Breathe... (A Life Worth Breathing...Kind of a Book Review #2)

I think if we take a look deep within ourselves with piercing honesty, we could agree that we carry around a file of our inadequacies with us—a file that contains many reasons to loathe ourselves...
Max Strom

...for me, it’s probably more like a file cabinet...or storage locker full of file cabinets...but point taken...

Breeeeathe...breathe in the aaaaaair...
Pink Floyd

Somebody from this publishing house said she wanted to send me a book to review...called A Life Worth Breathing...by this famous yoga teacher I’d never, at that point, heard of, named Max Strom...to which I replied if it’s for free, it’s for me...though not in so many words...figuring, if all else failed, I could call it a veritable tour de force...seminal...say it belongs on every yogi’s bookshelf...or it’s perfect for the yogi on your Christmas list....

...or, on the other hand, could actually read the thing...which I did...deciding in the process the book was actually worth writing about...meaning both that it was worth reading and I thought of some stuff to say about it that seemed clever...at least to me....found it at times illuminating...other times irritating....then, it’s the lot of the yoga cynic to rarely read anything that doesn’t have at least a 50/50 irritating/illuminating ratio...particularly when the author talks about subjects like...um...let’s see...God...

...but then, in the words of Ancient and Venerable Yoga Cynic Sutra 35:78...it’s always the really irritating stuff that makes ya think...and, big a deal as Max* makes of the metaphysical side of things, the book’s centered...literally and figuratively...at a far more basic level...on the breath...paying close attention to it...when practicing forearm stands or cutting toenails**...following and listening carefully to what such a simple, elemental process can tell about what’s going on inside...where the real action happens...

No matter how many vinyasas we do, no matter how much wheatgrass juice we drink, no matter how many kirtans we attend, we will not have a happy life if we are carrying resentment and hatred inside us...
Max Strom

...how you gon’ win when you ain’t right within?
Lauryn Hill

...as well as in the minute details of our lives...how we treat the people serving us coffee*** likely more revealing than any formal spiritual practice...

...and ya gotta like a guy who, for all the reverence expressed...and there’s a lot...toward celebrated holy people, says he thinks the only truly enlightened person he’s ever met was a homeless girl who didn’t say a word...

...overall, it’s a book that, in retrospect, had a lot more of an effect on me than was apparent while reading...(though...full disclosure...that might’ve been at least partly because I was thinking about what clever stuff was gonna end up in this post)...(seriously, dontcha love that Lauryn Hill quote?)...in the sense that it’s actually gotten me thinking more about the breath and what I can learn from it...the subtle but deeply important signs that, like most people, I put a lot of effort into dulling or ignoring...so that ya could say the book actually made me a bit more conscious of those little things that are really the big things...

...or, y’know, ya could call it a veritable tour de force...



* the guy’s a yoga teacher...so first names all the way...and, like this blog, his book is probably best experienced barefoot...

** or, conceivably, for really, really adept yogis, cutting toenails while doing forearm stands...though, truthfully, Max really doesn't go into that...

*** Max actually disses coffee...repeatedly...but that’s cool****...

**** while perhaps not quite yogic enough to abstain from coffee, I’m exactly yogic enough not to be bothered by the fact that even-more-yogic types often diss it...


*cross posted at Elephant Journal*

Imperfections R Us

...said sorry, not feeling quite myself today...though knowing that simmering misery is at least as much myself as anything else I might be feeling...

`I can't explain MYSELF, I'm afraid, sir' said Alice, `because I'm not myself, you see.'
Lewis Carroll

...been reading this book called Just Kids by Patti Smith, about herself and Robert Mapplethorpe as young artists in NY in the 60’s...listening to Blonde on Blonde and Beggars Banquet over and over, but too broke to go and see rock concerts...young artists aware of the legendary Andy Warhol factory scene nearby but lacking the cache to get anywhere near it...kind of funny, in a way...later on, Patti Smith asked should I pursue a path so twisted?...a line I’ve always liked...perhaps because the straight and narrow has only ever tended to get me hopelessly lost...

...one thing none of the yoga books say is that there’s probably no better time for a neti pot than when you’re sick-drunk....or that there’s no better cure for a serious hangover than a really intense vinyasa class...the kind that makes you silently chant what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger...

