Van Gogh Up Close

...on a grey and almost-rainy Groundhog Day, unable to work in more than dribbles in drabs...under-stimulated by a mild winter, yet overwhelmed by matters I won’t go into, here...decided to take a chilly bike ride downtown, ending up stopping in at the turn-around point, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, surprised to find out tickets were available on an early Thursday afternoon for the new exhibit, Van Gogh Up Close...

...walking in, felt a smile opening somewhere inside on seeing Sunflowers...followed by a colorful intensity of old boots, clouds, lilies, wheat fields, raindrops, blades of grass, hay bales, tree trunks and muck....thankfully, security was lax enough I didn’t get in trouble for peering so closely at glorious gobs of paint sticking out from the canvases...receiving quiet lessons in the seemingly limitless possibilities of paying attention...of stopping for just a moment to take in just a smidgen of the full experience of whatever happens to be directly in front of oneself at any moment...of simply seeing...

But never mind, I think I am not going to urge you too much to read books or dramas, seeing that I myself, after reading them for some time, feel obliged to go out and look at a blade of grass, the branch of a fir tree, an ear of wheat, in order to calm down. So if you want to do, as the artists do, go look at the red and white poppies with their bluish leaves, their buds soaring on gracefully bent stems. The hours of trouble and strife will know how to find us without our going to look for them.
Vincent van Gogh (Letter to Wilhelmina van Gogh, Saint-Rémy, 2 July 1889)

Livin' In Your Own Private Apocalypse

When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.
Haruki Murakami

…2012 less than a month old, I’m starting to suspect the Mayans may’ve been right...but, apparently, they were just talking about me…

…have written up a couple of different versions of a post with this title...(apologies to the B-52's as well as John the Revelator)…decided the first was too dark, personal, and downright depressing…so, a week or so later, re-did it…before rapidly deciding the second version was also too dark, personal, and downright depressing…

…so, perhaps, it’s just as well my hard drive went kablooey earlier this afternoon...after yin yoga class and the Sunday morning meditation group....taking with it those attempted posts and some personal writing too miserable to even be considered for this merry-if-sometimes-mildly-sardonic blog...if not the thoughts and feelings that inspired them, though it does feel just a bit like an expensive and unexpected cleaning of the slate...along with, apart from some handwritten notes, most of the work done on a project I was hoping to complete this weekend, which I’m gonna be really busy re-doing for the next couple days...which, at least, makes me a bit grateful I haven’t been all that productive in the past few weeks since last backing up files...

...even seasonal depression, apparently, has its uses...keeping the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men modest...as well as providing an excuse to support my local Girl Scouts and scarf down an entire box of Thin Mints...

...and, who knows...maybe we could all use a little apocalypse now and then...

Yoga Cynic Koan #45987

.

.

.

.

~ Is a kale smoothie still a kale smoothie if you add tequila? ~

.

.

.

.

.

Meditating Into 2012

...sitting quietly on an old striped cushion I’ve found...Coltrane playing Greensleeves softly on the mp3 player, mixing suddenly with sounds of fireworks....I remain sitting a few minutes more...

...upstairs in mom’s house, where I’m spending the weekend, the house where I grew up, home to memories and dust motes that never fail to make me sneeze...last night mom told me about rolling Easter eggs on the White House lawn during the Hoover administration...she met Eleanor Roosevelt and Bette Davis, voted against Joe McCarthy, and said she was going to bed as soon as 2012 hit...

...2011 might be called my year of lots of yoga and not a hell of a lot else...yoga teacher training and, eventually, just a little bit of actual teaching, then more training, and a bit more teaching...and even more practicing...earlier this evening drove downtown for my last class of the year, two hours with the legendary Simon Park and a live DJ...mat so drenched with sweat halfway through I could barely move without slipping, but that was okay...felt like I died and came back more than once, and that was good, too...

...2012’s first sunrise yet to come and I’m seeing a lot of daunting challenges, probably some of the biggest I've faced in life, straight ahead...(and I'm not talking about Mayan prophecies)...walls to walk through, waves to ride....endless opportunities to breath, relax, feel, watch, allow...and repeat...

The Interweb Quote of the Year!!!

