Meditation is Duct Tape for the Soul

Meditation is duct tape for the soul.

Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 333.981*

If duct tape doesn’t work, try using more duct tape.
Conventional Wisdom**

* The Ancient and Revered Cynical Sages didn’t necessarily think through all the implications of the meditation=duct tape thing. Most likely, they just thought it was funny...***

Ancient and Revered Commentary on Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 333.981
 
** ...while, personally, I’ve always been a bit dubious about the notion that there’s anything conventional about wisdom...

*** ...and that’s not even mentioning the ever-present possibility that they were drunk...
Ancient and Revered Commentary on the Ancient and Revered Commentary on Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 333.981

Bees of the Invisible

You can never get enough of what you don’t really want.
Eric Hoffer

...there’s an old joke about a guy who quit smoking, drinking, and sex, and, as a result, was in perfect health up until the day he killed himself...

...(of course, to be relevant to the twenty-first century yoga crowd, it might be better to rephrase that as quit wheat, gluten, and genetically modified foods)...

...it’s always easy, I think, to talk about other people’s bad habits...if she knows how bad that is for her, why doesn’t she quit?....next time you find yourself saying something like that, it might be a good idea to pick something you love, something small, that, nonetheless, provides countless little moments of pleasure to your life, maybe keeps you going day by day, regardless of whether it’s good for you or not...reality T.V. shows...or junk food...or surfing the internet...or masturbating...and quit cold turkey, starting now....then, after a week or so, ask the same question about that alcoholic/cigarette smoker/crack addict you were talking about before, and see if the answer might be a little bit clearer...

We are the bees of the invisible. We frantically plunder the visible of its honey, to accumulate it in the great golden hive of the invisible.
Rainer Maria Rilke

...reading Rilke, some more...sitting in full lotus...or listening to Beethoven...how very German...wonder where I can get me some good vienerschnitzel in this town...though guess it might be good to find out just exactly what vienerschnitzel is, first...

...been called lazy...by myself, mostly....some people seem to admire my drive in certain pursuits...though those generally don’t involve producing marketable goods and services of easily quantifiable value, and do little to keep the wheels of the great machine of capital churning...

...then, a related problem might be that I’ve never been so good at relaxing, either...despite so much practice...lying propped against cushions with book in hand, wandering in the woods or along a deserted beach, or sitting in a coffee shop....and yet it all seems like an ongoing struggle to achieve the relaxation so badly needed without ever...or, at least, rarely...actually achieving it...

...that was what Dharma Mittra got on me about...couldn’t care less that I couldn’t do full lotus while in head-stand for ten minutes like most of the people in the room, but was the first yoga teacher every to criticize my savasana, specifically the fact that my fingers and hands don’t really relax, most of the time...

...work may be hard, but relaxing may be harder...

Midsummer Blues & Greys...

Summertime, child, and livin’s easy...
The Gershwin Bros. (via Billie Holiday, Janis Joplin, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell, Miles Davis, Chet Baker, John Coltrane....)

...wracked with traffic tickets, impending dental bills, internet problems...etc....etc....etc....escaping the coming heat wave, at least, to walk on a beach at one a.m....early enough even on the summer solstice to be suitably dark....some select stars shining through the eastern haze of humidity...listening to Richard Thompson through ipod headphones....

...everything you do leaves you empty inside,

time to ring some changes...

...maybe not quite so bad as all that, but he’s got a point....even later, inside reading Duino Elegies, salvaged, earlier, from my dad’s bookshelves...(soon to be emptied by people who get paid to dispose of stuff other people can’t bear to get rid of, themselves).....thinking I gotta get up early to take screens in to be fixed before the renters come next week....then coffee, air-conditioned yoga, and waiting for the cable company...a beach house ill-kept of late...where, if nothing else, I’ve done an awful lot of writing...among other things...in the past....now with a For Sale sign out front....finally, a long walk down to the point as the sun sets on this longest day of the year, its heat diminished with the light...another cosmic cycle moving along on its way...

Denn Bleiben ist nirgends.*

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

* For there is no remaining,

no place to stay (David Young, trans.).
For staying is nowhere (J.B. Leishman and Stephen Spender, trans.).

The Only Living Yoga Cynic in New York...or, the Yoga Cynic Meets Dharma Mittra

Half of the time we’re gone but we don’t know where,
We don’t know where...
Paul Simon, The Only Living Boy in New York

...always found Manhattan kind of intimidating...so big, so uptight, arrogant, and loud, so much flagrant wealth and power, so many people so driven, so ambitious and competitive...ain’tchoohungry for success success success success...

...I like to get out on the rich-but-still-incessantly-hungry streets and just walk...

...walked the High Line...lovely, artistic, and green in a post-apocalyptic sorta way...from 14^th to 23^rd, then headed in past 6^th to get to the Master Sadhana yoga class at noon...finding a room full of hardcore New York yogis relaxing with feet behind their heads...if you can reach enlightenment theeeere, you can reach it anywheeeere....and just sat their doing my usual neck rolls, feeling even more intimidated, thinking the famous yoga master we were waiting for was gonna make organic vegan mincemeat outta me...

 ...(gotta admit, when I’ve encountered yoga bigwigs, they’ve been awesome, but, in the area of actually overcoming the ego, have seemed, if anything, generally a step or two behind the rest of us)...