...another thing they don’t say is that getting sick-drunk might indicate that you’re in a very different...perhaps less placid...state of mind than you might have been telling yourself...

...recently read this book called Letters From the Dhamma Brothers...about a vipassana meditation program for inmates in a southern maximum security prison...(which, like the Dhamma Brothers movie, is worth checking out)....in one place, the point is made, in reference to participants who’ve been addicts, that meditation shouldn't be used as a substitute for drugs...and I get that...these techniques were developed with higher goals than another addictive behavior or a buzz...just like yoga wasn’t invented for killer abs and firm butts...but, at the same time, can’t help thinking if somebody’s looking for a buzz, wouldn’t it be a whole lot better to get it from meditation than from heroin?...or, would it be better if the yoga-as-exercise crowd joined the 40% of Americans who don’t exercise at all?....all in all, am inclined to think that if people are replacing something unhealthy with something healthy, that’s a good thing...even if it’s a watered-down version of a better thing...

...I useta use all kindsa crap to dilute my coffee before finally learning to enjoy it black...

...(yeah, I just compared yoga to coffee)...(but, ya gotta admit, better that than crack)...

...still not so sure, though, about the food co-op employee heard a couple days ago proudly proclaiming that he smokes organic cigarettes...

*cross posted at Elephant Journal*

Ignorance May Not Be Bliss But Could Nonetheless Be a Pretty Correct Appraisal of My Relation to Infinity

I choose to let the mystery be...

Iris DeMent

...ignorance may not be bliss, but could, nonetheless, be a pretty correct appraisal of my relation to infinity...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 0.0

* as previously mentioned, I'm now brandishing my ignorance at Elephant Journal , as well as here...with Probably Not the Best Example of Loving Kindness...which might be familiar to long-time Yoga for Cynics readers...but this version’s better...and anyway contains probably the best first line I’ll ever write...as well as the probably really really familiar When Precious Met Alice...but, trust me, it’s way better the second time around*

Let's Get Metaphysical

...too caught up, generally, trying to find life before death to worry that much about what’s likely to happen after...or before...though reincarnation seems like a fascinating metaphor...if difficult to say what precisely it’s supposed to represent...then, as with all the good ones, that’s exactly what makes it interesting...


...if you can clearly understand a metaphor, it’s probably not a very good one...
Yoga Cynic Sutra 504:91

...perhaps better if imagined in a less linear way...a wheel more stationary than mobile...actors exchanging parts on an infinite grid rather than moving forward or back...progressing or regressing...so that everybody gets...or has...to be everybody...experiences everything possible to be experienced...me becoming you, you becoming me...and those people over there...rock stars and supermodels...junkies and prostitutes...emperors and slaves...abstainers and addicts...victims and perpetrators...ultimately, everybody...and everybody, ultimately, you and me...receiving, for every kiss or kick that’s given, not some vague moral equivalent, but that very kiss or kick itself...ignoring another’s pain impossible, since, sooner or later, it’s mine, and yours...love held back never received...all hatred, self-hatred...all murder, suicide...all violence, self-inflicted...all sex, masturbation...no point to envy, or to take pride in possessions, because everything, eventually, is mine and yours, and, eventually, lost to us...not in a moral, mystical, or karmic order, but an impossibly elaborate yet unfathomably simple dance...and looking at one another no different than gazing blindly into a mirror...


...never underestimate the potential of liars and fools...
Yoga Cynic Sutra 446:87

...like most people, I’m often afraid to say I don’t know...usually out of a fear of being thought ignorant...the irony of which, of course, is that it may be the one of the few truly intelligent things I’ve ever said...

Venomous Spiders, Handstands, Elephants, and Trying Yet Failing to Move With the Peculiar Grace of a Three-Legged Dog

...you’re the blessed, we’re the spiders from mars...
David Bowie

...bourgeois as this might sound, Yoga for Cynics will soon have a second home...as I’ve been asked to write for Elephant Journal...based in Boulder, Colorado...home to Tibetan Buddhists, organic vegan mountain oysters, and ludicrously expensive real estate inhabited by people who wear socks with sandals...(this blog is, as always, best read barefoot)...

