The Christmas Yoga Mat (a really deep and touching holiday story for the whole family)

The photo below is of the yoga mat I’ve been using for the past year or so...or, more specifically, the family Christmas tree, as seen through one of the larger holes in the mat I’ve been using for the past year or so...

 ...whereas this one is my fancy-schmancy so-heavy-it’s-gonna-add-a-whole-new-level-of-athletic-challenge-to-biking-to-yoga-class, ready-to-be-used-by-cockroaches-and-Keith-Richards-after-a-nuclear-war, 85-inch (since, to me, nothing says yoga more than being able to tell the guy next to me "mine’s bigger than yours"), brand new Christmas miracle Manduka mat...under the same tree...

 ...so, needless to say, since this is, of course, one of those ever-so-deep-and-spiritual yoga blogs, there’s a far deeper and more spiritual message here...when you really think about it...with your heart, as well as your mind...about renewal and hope and...um...peace on earth...or something...

...okay, it’s basically a very crass and materialistic kinda modern Christmas story about getting cool new stuff...(kinda like I wrote about here)...

...I’ll try to be more deep and spiritual, next time....for now, oh man, am I psyched about my new yoga mat...

Happy Holidays, y’all...

Notes on the Winter Solstice and Our Most Recent Apocalypse

...I swear apocalypses are happening every couple months these days...whether based on the Book of Revelations, Mayan Prophecies, or somebody just having a bad day and spreading the news on Facebook....but, like I always say, who doesn’t need a good Apocalypse now and then?

Apocalypse, we’ve all been there,

The same old tricks, what should we care?

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

...been watching this movie called Decasia: The State of Decay...made up completely of old film stock that’s breaking down...in some cases almost completely melted...leaving only ghostly, rapidly disappearing traces of whatever hopes and dreams went in to it, whatever was meant to preserved...images lost and devolving into chaos, soon to be nothing....and, by the way, it makes a really cool-looking movie to space out to...
 

Oh well. If the world doesn't end tonight, it's not the end of the world.
Salman Rushdie

...in addition to being the Apocalypse, the day that just ended here on the east coast of the United States was also, of course, the winter solstice...when darkness reaches its peak for the year, only to gradually give way to light, day by day, until the process reverses itself six months from now....works for me...

Somewhere Between the Hotel Chelsea and Nirvana...

...who knew that Dharma Mittra has his home base a mere block or two from the legendary Hotel Chelsea...home to great authors and musicians, alcoholics, junkies, great alcoholic and junkie authors and musicians, and, no doubt, lots of not-so-great authors and musicians, alcoholics, junkies, and otherwise...where Dylan Thomas may or may not have raged raged before succumbing to the dying of the light, Arthur C. Clarke wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey, Sid Vicious murdered Nancy Spungen, and Bob Dylan pined for the woman he’d marry, bear children with, and, through a process detailed over three or four truly classic rock n’ roll albums, divorce...

...stayin’ up for days in the Chelsea Hotel, writin’ Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands for you...

Bob Dylan

...in Dharma’s class even the pranayama kicks my ass....a truly yogic exercise, perhaps, is learning to be cool about the fact that everybody else in the room is doing handstands in full lotus and I’m just kinda squatting there ‘cause it’s the best I can do....after the two-hour class, Dharma recommends lunch at the vegan place across the street....got a thai “chicken” wrap and an ultra-natural but still tasty cupcake....but somehow not enough to get me all the way back to lower Manhattan, an hour walk along Broadway where I can’t help but grab a couple slices of cheap pizza...

...whiskey bottle over Jesus, not forever, just for now...

Uncle Tupelo

...couple glasses o’ wine and a beer, with mom in the fancy assisted living apartment watching Netflix, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf...based on the Edward Albee play...now those people are fucked up....been writing with a fever this past week or two, like I haven’t in way too long...makes me wanna move into the Chelsea Hotel with a beaten up old manual Smith Corona and a crate full o' whiskey bottles..and how convenient it’d be to be right down the street from Dharma’s yoga studio...

...He never supposed divine
Things might not look divine, nor that if nothing
Was divine then all things were, the world itself,
And that if nothing was the the truth, then all
Things were the truth, the world itself was the truth.

Wallace Stevens

Life is Messy

often, the state of the kitchen is the state of the mind, confused and unsure men, pliable men, are the thinkers. their kitchens are like their minds, cluttered with garbage, dirty ware, impurity, but they are aware of their mind-state and find some humor in it. at times, with a violent burst of fire they defy the eternal deities and come up with a lot of shining that we sometimes call creation.... the man with the ever-orderly kitchen is the freak.... his kitchen is his mind-state: all in order, settled, he has let life condition him quickly to a basened and hardened complex of defensive and soothing thought-order....

