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...