...not sure yet how what ends up there’s gonna differ from what’s here...maybe written under my full name...possibly with proper sentences, without ellipses...perhaps a bit less self-indulgent...meaning you’ll still have to come here to find out why I spent all day Monday in bathrobe, fuzzy pajama-type pants, and the ratty t-shirt I’d had on since Saturday’s eleven o’clock yoga class...(featuring my first American handstand)...(as opposed to those laid-back Costa Rican yoga retreat handstands anybody can do)...after which, as rain continued to fall steadily for the second day in a row, decided there was no more optimal use for the day than sitting around drinking coffee...which I did....yeah, I know, there’s much disagreement about coffee amongst the yoga crowd...pure-living non-(as opposed to anti-, since they’re too positive to be against anything)caffeine types on the one hand, irredeemable bean junkies with their steaming mugs filled to the brim with tasty rationalizations on the other....but I’ve got a far more potent and dangerous issue to discuss...we’re talkin’ spiders, people...

...because, that evening, started feeling pain and noticed swelling in my upper foot/lower ankle...which I promptly blamed on yoga...though couldn’t actually think of exactly how, in this instance, yoga could’ve done it...(alright...can feel the eyes rolling from here....change that to how I could’ve done it by bringing a stupidly competitive attitude to yoga and not listening to my body...are ya happy now?)...or why it took all day for the damage to kick in....

...then, as the weekend wore on, pain and swelling steadily increased...compromising my ability to walk...leaving me staggering, limping, hopping, crawling...trying yet failing to move with the peculiar grace of a three legged dog...as well as feeling strange chills...fever...and noticing a little red mark right in the belly of the swollen area...dismissed, at first, as simply one of countless little red marks left over from the Nicoya Peninsula...but, then, remembered this nasty little spider hanging right by my comfortable-yet-stylish IKEA chair earlier in the day...which, out of a deep commitment to ahimsa...or extreme laziness...I left alone...and the realization dawned that this thoroughly non-ahimsa-practicing spider had, in fact, bitten me*...

...now, Tuesday afternoon, I’m on the mend...even changed out of that ratty t-shirt...went to the doctor...who prescribed antibiotics...without bringing up the word amputate even once...though still probably a few days away from doing any more handstands....anyone so inclined is more than welcome to send healing energies...or cash...

* not, actually, the gigantic Costa Rican banana spider in the photo...though thinking that made the story more interesting, didn't it?

When Precious Met Alice: Kind of a Movie Review #9

...went to see the new Alice in Wonderland...3-D, IMAX....guess you could say I’ve joined the twenty-first century...or the psychedelic era...hell, the movie cost more than I used to pay to see a Grateful Dead show...with some similarities...

...beyond trippy visuals, though, the movie offers little chance of expanding consciousness...a wealth of joyfully absurdist poetry sucked out of the story in favor of drably conventional Hollywood fantasy adventure...surrealistic pillows given way to cheesy swords...any feints toward poetic madness rapidly contracted, shriveled and shrunken away with lameass explanations for anything in danger of expanding the viewer’s imaginative scope...(the Mad Hatter gets turned into a boring action hero, for chrissake...like Mel Gibson with Carrot Top’s hairstylist)...

...all in all, more C. S. Lewis than Lewis Carroll...if more liberal-minded....a grown-up Alice making the story a bit less Victorian-pervy, more modern-day female-empowerment........as such, offering, I guess, a better role model for my young nieces than the standard Hollywood princess shrinking away dreaming of a handsome prince/sexy vampire...but that's not saying much...

...one pill makes you larger, one pill makes you small...
Grace Slick

...if not for concerns about subject matter leaving them permanently traumatized, I’d be more likely to recommend sending the kids to see Precious....hell, having read Sapphire’s Push a decade ago, didn’t know if I was ready for it...but, flying from San Jose to George Bush International...relaxed and flexible from all the yoga and beach time...if not enough to make a coach seat comfortable enough to concentrate on reading for three and a half hours...mind relatively open and non-depressed...had a little TV on the seat-back in front of me with fifty-something cinematic pills to choose from...and went for it...

...while the movie only vaguely implies at least one of the novel’s more horrifying aspects, there are lots more where that came from...in an utterly harrowing portrayal of a young woman, Precious, the likes of whom most of us would prefer to ignore...trapped in a rabbit hole of poverty, neglect, rape, incest, illiteracy, and AIDS...told she’s stupid and worthless by a mother who treats her as little more than an object to be used and abused...grown huge on junk food, disappearing inside....

