happens...which, I think, makes it one of the more unexpected and interesting sex scenes in recent cinema...

...it’s all about balance, right?...lately, I’ve gotten so many blog awards and kind mentions in other people’s blogs I’ve forgotten to mention them all...thanks for the award, Yogadawg...and Melinda and Holly for the nice words...

...apparently in the interests of maintaining some kind of cosmic symmetry beyond my feeble comprehension, however, in the past few days this blog has been beset with a veritable flurry of negative comments...some attempts at constructive criticism, I think...some not so much...cloud stalking moron would probably fit into the second category...but I kinda liked it, anyway...

The Better Bogart Within

...life can be lonely and sad sometimes...but you know that already...so I’ll move on to another topic...

It's still the same old story
A fight for love and glory
A case of do or die...
Herman Hupfield (as sung by Dooley Wilson)

...there’s this guy...crusty, bitter, cynical...concerned with nobody but himself...corrupt...mercenary...but, underneath all that, though he himself refuses to admit it...might not even know it...he's still an idealist, a romantic...caring...full of love and compassion...when the chips are down, downright heroic....Clive Owen played him a few years ago in Children of Men...Harrison Ford in Star Wars...Paul Newman and Jack Nicholson a couple times each...though nobody as often...or nearly as well...as Bogart...

...watching Casablanca on a tired, rainy evening...can relate to Bogart’s Rick...the ugly attitude and bottomless bottle of booze...not about to stick his neck out for anybody...turning away from the young woman desperate for his help with a terse nobody ever loved me that much...certainly far easier to see oneself in than Paul Henreid’s Laszlo with his apparently bottomless sense of purpose, courage, virtue, and understanding...

...but, of course, Rick’s better self emerges...he helps the girl and, in the end, sacrifices his own happiness for a higher purpose, leaving corrupt Casablanca behind to rejoin the cause, somewhere out in the desert...even inspiring Claude Rains’ gleefully corrupt and amoral Captain Renault to join him...

...I think maybe the yoga thing is kinda like a Bogart movie...about working through the hard, crusty exterior shell...the outer Bogart...freeing the better Bogart within...

...but, y’know...without the cigarettes...and, preferably, without shooting anybody...and, no, I can’t really imagine Bogart doing downward facing dog...so, maybe it’s not a perfect metaphor...ah well....guess we’ll always have Paris...

Stuff That's In the Way

...went out to take pictures of a sunset a week or so ago...like people with cameras and artsy-fartsy pretensions do...was kinda frustrated by the opportunities offered by my neighborhood for a good clear wide-open cloudscape...too many things in the way of open sky...so, walked around a bit trying to find a better vantage point....then, looking at the photos last night, ended up deciding the ones I liked best were those with the most interference...

...in the end, we’re always somewhere...always someone...always immersed in context...much as we might, sometimes, like it to be otherwise...

To say we are all God is well and good, but not at the cost of denying our humanity with all its seeming foibles.
Joel Kramer/Diana Alstad

...a week or two ago, got up Saturday morning, did some yoga and meditated, then went kayaking with a friend on a lake I’d forgotten was such a short drive away, then lay on a float in a pool reading a book on mindfulness...and, a bit later, started a completely pointless argument with people I care about...

There are no holy places and no holy people, only holy moments, only moments of wisdom.
Jack Kornfield


...in sixth grade, we read this story by Ray Bradbury...about a shoe store owner and a kid who wants a pair of sneakers but can’t afford to pay for them...the kid pleads, talks about what it would mean to him to have the sneakers, evoking antelopes and gazelles and, for a moment, kinda bringing back the shoe store guy’s own lost youth....in the end, they make a deal...the kid can have them but will have to work off the cost...the kid says thanks, and the shoe store guy says something like you’ve given me so much more...which, the teacher explained, referred to the kid giving his time to work in the store after school...which struck me, even then, as an incredibly shallow reading....up to that point, I’d had disagreements with teachers...but they generally involved matters of behavior....that, I think, was the first time I realized that teachers can’t always be trusted to understand what they’re teaching...

...though, of course, just how clueless a teacher can be didn’t quite hit me 'til I became one myself...

The Body Electric

...have always had a kinda vexed relationship with technology...I mean, without modern antibiotics I’d at least be deaf, if not dead...and have trouble imagining life without the Daily Show or cinnamon Pop Tarts...even if the fruits of our busy modern minds seem to be driving humanity off a cliff at alarming speed...

...and I’m kinda doubting the planet’s gonna miss us much...

