Strap Yerself to a Tree With Roots (Building From the Ground Up, Part Four)

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...

Hello, Cleveland?

...I’m thinking about reading some blog stuff at this open mike at a local coffee shop this Saturday*...............................you heard it right...that's:

*****YOGA FOR CYNICS—ABSOLUTELY LIVE!!!!*****

...which means, yes, the cozy anonymity and serene dignity of the yogi blogger’s staid, quiet life, typing away and silently meditating like an aesthetically sensitive urban anchorite, a mystic radical subsisting on prana, stale bread, and the sad solemn songs of the heart in his dusty, book-lined, cheap incense-scented garret...lost, forsaken, repudiated for the tantalizing allure of footlights...the empty glare and ever elusive satiety of fame and glory...

...and who knows where things could go from there...

...screaming fans, endorsement deals, and giant bowls of M&M's...(minus the brown ones)...promoters, bodyguards, and ostentatious sunglasses worn indoors...a life of outrageous, excess, tired tour buses, trashed hotel rooms, jaded groupies, and absurd quantities of booze and dangerous drugs...the hopelessly compromised artist's desperation in trying, at first, to hold on to lofty ideals and integrity in a crazed whirlwind of contracts, parties, frenzied dissipation, and increasingly expensive habits...squandered talents, supermodels, private jets, and paranoia...teenage angst has paid off well, now I’m bored and old...fulfilling an endless round of contractual obligations, only now and then wistfully remembering the days when it meant something more than than a vain struggle to maintain a decadent lifestyle worthy of a Viking chieftain or Borgia pope...

...sounds cool...in a way.................maybe I’ll skip it...



* the High Point at Allen’s Lane, West Mt. Airy, State of Caffeinated Samadhi, USA, sometime between 2:00 and 4:00 PM

Tonight's Fortune Cookie

...kitchen so small in the new place it’s not exactly curbing my tendency to get take-out instead of putting in time and effort to make dinner...particularly not with that Chinese place down the road with its five buck heaping portions of General Tso’s and rice...deep frying, high fat content, MSG—check, check, check...does it help at all that I biked the half mile or so and back for it?

...there’s also the ongoing cold and wet that’s making Philly in June more like Seattle in April...I’m a negative creep, I’m a negative creep, I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned...Kurt Cobain...been there, done that, of course, but not now...

...now I’m sitting in my mellow room after midnight, reading poems and typing away on another blog post...was getting heated there for a bit, reading politics on the web...which, of course, is outside the purview of the mellow room...but, then, the number one rule of the mellow room is that if I break the mellow room’s rules, it’s not a big deal...

For now, my life is enough. There’s not much more to expect.
Simon J. Ortiz

...still going to four yoga classes and biking between fifty and a hundred miles most weeks...cut down to not-too-much-more-than a mug of coffee a day months ago and, amazingly enough, have stuck to it...even if I’ve started drinking soda again...don’t drink much alcohol, though...don’t smoke anything...so, all in all, really not doing badly...even if...oh, god, do I love junk food...that fortune cookie merely a final sugary bite to cap off the day’s indulgence...but it's alright...

...and its fortune, as it turns out, was memorable enough to cap off this post...

Don’t ask, don’t say.
Everything lies in silence.

Possible Yoga Terrorists and Paranoia Striking...Somewhat Shallowly

...back when I was a serious political activist, my friends all thought they were being watched...positive all the vegan potlucks were under tight surveillance...spies in every circle of self-affirmation....the international combine quaking in fear at the thought of kids temporarily out of school knocking on doors to save whales, smoking bongs till they couldn't form coherent sentences, talking about but not actually reading Marx, and blasting early Zappa at three A.M....one guy I knew went for months telling all the freaks at the local co-op the CIA was watching his every move, getting little in response but yeah, I’m pretty sure they’re watchin’ me, too before finally being diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic....

Just because you’re paranoid don’t mean they’re not after you....
Kurt Cobain

...which is not to say that I don’t think anybody’s out to get me...hell, every time I get stuck behind some jalopy going ten miles under the speed limit, I’m sure it’s part of a conspiracy to mess with my life...for that matter, in the late 60’s, when I was a little kid, my dad, a psychiatrist—yeah, I know, that explains a lot...shaddup—ran into a guy he’d had committed...on the street...and the guy said I know where your children play...and, as it turned out, he did...Rittenhouse Square in Philly...whenever I’m down that way I keep my eyes out for that guy, likely in his eighties or so, possibly moving about with a walker, still looking to abduct me after all these years....

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
George Orwell, 1984

I’ve been asked to be a community organizer for my local yoga friends...or sangha if ya wanna get all spiritual, sanctimonious, and Sanskrit-like about it...creating some kind of on-line entity, I think, and maybe more...might have to hug people or something...not too clear on that point at this juncture....anyway, I know what yer thinking...how might this community organizing crap impact any plans I might have to run for the Office of the Presidency of the United States of America?

Jesus was a community organizer...
The Internet

It’s a real concern, too...just who are these people?...how do I know none of them have dark pasts as yoga terrorists? how do I know, a few election cycles from now, I won’t be seeing video clips at every commercial break showing a seemingly mild and benevolent yoga teacher saying as you move from uttanasana to utkanasana, visualize death to America...?

Meditations on Nirvana

it was shortly after finishing the Appalachian Trail that I found Nirvana... oh...wait a second...excuse me...I meant the band...sorry for any confusion...as mentioned, I’d tumbled down from the mountains pretty hard...no money no job no home no girlfriend no plans no nothin’...worse yet, I felt I’d found my paradise only to realize I couldn’t stay there...which, I understand, is actually a common experience among those who’ve gone off to the Far East to do the Buddhist thing...at least that’s what Bill Murray said in The Razor’s Edge...so it was fitting that a friend I stopped in with in Boston on the way down to Philly from Maine took me to a series of bars and in, I think, the one after the strip club, put “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on the jukebox...hello hello hello how low...and then that, living at my parents’ house that Fall, reliving adolescence at 26, I bought the Nevermind CD, which was still new then... and anything else they put out as 26 turned to 27 and '92 became '93 and I really got into...I’m a negative creep I’m a negative creep I’m a negative creep and I’m stoned!...and I liked the fact that Kurt Cobain was about my age, when up to that point I’d mostly listened to people who were a good deal older...even though he was a rock star and I wasn’t...though he still seemed just about as miserable...I’m so ugly that’s okay cuz so are you...and that then, a year and a half or so later, when I was on my way out to Arizona to start grad school...leaving mid spring though school didn’t start till Fall...to spend a wasted summer in the high desert before starting the work of getting my life together...kinda thrilled and kinda revolted that the grunge thing had suddenly made my worn out jeans, flannel shirts, shaggy hair, and tendency not to shave too often stylish...when I stopped with some friends in Boulder and got snowed in at their geodesic dome in the mountains...I'm on a plain I can't complain...I heard that Kurt Cobain had blown his own face off...aqua seafoam shame...and felt like I’d dodged a bullet myself...