Friday, September 24, 2010

Bored?


...hiking at high elevations reminds me of advice given to people who get bored following the breath in meditation...

Take the thumb and first finger of either hand, clamp them tightly over your nose, keep your mouth closed, and notice how long it takes before your breathing becomes very interesting to you!
Jon Kabat-Zinn

...ten years or so ago, was sitting on a rocky beach in Maine reading To the Lighthouse, a novel in which the most commonplace situations are described with stunning color and intensity...making for a beautiful reading experience, though it made me think that, if Virginia Woolf actually experienced passing moments of life like that, without any kind of off-switch...as, I suspect, she did...it’s not hard to to understand why she filled her pockets with rocks and took that last fateful walk into the pond...


There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T.S. Eliot

...maybe twenty years ago, was backpacking in the Weminuche Wilderness in southern Colorado, just north of Durango, and, one afternoon, was in kind of an...ummm...ahem...altered state....things got kind of intense...way too much happening in mountains or groves of trees or the sky to keep looking at them....so, decided to simplify things....told myself I’m just gonna look at this rock here...nothin’ too intense or scary, there.....except there was...once I bothered to see...


Look: the sun gods, the gods
of fire, dawn, sky, wind, storm,
wonders that no mortal has ever
beheld...
Bhagavad Gita

...boredom, it occurs to me, is really a defense mechanism...guarding our eyes from the truly dazzling nature of everything around us...

Monday, September 20, 2010

Time Passes Slowly


Time passes slowly up here in the mountains...

...less than three days from my not-too-far-above-sea-level home in Philly, tromping up to 13,223 feet...used to spend a lot more time at heights like this, now try to work a bit harder...usually...at gaining equilibrium wherever I find myself...


Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream...

...still, it’s nice to get out to wild places...if only to see through different mirrors than the ones we’re used to...


...continue to idealize these high sylvan landscapes...colorful, quiet, peaceful...appearing like little paradises, off in the distance...always in the distance...though, as becomes particularly clear when barely able to walk up a rocky path in the face of strong icy winds in September, elevation making the lungs burn and mind get fuzzy, they’re about as inhospitable as places get...gorgeous to look at, from a distance, and then go home...

Time passes slowly and then fades away...
Bob Dylan

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Yoga Cynic Sutra



...been wishing lately I could do nothing but yoga, all day, every day...not sure, though, if that’s a reflection of devotion or despair...

Monday, September 13, 2010

Flying Words


...with debates raging on about commercialism, body image, and what should and shouldn't be termed “yoga,”* I’m pleased to announce the impending publication of my new translation of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras...

...re-titled, for the sake of commercial viability, Patanjali's 196 Secrets for Tight Buns and Rock Hard Abs...

...to be followed, early next year, by my interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita...in which Krishna counsels Arjuna on how to use the Law of Attraction™ to lose dhoti fat, meet attractive virgins of appropriate caste, and avoid paying taxes...

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honour.
Oscar Wilde

...the longest word in the world is 189,819 letters long.....technically, it’s a chemical formula...it’s not in any dictionaries...and, I would guess, it’s very rarely been written...and, quite possibly never spoken at all...or used in a sentence...almost definitely never used in Scrabble...in fact, after a good bit of google searching, finding only abbreviated versions, I started wondering if it existed only in theory......until I found it here...(at the bottom is a recording of part of it read aloud...sped up...but, apparently, the work of a speech synthesizer...leaving open the question of whether it’s been spoken by a human voice)...I’d like to be the first person to use it in a poem...

…frameworks of the One (derived from mysticism) and the Many (derived from common experience) falsely polarize individuation and merging, which are actually embedded in each other…
Diana Alstad

...might silliness and seriousness be a false dichotomy as well?...isn’t everything we see or do to some extent vitally important and to some other extent ridiculous?...isn’t it all just a matter of degree...or perspective......or could it be that I just ain’t smart enough for none o’ them non-dichotomous paradoxes?...



*see here and here and here...

Saturday, September 11, 2010

How You React...(for another Sept 11)


...this blog's been slackin' lately...as its few remaining readers may have noticed...and don't expect this little bit of self-referentiality to be any significant improvement...

...been regretfully neglecting my blog friends, as well...not to mention staying cheerfully irrelevant in the midst of ongoing word-wars over yoga advertising...(though, if any of you yoga advertisers out there might be interested in some nude pictures of me...I can be bought)...(like, seriously...anybody interested?)...

...ahem...

...nonetheless, thought I'd share a link to an edited version of a post from a year ago today, in memory of events nine years ago, at Elephant Journal...and relevant now as then: How You React...(for Sept. 11) ...


shanti shanti shanti




Thursday, September 2, 2010

still clear quiet space

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