One thing this blog’s kinda been known for is the quotations peppered through its posts...often making its original writing pale in comparison, but, then, so it goes...(Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five). Of course, in this, it's taking part in that greatest of postmodern practices, which has flowered so fully on the interwebs: using other people's stuff for lack of anything original to express. So, in honor of all that, the staff here would like to share the first (and probably last) annual Yoga for Cynics Interweb Quotation of the Year!

Certainly, in the year 2011, nothing else came close to the profundity, timeliness, or sheer ubiquity of:

Something I never actually said.
The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thank you, thank you.

Runners Up include:

The timeless:

Something kinda new-agey I certainly didn’t say, and that probably wouldn’t really fit with my philosophy or beliefs, either...
Rumi, the Buddha, and/or Albert Einstein

And more topical:

Something I did say, but taken so far out of context that it seems to mean the complete opposite of what it meant in-context.
Barack Obama

And, finally, who could forget:

Of course we’re going to riot....What do they expect when they tell us at 10 o’clock that they fired our football coach?
Student, Penn State, November 9, 2011

Happy new year, folks...

The Yoga Cynic Speaks of Rivers* (and “Real Yoga”)

It’s comin’ on Christmas, they’re cuttin’ down trees
They’re puttin’ up reindeer, singin’ songs of joy and peace,
Oh, I wish I had a river I could skate away on...
Joni Mitchell

I am the river, and, therefore, a connecting thread between the living and the dead, just like the stories that speak to us in the night, I take on the likeness of past times and past events too, I am the river. But the river is just the river. Nothing more.
Javier Marías

...was in the café, post-meditation, imbibing that special kinda prana known as coffee...when this guy at the next table started talking about yoga...specifically, real yoga****...

...if you feel the need to brag about your practice, it’s probably nothing to brag about...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 451:968

...how great, generally, his practice is...how any real yogi is vegetarian...how much better ashtanga is than other kinds of yoga... how much better ashtanga yoga is than sitting meditation...since, y’know, anybody can sit in a dark room*****....somewhere in there, I turned my headphones back on...(one o’ those yamas or niyamas has gotta say something about eavesdropping)...



* apologies to Langston Hughes...**

** and, yeah, I know, apart from the quotes, the post really doesn’t have anything to do with rivers*** (that’s not even a river in the picture...it’s the Wissahickon Creek...though it did get pretty river-like last summer when it flooded)...

*** or maybe it does....whaddaya want me to do?!...explain my metaphors to you?!...

**** real yoga (noun): the kind of yoga I happen to practice. (antonym: whatever kinda yoga you happen to practice) (courtesy, the Yoga Cynic’s Dictionary)

***** leaving me thinking that, given how much difficulty I’d experienced sitting in a semi-lighted room for forty-five minutes, struggling with drowsiness, a laundry-list of physical discomforts, and a, one might say, river of past, present, and future troubles, a mere hour or so before, I may just barely qualify as anybody...******

****** which, now that I think of it, could mean I’m on the threshold of transcending individuation and a realizing ultimate oneness with the universe....have to look that one up...

The More Un-Yogic, the Better?

What is here is elsewhere; what is not here is nowhere.
Vishva-Sara-Tantra

Folks, you know I’ve never been a fan of yoga. If I wanted to spend all day on the ground sweating in a contorted position, I would eat another gas station hot dog.
Stephen Colbert

...sometimes I arrive at yoga class in what might not be considered the most, y’know, yogic mood...at some strange juncture in a difficult day, full of anxiety, anger, and/or general misery, exacerbated by the trip to yoga class, driving through traffic in the rain or nearly getting plowed into by a truck on my bike...or nearly getting plowed into by a truck on my bike in the rain, the guy who nearly killed me though I had the right of way having the nerve to yell at me...you get the idea...leaving me tromping in and rolling out my mat in a an utterly wired and generally negative frenzy....really, there couldn't be a better time to practice yoga...

...making me especially grateful for these kind, calm, and centered teachers who help me to let go...

...though, of course, as I’m learning, now, it’s a bit more complicated...or maybe simpler, but more difficult...if, ultimately, more rewarding for that...when I am the yoga teacher...