 ...until this unassuming, gentle, and totally unpretentious older dude I barely noticed ‘til he was up at the front of the room started the class...making jokes in a heavy accent, smiling at the little kids running around the room (the kinda thing that drives me nuts, trying to teach yoga at the homeless shelter, but which seemed to be perfectly welcome, here)...as well as giving time to my generally neglected inability to fully relax, the hands that won't fully unclench in savasana...reminding me that, despite all that fast-forward-moving energy down in the streets, the path leads to where I already am, wherever that might be...

Coffee Yoga, Coffee Zen

...not, generally, a morning person, woke and decided to head for the yoga mat...though, as usual, the option of sitting in the Ikea chair, crankin’ up the interwebs, and drinking coffee beckoned, as well...especially the coffee part...

...ever the non-traditional yogi...(though continuing to insist that, if they’d had it in India, at the time, the first yoga sutra would have been preceded by first, some coffee)...wondered if the two might somehow be incorporated...

...lately, been working on sustaining sitting poses, particularly full lotus...padmasana, for you Sanskrit nerds...and hero pose...virasana...leaving open the question of just what to do while in those poses for long periods....yeah, I know, meditate...do some pranayama...stretch the neck and shoulders...but, then, sometimes I also like to read a little Walt Whitman or Zen Flesh, Zen Bones...an activity that goes just beautifully with drinking coffee...

...and there, tops of feet on my thighs, almost immediately upon opening Zen Flesh..., in the final, Centering, section, read...

When eating or drinking, become the taste of the food or drink, and be filled.

...so that’s what I did with my coffee....touching on that sacred matrix between aum and yum....(or somethin’ like that)...

Strange, Dusty Roads

...old letters, lots of ‘em...amazing how much got put on paper back in the days before e-mail...and Facebook...and twitter...and texting...and blogs...lots of warmth and color in them, from unexpected people...reminders of years that might not have been quite as lonely as I tend to remember...pictures, scraps, strange mementos...ticket stubs, from a frightening number of Dead shows, but also the Van Gogh Face to Face exhibit, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2/15/01, 76ers vs. Orlando Magic, 1/14/00, Miles Davis at the Academy of Music (strangely double-billed with Japanese pop-fusion group Hiroshima), 6/20/90, Neil Young & Crazy Horse at the Verona Arena (built by the Roman Empire), 1987, David Bowie, Serious Moonlight Tour, 7/20/84, the Who at JFK Stadium (opening acts: Santana and the Clash), 9/25/82...senior pictures of pretty girls from high school, now mothers to other pretty girls, now in high school, whose senior pictures they’ve been putting up on Facebook...a snapshot of that long haired counselor at the pre-school day camp, wearing the hat I gave him...one I took of my dad, looking younger than I ever remember him, with windblown hair, in a parking lot....what looks like a massive amount of stuff when spread out, but, despite its emotional weight, could probably be fit quite easily in a shoebox...

 ...a surprising number of comic books left over from when, broke and stuck at my parents’ house after thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail, I sold the bulk of my collection....turns out I mostly held on to the really weird ones...titles like Legion of Charlies, Slow Death, Kamandi: Last Boy on Earth, Killraven: Warrior of the Worlds, Zap, Mr. Natural, and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers...piles of magazines, and some crumbling newspapers, including one from December 9, 1980...I read the news today, oh boy...

 ...enough dust and mildew to cause an allergic reaction I'm feeling a day later...a cardboard sign with an impressively creepy decal of an eye, magic-markered letters reading Jay Winston private eye. If you need him nock....some lovely ceramic paraphernalia...a program for the 1984 Great Valley High School Production of West Side Story, signed by my fellow cast members...a college paper on the theme of death in seven plays by Eugene O’Neill, strange handwritten science fiction stories, wretched attempts at political songwriting, report cards with enough D's and F's to make anyone wonder how I made it from grade to grade, much less to college and grad. school....piles of notebooks...

 ...including the trail journals from the A.T. I'd thought were lost...all four...marking the time from March 31 to September 1^st, 1992....inside the cover of the first, before starting the trail, I taped a panel from a Calvin and Hobbes strip, with Calvin in his spaceship, exclaiming FREE TO ROME THE HEAVENS IN MAN’S NOBLE QUEST TO INVESTIGATE THE WEIRDNESS OF THE UNIVERSE!...and then, in the opening pages, wrote out a bunch of poems, creating a kind of digest to accompany from Georgia to Maine...Shakespeare, Blake, Basho, Snyder, cummings, Frost, Yeats, Kerouac, Thoreau, and, of course, filling the first page, none other than Walt Whitman...Afoot and lighthearted I take to the open road...

 ...all of this surprisingly cool stuff making me think...having dreaded so much the very thought of actually going through or even looking at it...that there may be more positive continuity than I thought....last year, to mark my 45^th birthday, at Kripalu, during the yoga teacher training, I was asked to make an affirmation that everybody’d repeat back to me...never much one for that affirmations thing, I struggled a bit, then said stay on the path....our teacher, Devarshi, thought that a bit negative, suggested I am on the path, which I went with....and right now, looking back over so many strange twists and turns, it seems I’ve been on it quite a while...