Strap yourself to a tree with roots, you ain’t goin’ nowhere...
Bob Dylan (Happy 70th!)
...wasn’t writing much for a while, there...and still finding it awfully difficult.....you need a comfortable place to sit to write...and, no offense to my ever-beloved Ikea chair, that sturdy, soft but supportive seat has often seemed to be missing...replaced with a fervent desire to retreat and hide...dig a hole and bury myself...a metaphor superficially similar yet inherently, in spirit, distinct from that of being rooted...though distinctions can bewilder...
...we would argue that the greatest irreverence in yoga is to leave any dogma, conscious or unconscious, unchallenged.
yoga 2.0
...this is where dogma comes in, for some people...senses of the sacred that separate and exclude, providing that save haven with walls and battlements...a fortress as much as a refuge...
...but I’m getting away from the point...which tends to happen when yer not properly rooted....all those sacred scriptures I tend make fun of talk about the problem of grasping...the solution offered being non-attachment...making the grasping of scriptures themselves as inherent-answers-to-everything somewhat ironic...but, again, I digress....the common comforting view of the skeptic...which, truth be told, I tend to grasp toward, myself...is that this is a position of denial...
The shadow side of Buddhist practice is what I call “premature nonattachment,” which is actually avoidance masquerading as spiritual attainment.
Thanissara
...a denial! a denial! a denial!
Kurt Cobain
...in friendship...at least in an the abstract, or maybe retrospect, if not so much within the full catastrophe of everyday life...the difference between compassion and grasping can be seen pretty clearly...one creates union, the other attempts to do so, and may appear to succeed, but instead makes real closeness impossible...one grows lasting roots, the other clings desperately but, in the end, leaves us drifting...
...standing in tree pose...vriksasana... setting my drishti through the window toward the crux of a green tree branch...leaves dancing in a frenzy with the wind, as I remain rooted, still...almost...for a minute or two...
10 comments:
Some people apparently took Bob literally:
http://www.elephantjournal.com/2011/05/connecting-with-nature-through-treeyoga/
I enjoyed the part about burying oneself (like hiding) as similar in some respect to planting a seed: what if you sprout? I think you can't help it! Oops! look at these funny stringy things goin' down: Ohmygod... Roots!
Great post, but what I really want to say right now is "I love Brooks".
I just want to marinate in those last 2 paragraphs for a while...beautiful...
my favourite part of yoga is sending my roots down and my arms up. :)
Premature nonattatchment? I like that! Or rather, it drives me nuts.
Hi!
Great blog.
Found you at True Blue Texan.
May I blogroll you?
Sister-in-arms (yoga arms)
S
Suzan,
Nice to meetcha. You can blogroll me any time...
The Management
Yoga for Cynics, Inc.
Your paragraph on compassion and grasping, mirrors an aspect of my life exactly. I've always found it very hard to be compassionate towards one who demands it (and more)...so I grasp. I try to "do the right thing," but I wonder: what does acting compassionately, but not feeling it, say about me? I seem to have conditional compassion, but that's not right...
And I may have missed your point here entirely. Hope not. :o/
At 43 years of age I'm still looking for any kinds of roots. I wonder what it is about my inherent rootlessness that bothers me...
Sorry for my recent absence, btw. I was gone on a road trip.
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