...but I'm thinking right now of one of the few true miracles of today's technology...rising above petty concerns with its awe-inspiring amalgamation of essential utility and general really really goodness...if, at times, horribly misused...even for ghastly and near-unspeakable atrocities (particularly during the 80’s)...nonetheless, a modern wonder and sign of the highest capabilities and dreams of the human species...

...of course I’m talking about the electric guitar...

...heard about that yoga & music festival out in California...at first thought it sounded cool...like a yoga Woodstock...sadhana and rock n’ roll swirling together like chocolate and peanut butter...

...then, lookin’ at pictures, gotta say it just looked a bit too...yogic...too peaceful...just too fuckin’ healthy...

...don’t get me wrong, I’m totally into the yoga thing...the inner peace thing...the living healthy thing...the meditation and asana thing...but, wonderful as it is to spend time at yoga retreats and ashrams...it's not exactly rock n' roll...

...which is okay...it probably shouldn't be...but still can’t help thinkin’ there’s gotta be a place for danger...recklessness...dancing with chaos...it’s better to burn out than it is to rust...let fury have the hour, anger can be power...even honey, I’m the world’s forgotten boy, the one who’s searchin’, searchin’ to destroy... *

...but, maybe that's just me...

*Neil Young, Joe Strummer, Iggy Pop, respectively...

...in memory of Les Paul, 1915-2009...

Seven Veils

...Yoga for Cynics is once again feelin’ the blog love...with a whopping three (3) (III) blog awards coming to its lowly self from a trio of vastly superior...okay, I’ll cut the self-loathing/false humility...also-really-good bloggers...Roseanne of It’s All Yoga, Baby, Brooks of Yoga, the Mind and Culture, and Eco Yogini of...ummm...Eco Yogini...

...as is probably clear to anyone who’s read this blog for a while, I’m not so good with rules...like, for instance, I actually do know how to write complete, properly punctuated sentences...but don’t...nonetheless, I think there was something about seven things...

1)...which reminds me of that obscure Bob Dylan song Seven Curses which is totally stolen from at least one old folk song...or at least retells a classic folktale...also appropriated, at various times, by Leadbelly, Led Zeppelin, and the Marquis de Sade...about a young girl who agrees to sleep with a crusty old judge if he’ll spare her father’s life, only to wake in the morning to find out that the judge lied, and her father’s been hung after all...and it ends with seven curses on a judge so cruel...which are that one doctor cannot save him, that two healers cannot heal him, that three eyes cannot see him, that four ears cannot hear him, that five walls cannot hide him, that six diggers cannot bury him, and that seven deaths shall never kill him...

2)...I realize that the previous entry wasn’t about me, and in fact had nothing to do with anything other than the number seven, and will try harder with the rest...

3)...had a weird sensation in yoga class, doing bridge pose, with eyes closed...felt strangely small...which, in the way people generally use the expression feeling small doesn’t sound so good...but it’s different when one tends to think of oneself as large and ungainly...

4)...ironically enough, it often seems that those who are most nostalgic and resistant to change have miserable pasts...which, I suspect grows from of a feeling that something essential was lost back then...and that, the further away then gets, the less chance there is to retrieve it...

5)...my first attempt at a blog was called It’s Rough Inside Your Head...its name something a shrink said to me once, after I’d gotten her completely exasperated by expertly shooting down every attempt she made to get me to think about my life in a more positive way...as such, the blog, which I think I wrote four posts for, never telling anybody about its existence and then killing it when I started this one, some time later, was an outpouring of unreserved vitriol about whatever pissed me off so much I felt I had to express it but couldn’t in most social circumstances for fear of offending or frightening people...

6)...was actually planning on digging out some sample paragraph or two from that unmourned virtual entity...but, somehow, in between the laptop it was created on and the one I’m typing on now, the file that stuff was saved on seems to have been lost...

7)...the goal of this blog, on the other hand...or, at least, one I can think of right now...is to try and cultivate somewhat more open, less combative aspects...not to deny those other parts, but, virtually, at least, to create a relatively peaceful, quiet space where they can be allowed to rest for a while...like a yoga practice, but in words...kinda...

Livin' With the Earth...Kinda...

...when my brother was applying to med. school, I went over his application essay...including a sentence that began growing up on a farm,...I commented in the margin are you sure you grew up on a farm and not two and a half acres in the outer suburbs with a father who raised some goats and chickens as a hobby?...he changed it to small farm...

...in college years was what you might call an eco-hippie...raised money for Greenpeace and the Rainforest Action Network...recycled before everybody started doing it...spent an awful lot of time getting high in the woods...