`I can't help it,' said Alice very meekly: `I'm growing.'
`You've no right to grow here,' said the Dormouse.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland (not in the movie)

...and yet, the movie’s ultimately about growth...kinda like yoga*...finding possibilities for expansion in unexpected places**...that sacred something remaining, no matter how fucked up and hopeless-seeming a person might appear on the surface...and the importance of having the compassion to see that something even in people it'd be easier not to have to see at all...

I am large. I contain multitudes...
Walt Whitman

...near the end, Precious' mother*** gives a monologue...revealing, even more than before, just how toxic she is to her daughter...and, probably, to just about anyone else likely to come in contact with her...but, also, the far more difficult truth that, in the end, she’s another desperately wounded human being...so twisted and lost in her damaged mind it’s hard to imagine how she could find peace...but one of us, nonetheless...if we can grow large enough to acknowledge her...

* that said, it should be mentioned that Gabourey Sibide, who plays the title character, says she hates yoga...would like to kill it, even....though I suspect that has more to do with airbrushed mass-marketed images than core philosophies...

** hell, it turns out Mariah Carey can act...who could’ve imagined that?...

*** played by Mo’Nique...representing one of the rare instances in which I actually agreed with Oscar...(though, if I had my way, Cate Blanchett and Meryl Streep would win practically every year)...(then, if I really had my way, I'd probably be married to Cate Blanchett...but, anyway...)...

Yogi Don’t Surf! (El Yogi Cynico en Costa Rica Parte Cinco)

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.
William Blake

...someone told me the forecast for Philly for the following week, when we’d be home, had highs in the upper forties...which’ll feel just balmy, said she....or would if we hadn’t just spent ten days down here, said I...


Charlie don’t surf!
Colonel Kilgore, Apocalypse, Now

...the Pacific coast of the Nicoya Peninsula is renowned as a major surf haven, attracting incredibly buff wave riders from around the world...including most everybody else on our little retreat...and yet...alas...this cynical yogi...(with a history of ear problems...culminating in chronically infected scar tissue from operations meant to remove other chronically infected scar tissue resulting from previous operations meant to stop chronic ear infections)...(all of which makes water sports that involve submerging the head highly inadvisable)...does not surf...

...and, anyway, there are an awful lot of underwater rocks, there...so ya never know, when floating about the surf, just what might be lurking underneath....and this is starting to sound like yet another metaphor...

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
attributed to Swami Satchidinanda

...there’s a book called In Search of Captain Zero, about a couple of surfers and ex-weed smugglers who, earlier in their lives, decided that someday they’d find the perfect beach with the perfect surf break...paradise...to spend the rest of their lives...

The Paradise is in the desire, not in the imperfection of accomplishment...

Allen Ginsberg

...in time, though, they lost one another...and the author, Allan C. Weisbecker, has the idea that his friend, Christopher...Captain Zero...may have finally found it...so heads down through Mexico into Central America...doing lots of surfing along the way...

That ‘s how thick the wave was and how deep within it I found myself. I was in a crouch, which is pretty much instinctive in that sort of situation, but I could have stood up and still not gotten my hair wet. For the three, maybe four seconds before that wave spit me back out into the sunlight with my feet still planted firmly on my board, I was exactly and without doubt where I wanted to be on the surface of the planet earth. And there was not a drop of water in my universe that was out of place.

...eventually finding Christopher, and it, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica...only to learn that, having found his paradise, Captain Zero’s developed an addiction to crack....sometimes, it seems, there’s nothing more dangerous than finding your ideal...especially if the plan is to try and hold on to it for good instead of simply enjoying the perfect moments you get before letting them go...

...back in slowly-melting-snowy Philadelphia, found my difficult adjustment to cold weather after ten days struggling to stay cool, itchy skin flaking off from sunburn, arms and legs so bug bitten they've been compared to Saint Sebastian, garnered little sympathy...

...and, anyway, here’s where I am now...and, with temperatures reaching up toward the low sixties, and purple flowers blooming where snow was days ago, it's probably best to let go of that beach...for now...

