From the Coffee Shop at Kripalu...

soft foggy morning,

mist, quite the view from here, is

that a metaphor?*

* ...biggest problem with this place is the food's so good, and there's so much of it...and afterwards, you do yoga....then, I suspect there are worse things a person can experience in this world than a touch of indigestion during camel pose....all morning, stuff kept reminding me of a dream last night I can't remember...just strange amorphous resonances....was telling Brooks...(even better in person than on-line)...about it...she asked what the dream felt like....I thought for a minute, said nice...warm...she said that's good...and I think she's probably right...

Mindful Irritation, Graceful Wipe-Outs, and Yogardosing in the Crisp Autumn Air

...had this nasty rash all summer...(don’t worry...I’m not providing details)...(or pictures)...actually, longer than that...and still have it...but the high heat and humidity made it unbearable...(except that, obviously, I did bear it)...(and, as such, like most unbearable things, it really wasn’t)...(just really unpleasant)...which made concentration difficult...and uninterrupted sleep nearly impossible...making concentration even more difficult...causing me to write a lot less and find far less enthusiasm for the mindfulness meditation thing....since, y'know, being mindful of irritation gets old fast...

...yeah, yeah, I know what you hardcore yogis out there are thinking...this is exactly the kind of challenge I should welcome....at this very moment, you’re skimming to the bottom of the post to leave a comment about your guru who not only sat meditating on a fire ant nest for fifty years, but had acolytes continually pouring warm honey over his head....I ain’t him...

...as it is, I’ve gained a new appreciation for Autumn, though...the chill coming through windows I refuse to close, though any sane person would...

...the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill river bike paths both flooded Friday, leaving a good bit of mud on the pavement in places...cold rain still pitter-pattering along again on Monday, but I just had to get out on the bike...hit a muddy patch and, feeling the bike falling inexorably to the right, pulled my leg out and managed to sit perched on the left edge of the seat, riding gently to a halt....a passing jogger, once having ascertaining I was alright, complimented me on my graceful wipe-out...

...was gonna try to go to yoga class every day in October...ended up making it all the way through October 1st before one thing after another came up on the 2nd...but plan on serious yogardosing* from here on out, including Philadelphia’s first yoga festival, Do Yoga Philly! this weekend, and, two weeks later, a weekend workshop at Kripalu with yoga legends Brooks Hall and Seane Corn (I’m sooooo unworthy...)...and then might be heading down to D.C. for the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive...which might be yogic in its own way...a meeting at the crossroads of idealism and sarcasm...what could be more appropriate?


* defined...in section 11,266 of the Sacred and Venerable 3,197th Commentary on Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 312:474...as: like overdosing, but good for you...

* also just put up a revised version of an older autumn post "Falling" at Elephant Journal

Do You Have to Do Something Wrong To Be Forgiven?

...famous yoga blogger Brooks Hall wrote this lovely poem about forgiving the world, and I left a typically silly comment...

and the world forgives you, too...or, at least I do...or I would, if I was mad at you or you'd done anything I'd need to forgive you for...does a person have to do something wrong to be forgiven?

...then I thought hmmm...that might not be such a silly question...though it certainly wouldn’t be the first time acting silly led me to insight...

...I mean...forgiveness has been called divine...an incredible loving gift we give to one another... grace, itself...the very essence of love...representing the highest kind of interconnectedness between human beings...oneness...even, dare I say it, God...

...in that one long ago instant at least out of the long and shabby stretch of their human lives, even though they knew at the time it wouldn’t and couldn’t last, they had touched and become as God when they voluntarily and in advance forgave one another for all that each knew the other could never be.
William Faulkner

...so...do I really need to piss somebody off to get me some?...

...of course, the question may be, ultimately, kind of academic, since, let’s face it, anybody who knows me well enough to love me has had to forgive me for all kindsa crap...

...and I’m grateful for that...

...so...for what it's worth...this blog sends out forgiveness to you who are reading it...regardless of whether you've done anything wrong...





*I also hereby forgive anybody who missed the irony in my latest Elephant article*

Old Walt

All truths wait in all things...
Walt Whitman

...I’m recycling myself again, from a comment left on Brooks’ latest blog post...which I was enticed into...even though I always read her anyway...by one of my favorite Whitman poems when I first read him twenty years ago...but that I'd almost completely forgotten until I saw those first few words...unseen buds, infinite, hidden well...god, how I love old Walt...Leaves of Grass remaining probably the closest thing my intrinsically vague personal religion has to a holy book...

...gotta admit I didn’t like him particularly at first...reading bits of Song of Myself and maybe some other stuff in an American Lit class...didn’t do a thing for me, really...but for some reason knew there was something I was missing...got a copy of Leaves of Grass, walked a mile through the woods from campus to the beach on Puget Sound to sit on rocks and open to random pages...generally reading small poems like unseen buds...

...I still have that copy, though it’s fallen apart, gotten yellow and crinkly after living in my backpack through my serious backpacking years...up and down the Appalachians and Rockies, across Zion and Canyonlands and Arches, to the top of the San Francisco Peaks and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where I spent my twenty ninth birthday and the pack got clawed open by a ringtail cat during the night...

...more recently, taught Song of Myself to students at a couple different colleges...making sure to point out the significance of I loaf and invite my soul...which is, essentially, that it’s Whitman’s instruction on how to read the poem...and, as such, the complete antithesis of reading it in a classroom where they’d be required to write a paper about it and end up being graded on their performance, as I was having them do...and told them something like if you really want to understand this poem, read it on your own when you don’t have to worry about papers or grades...preferably lying in the grass or sitting on a beach on Puget Sound, or way down in the Grand Canyon...but be sure to hang your backpack properly...