Yes it’s good, livin’ on a farm, oh so good, livin’ on a farm...
Jefferson Airplane

...one dream shared by just about every eco hippie is of one day having a farm...living and working directly with the earth...in tune with the natural order...flowing with the eternal cycles of life and death...just like agrarian people have for thousands of years...

...as it turned out, I was the one exception to that...in my crowd, at least...then, I was also the only one who’d ever had to shovel shit out of a barn...

...mom was never really into the farm thing, either...nowadays, the pasture gets mowed once or twice a year, and my brother keeps up the garden, but the animals are gone...though not without a bit of trouble...out of twelve chickens, it turned out there were only four hens...and finding homes for eight roosters ain’t, as it turns out, easy...after ads offering them for free at local feed stores went unanswered, I suggested leaving the henhouse door open at night...letting nature take its course...mom didn’t like that idea at all....

...outsider art is cool...generally created by people with little education or training in art...like Henry Darger, whose work would have been a lot less interesting if he’d ever read Freud or Jung....alas, it’s kinda difficult to be an outsider artist with a PhD...nonetheless, despite a fancy digital camera and familiarity with the celebrated work of Ansel Adams, Diane Arbus, Annie Leibowitz, Edward Curtis, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Earth to Holly, I’m trying to be as outside as possible with this photography thing...and an almost complete lack of technical knowledge helps...like, so far, I’ve figured out that light is everything...but haven't the foggiest idea what to do with that knowledge...

...walking around the old homestead a weekend ago, looking at old things breaking down...memories and all those memories carry with them crumbling to earth...tend to find it depressing...so, started taking pictures...trying to maybe save something...but not happy about how most of them came out...mostly because the light wasn’t right...ending up thinking the ones that came out best were the ones that came out worst...so, messed ‘em up even worse and put ‘em here...

I heard the old, old men say,
'Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.'
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
'All that's beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.'
William Butler Yeats

Thoughts From the Well #1

...always thought the letter Q was misplaced in the alphabet...that it should be back at the end with X, Y, and Z...the other weird letters...which may appear to be very small minded of me...or maybe Q just looks lonely...

...people get into the yoga thing for lots of different reasons...ranging from wanting a firm ass to wanting to be a bodhisattva...then, there are also people who want to be bodhisattvas with firm asses...

...sitting quietly...trying to investigate the resistance to sitting quietly...finding it feels an awful lot like sadness...

...one thing you hear a lot from children of the eighties are sentences that begin oh, come on, it was the 80’s—everybody was into ________...said blank filled in with the likes of Bon Jovi, Rambo, acid washed jeans, Full House, the Brat Pack, Flashdance, Phil Collins, Porky’s, drum machines, St. Elmo’s Fire, Ronald Reagan, channeling, Journey, and/or feathered mullets....for the record, I wasn’t...

...often the fear of this unknown moment is greater than that of anything that might be imagined in the future...

...just saw an ad on a bulletin board for someone who can tudor in all subjects...I’m thinking this person might be good for British history...probably not so much for spelling...

Old Walt

All truths wait in all things...
Walt Whitman

...I’m recycling myself again, from a comment left on Brooks’ latest blog post...which I was enticed into...even though I always read her anyway...by one of my favorite Whitman poems when I first read him twenty years ago...but that I'd almost completely forgotten until I saw those first few words...unseen buds, infinite, hidden well...god, how I love old Walt...Leaves of Grass remaining probably the closest thing my intrinsically vague personal religion has to a holy book...

...gotta admit I didn’t like him particularly at first...reading bits of Song of Myself and maybe some other stuff in an American Lit class...didn’t do a thing for me, really...but for some reason knew there was something I was missing...got a copy of Leaves of Grass, walked a mile through the woods from campus to the beach on Puget Sound to sit on rocks and open to random pages...generally reading small poems like unseen buds...

...I still have that copy, though it’s fallen apart, gotten yellow and crinkly after living in my backpack through my serious backpacking years...up and down the Appalachians and Rockies, across Zion and Canyonlands and Arches, to the top of the San Francisco Peaks and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where I spent my twenty ninth birthday and the pack got clawed open by a ringtail cat during the night...

...more recently, taught Song of Myself to students at a couple different colleges...making sure to point out the significance of I loaf and invite my soul...which is, essentially, that it’s Whitman’s instruction on how to read the poem...and, as such, the complete antithesis of reading it in a classroom where they’d be required to write a paper about it and end up being graded on their performance, as I was having them do...and told them something like if you really want to understand this poem, read it on your own when you don’t have to worry about papers or grades...preferably lying in the grass or sitting on a beach on Puget Sound, or way down in the Grand Canyon...but be sure to hang your backpack properly...