Got My Mind On My Monkeys And My Monkeys On My Mind (El Yogi Cynico en Costa Rica Parte Cuatro)

...everything we do is music...
John Cage

... returning from Casa Zen to Punta Coco on the last afternoon, heard unmistakable barbaric yawping of howler monkeys in the trees by the tiny escuela across the street...unmistakable not because I recognized or had heard them before...but since, having heard of them, could imagine no other answer to the inevitable what the hell is that??!!...like a roaring hippo mixed with a cement mixer and filtered through a wah-wah pedal...


...though it wasn’t on the official agenda, managed to wander out every morning straight from bed to sit, legs crossed, back relatively straight, on a folded up towel on the rocks, peering hazily out to the sea for half an hour...though morning yoga was at the ungodly-for-me hour of 7:00 AM...sometimes was out even before the sun rose at around 6:00...on the last morning, when we needed to catch an early morning bus, it was closer to 4:30...with a bright red moon and a shooting star...made somewhat easier by the near-unimpeachable logic that peering out to sea while the moon goes down and the sun comes up is better than sleeping, anyway....

...Zen Buddhists...when not talking about the pointlessness of talking about anything...talk about something called monkey mind...a term which describes the way thoughts go leaping through the leaves and branches of consciousness...so quickly...in seemingly random motions...that convincing them to be still seems close to impossible...and even to calmly follow and watch takes great skill...

...ended up taking nearly seventy pictures up into those trees, in crappy light, of creatures that, like my thoughts, won’t seem to keep still...hoping one or two might come out okay...(now that I think of it, this rather forced metaphor might relate more to writing than meditation...whatever works)...and, like denizens of the deeper recesses, don’t, apparently, want to be seen very clearly...though ever ready to leap out and disturb any seeming calm...

...back home, I’ve managed so far to keep the morning meditation thing going...if a bit later...and just so long as I’m willing to let the monkeys howl...

Yoga, Surfing, and Pot (El Yogi Cynico en Costa Rica Parte Tres)

If dogs run free, why not we, across the swamp of time?
Bob Dylan

...ubiquitous surfboards, dreadlocks, thongs, and tattoos...far more yoga teachers and artists than cops, doctors, or clergy...as many bikes as cars...t-shirt shops full of flagrant, fragrant smoke...Argentines, Israelis, and Americans intermingling with the almost invariably warm and friendly locals...a mellow postmodern trinity of, as my friend put it, yoga, surfing, and pot...


...of which, it should be mentioned, I indulged only in the first...along with so many of those less-than-$1 empanadas at the tiny bakeries...carne, pollo, frijole, queso...Bimbo chocolate cookies, and as much fresh tropical fruit as a body can safely digest....one thing about Latin America in general: you don’t go there to lose weight...and the crummiest little convenience store can be counted on for a produce section to make the northern jaw drop....and that’s not even mentioning that this is the culture that gave the world hot pants...


...they got the fun, they got the palm trees,
they got the weed, they got the taxis...
Joe Strummer, Safe European Home

...it’s always important, I think, for Americans proud of living simply out of their backpacks to remember that they’re probably sinking more money into their week-long vacations than most of the locals see in a year...and yet, Costa Rica can make one feel a bit less the great white imperialist...seeing little of the overwhelming poverty, trash, and heavily armed cops and soldiers impossible to avoid in much of the region...which, actually, has something to do with the country going without a standing army for more than half a century....relative prosperity deriving, to a significant extent, from putting funds that might otherwise go toward the military into education...

...that said, gotta confess to having made an attitude of semi-blissful semi-oblivion toward world events an essential aspect of my retreat....got on-line once early in the trip to give family members contact info in case of emergency, and then again in the bed and breakfast near the airport the night before flying home to clear junk accumulations from in-boxes, but that was it....and, except for stray bits picked up here and there...like last week’s snow in Philly we all hoped would delay our flights home...heard and saw nothing about the world beyond our beach...realizing when I got home that I hadn’t so much as thought about Tea Partiers, Sarah Palin, or the health care debate in over a week...and, with that, finding myself quite reticent about getting re-informed...spending far less time on-line now than before the trip...even if that’s meant unconscionably neglecting many of my blog friends, along with the news....sorry...I’ll be back...

...have always believed in keeping informed...taking part...little interest in being the kinda yogi who holds up non-attachment to justify non-engagement or the greater scheme of things as an excuse for apathy...but there comes a point when engaging with the wide world out there...particularly when doing so by surfing the interwebs ’til the early hours of the morn...becomes simply a mode of escape from the world nearer-by...and, perhaps most of all, just another of the infinite futile ways of trying to push away the vast universe inside...