Charles Bukowski

...badly underemployed and working on a novel about dysfunctional superheroes...biking downtown daily for the most intense and demanding vinyasa yoga classes I can find...discovering new ways and means for exploring and exploiting edges...leaving a pile of sweaty t-shirts, along with other laundry, by last week grown to the point that now I don’t want to deal with it simply because there’s too much to carry...sunlight can, now, be seen through four significant areas of my yoga mat...in line with hands and feet...which might seem cool in a sunny, happy, yoga hippie kinda way...put it in the right words along with a picture of a sunset and it’ll get a thousand “likes” on Facebook...but maybe, really, I just need a new mat, badly...writing about other people’s books*...piled around the deteriorating Ikea chair friends find so comforting...mp3 player blasting X, Cat Power, Mary Halvorson, Arvo Part, Frank Zappa, Miles Davis, and the Stones’ Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out...coffee ready if I can get up the gumption to go and pour a cup this early in the morning...glasses held together with tape on both sides under disheveled hair badly in need of basic grooming....for a while, I was getting haircuts from this old guy who’d be asleep in the chair when I got there, and I’d have to yell to tell him how I wanted it cut...the last time, he seemed so out of it, didn’t even ask...

....one thing you have to get used to living in the big city is that it never really gets dark...wildlife is the birds always coming and going from the power lines outside my windows, their flight sometimes causing shadows inside the apartment, making me think, for a moment, that they’re in here with me...

...Democracy is messy, by definition...the trouble with the concept of heaven is that none of us, in the long run, could really be comfortable there...an eternity of having our every failing magnified in comparison to the perfection all around...messiness is our condition, underneath all the careful ordering and cleaning products...but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to do something with that pile of dirty laundry, and soon...

* my latest rants & reviews at Elephant Journal: Addressing the Question of Whether Matthew Remski should be burned at the stake for Yogic Heresy and Ahimsa Be Damned: When Buddhists Attack...

Thankful Kinda Haiku

still sunlight in waves,

bare toes in cold November

sand, thinking, always

Post-Apocalyptic Self-Promotion

...Sandy, the semi-mythical Jersey girl Bruce Springsteen sang about and, apparently, spurned, so that she came back decades later to wreck the Jersey shore, has moved on...or maybe that conscious universe the yoga crowd’s always talking about caught an episode of Jersey Shore and decided to get all Old Testament on it...taking lower Manhattan and Red Hook Brooklyn...(which I know about from that Dylan tune...yes, I do comprehend the world through a lens of 70's rock ballads)...and much of the eastern seaboard with it....here in Philly, I’m finishing up a can of Mad Max brand dog food...Mad Max: The Dog Food Mad Max Eats!...and hoping to head out later for Tina Turner’s post-apocalyptic vinyasa class at Thunderdome...

...alright, enough snarky pop-cultural references...in the post-apocalyptic wasteland,* it’s self-preservation that counts...along with its dear acquaintance self-promotion...and so, I come bearing a cornucopia of  links: to my latest breathlessly self-indulgent book reviews, Yoga in America: Containing Multitudes and The Yoga of Biking: Pedal, Stretch, Breathe, as well as a first-ever interview with the Yoga Cynic (who manages to be sarcastic only about 73.2% of the time), all at Elephant Journal...read 'em, "like" 'em, share 'em, tweet 'em, make 'em central to your way of life and essential belief system...

* Totally Serious Postscript: actually went biking around Philly with a camera on Tuesday, hoping to get some good  pics of the local devastation for this post....it kinda looked like we’d had a bit of rain....thankfully, not only did Philly get through with little damage, but friends and family in harder-hit areas in NYC, NJ, and rural PA also got through unscathed, though some are still waiting to get power back....others, of course, weren’t so lucky, so here’s a link for anyone looking to help out the many still in need...

Bruce Springsteen's Shrink and the Overused Metaphor of the Lotus Flower

...was readin’ this New Yorker article about Bruce Springsteen...as usual with magazines, I read somebody else's copy, months after the fact....Ezra Pound said that literature is news that stays news...and, though old Ezra probably wouldn’t have thought so, the same might be said for the occasional magazine article about a rock star...(though probably not even the occasional blog post about a magazine article about a rock star)....anyway...

...apparently, back in the early 80’s, Bruce was suffering from serious depression...leading to some odd behavior...

For years, he would drive at night past his parents’ old house in Freehold, sometimes three or four times a week. In 1982, he started seeing a psychotherapist. At a concert years later, Springsteen introduced his song “My Father’s House” by recalling what the therapist had told him about those nighttime trips to Freehold: “He said, ‘what you’re doing is that something bad happened, and you’re going back, thinking that you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it or somehow make it right.’ And I sat there and I said, ‘That is what I’m doing.’ And he said, ‘Well, you can’t.’”

...thinking about this, some of my own odd behavior makes a lot more sense....as if Bruce Springsteen’s shrink did more for me than some mental health professionals who’ve taken outrageous amounts of my time and money...

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

James Joyce

Lost but not forgotten from the dark heart of a dream...

Bruce Springsteen, Adam Raised a Cain

 

...one of the most overused metaphors in the yoga world...where overusing metaphors is practically its own asana...is the lotus flower blooming from the muck...but, when muck is what ya got, there are really only two choices...stay down and wallow, or rise up...