...and sometimes, it seems, ya hafta go somewhere far away to see what’s really goin’ on with ya back home...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 12:291

Sutras While the Sun Sets (El Yogi Cynico en Costa Rica Parte Dos)

...it really says something about this town that a big hairy guy can get picked up hitch-hiking in the dark by a girl in a bikini...or so I announced, manic frenzied energy bursting into the improvised yoga studio on the cabana’s front porch facing the ocean as everyone else prepared quietly for candle-lit kundalini...and I think I was misunderstood...

...getting lost is often essential in getting where you need to go...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 18:339

...first day or so in Santa Teresa found me gravitating between a kind of elated relief and lingering dread carried over from home...shedding layers of clothing and watching the mountains and jungle go by on the six hour bus and ferry ride to the Nicoya Peninsula, buying armloads of fresh papayas and mangoes, avocados and bananas...body where I wanted it to be, but another part remaining, as if caught in a web of ice, elsewhere...

...but working on it, getting up to sit on the rocks as the sun came up, morning yoga and running out into the waves to wash off the sweat...setting out to make a meditation of wandering through the day...

...culminating in a long afternoon walk, about as far down the beach toward the south as bare feet could comfortably take me, before turning around, expecting time to kick back a while, maybe take another swim, before evening yoga...just had to turn right into the trees at the rocks in front of Punta Coco...purple i-pod playing Buenavista Social Club, Peter Tosh, Astrid Gilberto, and Cowgirl in the Sand...(Fillmore East version)...orange sun fading from sky to sea...

...and yet, after some distance, nothing, apparently, but thin sandy high tide beach up ahead...seeming to go on and on...sun now red, continuing its descent as I moved faster, fueled by just a bit of anxiety in paradise...thinking, after a while, I must have gone too far but certainly didn’t recall seeing those rocks...then worrying I was gonna miss yoga class, and racing into the descending darkness...adrenaline coursing through every capillary even with the realization that I was likely running away from instead of toward home...feet padding rapidly on wet sand as light diminished...

...it’s not an adventure unless, as some point along the way, it really sucks...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 532:42

...and yet, the beach only seemed to get more narrow, unfamiliar...just about ending....no doubt about it, I’d gone too far...possibly way too far....turned off on the first dirt and gravel passageway, finding a strange collection of houses connected by wooden walkways, followed by a steep rocky hill...though things were completely flat where we were staying...meaning I was way off...shit...not wanting to go back to the beach, though, with little reason to think I’d have any more success finding Punta Coco going the other way, with even less light...so continued trudging upward...barefoot, on gravel...finding this little jaunt had stopped being fun some time ago and showed little promise of getting anything but worse...at last reaching the road, now in full dark, turning knowing I had quite a way to go on it, though still not at all sure exactly where in this strange foreign land I was...and my feet were already sore...

...saw an SUV coming...not many cars other than SUV’s and ORV’s in those parts...the roads are too rough...and, just for the hell of it, stuck out my thumb...hoping, from past experience, for some big burly guy...typically the only kind of person who picks up big burly guy hitch-hikers...though even they generally don’t so in the dark...

...instead, the Spanish speaking surfer girl in the green bathing suit calmly pulled over upon sight of my upraised thumb....even if she seemed a bit nonplussed when her dirty, barefoot passenger seemed unclear on where he was or where he was going...and what I could explain she couldn’t understand...finally managing to sputter out perdido...en la playa...she smiled and said aaaah...fully aware, it was clear, of the intoxicating nature of the Costa Rican sunset...

...all in all, take a poet over a guru any day...intrepid searchers make far better conversation than those who claim to have found...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 561:87

...seemed at least two miles before the sign for the little hamburguesa joint near the gate to Punta Coco...and so, after another barefoot jaunt down the short jungle gravel road to the cabanas, made it to yoga class on time...heart pumping, crazily invigorated...there, completely...

Pressure Drop (El Yogi Cynico en Costa Rica Parte Uno)

When it drop, oh ya gotta feel it...

Toots Hibbert

...she said I know as little about it as you do...and I thought, but didn't say, you have no idea how little I know...

...sitting, unable, sometimes, to tell rocks from reflections of rocks...

...and nothing in this world was more difficult than love...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez