Haiku?

 

 



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...

Bellying Up to the Bardo

There’s a new edition of Dante’s “Inferno” that’s recently begun appearing in bookstores. Same words. Different cover. It’s got a big picture of a muscular fellow in a spiky crown and an overline that says, “The literary classic that inspired the epic video game.”
David Itzikoff, New York Times January 30, 2010

...nearly got run over by Chubby Checker crossing the street in the outer suburbs this one time, maybe twenty years ago...a couple miles from where I’ve been told he lives...in the center turning lane, about to finish crossing, and this bright red sports car heading straight for me, braking a split second before I’d have ended up laid out like a broken hood ornament...and there, through the windshield glass, for just a moment, the unmistakable strangely smiling face of the guy who did The Twist...

The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that's really swell.
Pema Chodron

...another time, kicked a rattlesnake...the year after hiking the Appalachian Trail...a difficult period...seemed like I’d found what I loved...walking through the woods all day...every day...but it wasn’t exactly sustainable...living with my folks for a while, working temp office jobs, delivering flowers, doing whatever was needed for a friend’s tie-dye business, getting baked and eating a lot...took a trip down south in the spring to meet up with trail people and get out in the mountains again...including this one afternoon, running along the A.T. just below Shenandoah National Park...at one point said hi to this lovely little family...mom and pop and two towheaded young boys...and moved on...saw a stick lying across the trail...not a big one...didn’t bother avoiding it with the toe of my boot....and whoosh it shot off into the underbrush...which appeared, to me, to lie somewhat outside the standard behavioral patterns of the average stick....stopping and turning around, saw the copperhead, coiled, tail shaking, just by the side of the trail....waited a couple minutes to let the adorable little family catch up so I could warn them away from it before moving on again...

There...will never be any more perfection than there is now,

Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.
Walt Whitman

...meditation...formal or otherwise...can, at its best...or worst, depending on one’s perspective...be like walking through an inferno...dropping defenses...letting flames lick what they will, demons scream their threats of annihilation...facing all that, then seeing what emerges on the other side...

Maybe it’s been too long a time since I was scramblin’ down in the street...

...still midwinter...following weeks of writing about misery and nostalgia for happy teenaged years that never happened...see recent posts...and not much else...had a conversation with somebody about a not-too-expensive trip to Costa Rica...involving a week...(coinciding, coincidentally enough, with my forty-fourth birthday)...at a distant Pacific beach...lounging out, doing yoga, letting wintry eyes get lost in tropical skies...five hour bus rides across the Central American countryside, nights hosteling in San Jose...and brief layovers at George Bush International Airport...yeah, really...at each end...just a matter of weeks away...but still way beyond my budget...

...I said okay, I’ll go...

...given the details, seems like travelin' light's gonna be the way...perhaps limiting myself to one bag...toothbrush, a few shirts, changes of underwear, a book or two...and...here it comes...seriously...no c.o.m.p.u.t.e.r...

...though working my habit-driven mind around that concept may take a while....have avoided these crazy interwebs on yoga retreats in the past...mostly...but...to forsake this metal and plastic block containing my writing, music, pictures, etc., entirely...haven’t done that for so much as a day in a long, long time....which, actually, makes it seem all the more a good idea...

...maybe it’s been too long a time since I was scramblin’ down in the street...
Joni Mitchell

...used to go for months living out of a backpack...no ipod or cellphone, either...(for that matter, they weren’t even invented yet)...leaving the pack with everything in it in an almost complete stranger’s unlocked van to go see a rock band, harboring little doubt it was worth the risk...sitting on the rocks by a little Greek village in Paros, finding a strange contentment in being so far from anything familiar, anyone who knew my name...scrawling life is good all along the northern reaches of the Appalachian Trail, happy with being warm and well fed, nothing too blatantly feeding on me... unencumbered...relatively speaking...

...not to suggest running away as a solution to anything...nor to romanticize poverty...or a rootless life based on amassing frequent flyer miles like George Clooney in that movie....what’s important, I suspect, isn’t to escape from anything...or even to refuse oneself that new i-Pad thing everybody suddenly needs...(I’m certainly not about to preach asceticism a mere couple paragraphs down from saying I'm gonna go jetting off for a week of downward facing dog in the tropics)...

...voluntary simplicity is a wonderful thing...so long as you remember that, for most of the world, there’s nothing voluntary...or simple...about it...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Sutra 333:76

...but to realize you’re complete with or without all that...non-attachment not in the sense of breaking off from anything...but realizing none of it was ever truly essential to you in the first place...

...thanks to April for the photo of some unidentified individual standing in a Rocky Mountain meadow...

Notes from a Postmodern Yogi...Bear

...always been a big guy...bit on the hairy side...kinda slow and lumbering...with a sweet tooth...and a grouchy temper....have been referred to as that big lumberjack guy...but, far more often, as a bear...uso, in Spanish....apparently, if I were gay, that’d make me part of a subculture...but, then, I’ve generally fit in with subcultures only slightly better than with the larger cultures they exist on the fringes of, so maybe it’s just as well...even if it was kinda cool for a while when the grunge look came along and I was suddenly fashionable...but those things never last...

I turn into a bear every so often. I feel myself becoming a bear, and that’s a struggle I have to face now and then.
N. Scott Momaday

...have seen seven bears in the wild...the first, in the Tuolumne Meadows campground in Yosemite, was huge...seemingly fearless as it ravaged campers’ picnic supplies...turning to show its teeth and moving as if to charge when people got too close...which was certainly all the message I needed...though, after a while, a ranger came along, picked up a few pebbles and got the bear running with a few well aimed throws at its gigantic furry ass....the other six were along the Appalachian Trail...mostly crashing through underbrush at great speeds to get away from apparent danger...me....and then, maybe a week after the last, in the wilds of New Jersey...really...saw a few in cages, also just along the trail, down below Bear Mountain in New York, near the Walt Whitman statue...where tourists from the city shot me ugly looks, assuming, apparently, by my backpack and dirty, hairy thru-hiker's appearance, that I wasn’t the kind of person they wanted anywhere near their picnics...

And the number one threat to America is... Bears.
Stephen Colbert

...modern society wasn’t built with bears in mind...that much is clear...a culture of frenzied production and consumption looking ever askance at hibernations of any length, as well as the furry wildness of bears, in general...

“Well,” said Pooh, “we keep looking for Home and not finding it, so I thought that if we looked for this Pit, we’d be sure not to find it, which would be a Good Thing, because then we might find something that we weren’t looking for, which might be just what we were looking for, really.”
A. A. Milne

...haven’t been too productive lately...somewhat indolent...attempts at decisive action like swimming through viscous sludge...struggling a bit, and then sinking...down through the floor, into the earth...to hibernate, like postmodern bears do, with the i-pod, DVD player and cheap greasy food from the Chinese take-out place down the street...but also books, yoga mat, and meditation cushion...making me a postmodern yogi bear...and I’ll crawl out when I’m good and ready...

So meet a bear and take him out to lunch with you
And even though your friends may stop and stare
Just remember that's a bear there in the bunch with you
And they just don't come no better than a bear
Lyle Lovett

Containing Multitudes...

...full disclosure: though technically a native of the big city, where I lived until just before my fourth birthday, when the family moved to the country...which can’t be blamed for being so quickly and easily swallowed by intractable forces of urban blight, white flight, and omni-ravenous sprawl...I am, in the end, one of that peculiarly modern tribe often held up as representative of just about everything wrong with American life today...a suburbanite...

...though, given the state of lonely misery in which my formative suburban years were largely spent, at least I can attest to never having been a very good one...


...for a long time, identified as a country mouse...and a rather militant one, at that...at one point, living amidst the screaming multitudes with their noise, anger, fear, and madness exploding it seemed on every corner of Boston or San Francisco, wrote a short story describing the tall buildings as tombstones for the forests, meadows, and multitudinous life they replaced...concluding with an ominous yet, to my mind, optimistic rumbling...

...and, in time, did my best to get away...backpacked all over the Rockies and southwestern deserts, lived in cabins, trailers and tents...hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine....and all that was certainly good...the fresh air, the trees, and the peaceful feeling I still can get tromping along a trail through the woods...but there was always some element of escape in it...of needing to run away from people...dreaming, at my worst, of a day when I’d never have to see anybody, except on periodic supply runs...

...so, the gradual emergence of the city mouse came as a surprise...as, kicking back in northern Arizona, I found myself longing for live music, bookstores, museums, and that strangely vibrant feeling of walking-down-the-sidewalk, life’s machinery rushing by at a sometimes frightening pace on one side, tall, deep, and unmoving on the other...the dance of diversity and discord, with its near-infinite commingling and conflicts...of which, it must be confessed, I am an inextricable part...

Flowers In the Ruins...

These fragments I have shored against my ruins...
T. S. Eliot

...for a little while, worked on a trail crew in Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia...where some hundred and thirty or so years earlier John Brown tried, and failed, almost single-handedly, to free the slaves....since it was late fall, rapidly turning to winter, the Park Service let us use an building in the old section of town...people crammed three or four to a room, and, when I showed up, the only available bed was in a room with an older guy who snored like a rhinoceros with a bad case of gas....as it turned out, though, there was another room...practically a suite...with its own bathroom...and a couch...empty in the basement...apparently somebody’d drowned a hundred or so years earlier, and everybody said it was haunted....I dragged my mattress down there without a second thought...

...we were dragging these massive slabs of rocks down a hill to build this great big staircase on the Appalachian Trail, right below an old graveyard overlooking the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers...where Thomas Jefferson said something really impressive...and, a few years after I was there, Bill Clinton and Al Gore pretended for the cameras to lay the final stone for the project we’d actually completed that winter....what I liked, though, was the way the ground was like waves, swallowing up the gravestones...just like they’d eventually end up swallowing our gigantic slabs...and all of Harper’s Ferry, and every last trace of John Brown or the guy who died in that basement, and me...

The first glance of this scene hurries our senses into the opinion that this earth has been created in time, that the mountains were formed first, that the rivers began to flow afterwards, that in this place particularly they have been so dammed up by the Blue Ridge of mountains as to have formed an ocean which filled the whole valley; that, continuing to rise, they have at last broken over at this spot and have torn the mountain down from its summit to its base.
Thomas Jefferson

...I’ve always had a thing for ruins...ghost towns...cliff dwellings...pyramids....is it morbid of me to find it kind of comforting to see peoples’ proudest accomplishments gradually crumbling into dust...the best laid plans of mice and men reclaimed by dirt and grass?

...when in Rome...this was the spring of 1987...I loved walking around the Forum...seat of the Roman Empire...where, according to Shakespeare...who I have no reason to doubt...Mark Antony, standing over the multiple stab wounds of Julius Caesar, yelled Cry "Havoc!" and let slip the dogs of war, That this foul deed shall smell above the earth...by that time, though, it was nothing but ancient ruins covered with wildflowers...revealing that, though sticking flowers into gun barrels may not have ended the war in Vietnam, flowers will, in the end, win out...

...it's all too easy to become anxious about being anxious...just as I can become depressed worrying about getting depressed...all in all, it all comes down to lingering remnants of the past....the question is, what kind of flowers am I letting grow out of my ruins?

Questions to Meditate On...Or Not...

This is the third Yoga for Cynics post in the past week or so that’s featured the word not prominently in the title—could my need for this yoga retreat in Mexico thingy be any more stark?

In the immortal words of Neil Young: tell me why is it hard to make arrangements with yourself when you’re old enough to re-paint but young enough to sell?

What the hell does that mean?

Before Mexico, I’m taking a shorter trip...to New York City....could anything be more appropriate before a yoga retreat than a visit to the world capital of angst?

In the words of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: work and work for love and sex, ain’t you hungry for success success success success? Does it matter?

Are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards people you'd normally turn to for a critique of materialism?

Is to be or not to be really the question?

Why is a person with love considered a loser in tennis?

Is it possible to snort crystal meth mindfully?

Do you think there are people who fantasize about masturbation during sex?

Written in a shelter register on the Appalachian Trail in a very wet month of May, 1992: if April showers bring May flowers, what do May showers bring?

In the words of a guy named “Rudi” in Stephen Cope’s The Wisdom of Yoga: in the end, we all have to write our own scriptures, don’t we?

Apocalypse Here and Now (Kind of a Movie Review #3)

The first time I saw Apocalypse Now was when it first came out, on big screen. I was somewhere around twelve years old, expecting a cool war movie—and why not? War seemed a whole hell of a lot more fun than those peace-loving sentiments associated with the incredible boredom of having to sit through Quaker meeting every Sunday...but wasn’t expecting to see that family get blown to pieces for a puppy, or the guy holding in his guts and begging for water, or the mother’s voice on the tape that kept playing, wishing for the safe return of the son lying dead, or the hanging bodies...the horror, the horror...and so, with the Reagan/Bush era that, thirty years later, we have yet to leave behind looming a mere year or two in the future, I felt my first glimmer of political consciousness...Charlie don’t surf to this day sounding like as good a three word summation of a half century's foreign policy as anyone’s likely to hear...as well as a good Clash song...though a decade later, already burned out as a left wing anti-war activist, and watching it again on VHS, smoke far less toxic than that from napalm filling the air, I thought whooooah...this shit’s trippy...particularly the opening sequence and ending, comprising what is without a doubt the coolest rock video ever....of our elaborate plans, the end, of everything that stands, the end, no safety or surprise, the end, I’ll never look into your eyes, again....but it was only in my thirties, in therapy, probing through the wreckage with an intensity equally exhilarating, liberating, and terrifying, that I could understand what authentically drunken Willard said in between Jim Morrison’s lines, beneath that Saigon ceiling fan...when I was here, I wanted to be there; when I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle...wondering if perhaps the apocalypse—that ultimate battle between heaven and hell taken so literally by fundamentalists and conspiracy freaks, and so overmined for imagery by heavy metal groups and horror movie scriptwriters—might, in fact, be always here, and always now....

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
W.B. Yeats

Q. How Can You Tell That Your God is Man-made?
A. If He Hates All the Same People You Do.

One evening on the Appalachian Trail, I wandered into a shelter some few miles south of Delaware Water Gap. Sitting there already were another thru-hiker and a skinny guy whose jeans and flannel shirt showed he clearly wasn’t one, holding up his watch and asking what we thought he might get for it at a pawn shop. We made some guesses, and he told us a story of middle class woe—how he lost his wife, and kids with her, along with a house and three or four failed businesses, leaving, it seemed, only his “God”—a woman, as it turned out, who lived at some kind of ashram somewhere in New York state. He was walking to her. “She sees everything,” he said, “she knows I’m here right now.” We started preparing our respective dinners, and he just sat there quietly, until I asked if he had any food. He said no. “You hungry?” “Yeah!” I dug out a bag of instant grits I’d found somewhere, offering my stove once I was done with it. He didn’t want to wait, though, upending the bag and inhaling its dry and tasteless contents before pronouncing it good. That was when I realized his hunger wasn’t the haven’t eaten since lunch variety, but closer to haven’t eaten in days. Digging deeper, I found a bag of granola, which he wolfed down in no time, as well. It was the last food in my pack, which was okay, since I’d be getting into town in the morning anyway, and a diner breakfast would be all the better after a couple hours hiking on an empty stomach.

I didn’t see him again, but somehow doubt his “God” was gonna be too receptive to a supplicant showing up with empty pockets—no different in that way from third world dictators raising gilded cathedrals in their impoverished cities, or countless ministers of the "prosperity gospel" on cable TV with their bogus stories of people sending in their last dollars, only to have God drop hundreds in their path the next day. Those folks tend to be really into the apocalypse, too—no need to worry about global warming, the more things blow up in the Middle East the better, that just means the rapture’s coming sooner, so keep sending in your checks and you won’t get left behind. Faith can offer consolation to the desperate, certainly; all too often, though, it takes the desperate for whatever they may have left.

Thanks to Friendly Atheist for the God joke.

It's So Cold In Alaska....

Texas always seemed so big, but you know you’re in the largest state of the union when you’re anchored down in Anchorage.
Michelle Shocked
Alaska First -- Alaska Always.
motto of the Alaskan Independence Party

From what I’ve seen, Alaska’s incomprehensibly beautiful, as well as the coldest, most merciless part of America.

It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.
Jack London

I’ve never actually been there, but I’ve seen lots of episodes of Northern Exposure. I liked how that show portrayed a wide variety of weird people...as people rather than punchlines, or subjects of pity or derision...even if it had to stick them all so far away. More recently, there’ve been some good movies about people going to Alaska to die. One of them’s Into the Wild, based on the book by Jon Krakauer—to which I feel kind of a personal connection. In the early ‘90’s Chris McCandless and I were both not long out of college, and led by overwhelming alienation into the woods. In the summer of 1992, while he ventured into the Alaskan wild, I hiked the Appalachian Trail—idly wondering if it might cure what ailed me, or provide skills necessary to one day escape permanently. I came back. He died. I wondered aloud to a friend if the difference was that he had the courage to go further and deeper. My friend laughed, said maybe I was less afraid of other people—didn’t need to go to Alaska.

Is There Life Before Death?

People are shocked when I say I don’t take pictures (last week’s sublime banana-on-a-yoga-mat excepted). Somebody, upon hearing I hadn’t taken any on the Appalachian Trail, said: “what’s the point of even doing it if you’re not gonna take pictures?!” I found that fascinating—the notion that the only value in an experience is in displaying souvenirs after it’s over. I wonder if that guy takes pictures of himself showing his pictures to family and friends—if not, what’s the point of even doing it?

To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important.
Eckhart Tolle

Don’t worry, I’m not gonna get all Eckhart Tolle on you...this ain’t Oprah...or like those yogis whose favorite topics are 1) living purely for the here and now, and 2) reincarnation....Faulkner had a point when he wrote The past is never dead. It’s not even past...and the future may be as abstract as the brick wall you’re driving towards when the brakes go out...and hope, according to Emily Dickinson, is the thing with feathers...(though, notably, Woody Allen said Hope is not "the thing with feathers." The thing with feathers has turned out to be my nephew. I must take him to a specialist in Zurich)....

I like the words of Walt Whitman, partially immortalized on a mossy, broken bench along the Wissahickon Creek (near West Mt. Airy, state of Wistful Inebriation, USA):

I exist as I am, that is enough,
If no other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
One world is aware and by far the largest to me, and that is myself,
And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,
I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness I can wait.

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...

The Body, Electric and Unplugged

The Church says: The body is a sin. Science says: The body is a machine. Advertising says: The body is a business. The body says: I am a fiesta.
Eduardo Galeano

When I was twenty six, I hiked the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. It took me five months, got me in better shape than I’d ever been before, both physically and mentally (at least until it was over and I went home with a raging metabolism, no money, no home, no job, no practical plans for my life—though I’d thought, when I started, that I’d have a smart, raven-haired girlfriend to come back to—hitch-hiked from the trail to small town southern payphones to stand in the rain listening to endless dial tones—only to find she’d met some other guy and headed off to Oregon with him). At one point, my brother asked me “what do you think about when you’re out there walking the trail all day,” and I was surprised by my own inability to answer, probably because, before I’d started, I’d thought a lot about what I’d think about—the big philosophical questions, certainly, but also...everything else...all the most difficult passageways of a difficult past, present, and future—every scar and issue, all the hidden bitterness, fear, pain, and confusion, like a purifying fire as I pushed my body through wind and rain and snow and overwhelming heat, coming out finally healed, strong, complete. But that wasn’t what happened. In fact I didn't think much about that stuff at all. I thought about food, about keeping myself warm and my sleeping bag dry, about having a place to sleep that night that’d offer protection from rain and insects. When those needs were met, I was happy. When I got into a town, to find ice cream and pizza and a warm shower and maybe even an actual bed to sleep in, I was in paradise. By the time I got to New England, I'd started writing “life is good” in trail registers, despite everything, present, past, and future, and all the big philosophical questions that remained unanswered.

I’m built for comfort, I ain’t built for speed
Willie Dixon

Paradoxically, I also learned something about the benefits of life as a couch potato. Early on, it seemed like every time I got to a town where there was a hostel or other place hikers could stay for free—there were lots, particularly down south; locals tend to be highly hospitable, and certainly appreciative of the incredible appetites hikers satisfy at their restaurants and grocery stores—the place would be like a hospital ward—full of hikers nursing injured legs. The thing was, almost none of these injuries originated in their recent long days on the trail, and those suffering were often the more athletic-looking types. Their stories were strikingly uniform: “broke it playing basketball in high school,” “blew it out running track when I was fifteen,” “the problem started when I was playing football in college...” and the thought came to me: “thank god I spent my formative years getting fat in front of the T.V.!" Wishing them all the best, I chowed down on sausage biscuits and Little Debbie’s snack cakes, and got back on the trail in the morning.

Those who can’t do, teach, and those who can’t teach, teach gym.
Woody Allen, Annie Hall

The way they taught gym in my school was just about guaranteed to inspire those who weren’t particularly athletic to stay that way. If anything, it probably increased the rate of childhood obesity. Rather than encouraging long-term physical fitness, it seemed to be about creating and encouraging hierarchies—or at least giving official sanction to those that formed on the playground—glorifying the big kids, the tough kids, the bullies, and teaching the rest to feel like losers who'd never measure up, no matter how they tried.

god...not another fucking triangle pose...
unidentified yoga student

One thing that’s not said enough about the yoga thing is that it can suck. This, I think, is the reason so many start only to quit after a couple classes—not, actually, that it sucks, but that people are led to believe that it doesn’t. Alright, that sounded way more like a koan than I intended. Listen: if you read much on the subject, you’ll no doubt find a lot of descriptions of first experiences of people who’ve since become yoga teachers and now write books about it and are trying to encourage others to start by saying shit like “as I did my first triangle pose a mystical warmth streamed through my heart chakra. My entire being glowed as its every fiber merged with the Absolute. A full mind body spirit orgasm soaked my shorts as I began to levitate through the ceiling...” and so on. Sounds good, but I suspect my own experience was a good deal more typical: for the first month or two, soreness and exhaustion and utter mystification about what that mystical shit the teacher said had to do with that agonizing downward facing dog thing. The only apparent change in consciousness involved a deep understanding of just how pathetically out of shape I was. In time, that changed, and I commenced making my teacher wonder if I was serious when I said “whoah...that was cool" after every class, but that took a while. And, actually, it still can be a pain in the ass sometimes, especially trying to keep up an every-fucking-morning practice at home. I mean, normal people get up, take a shit, have their coffee, eat, read the paper, etc.. But not me. I gotta try and mellow my mind and do a bunch of clumsy sun salutations before I check my fucking e-mail, no matter how crappy I'm feeling. But, then, maybe the point really isn't to have a stupid smile plastered on my face and think everything's wonderful all the time. It may be more like what my friend Meg said (quoting somebody): "Good days, I'm okay. Bad days, I'm still okay."

I will show you fear in a handful of dust
T.S. Eliot

We all know how effective parents can be at fucking with our heads. No matter how old we get they can make use feel like kids, or simply as hopelessly dysfunctional adults, can manipulate and cause immense guilt trips; more poignantly, they can fail in every imaginable way to be who we want them to be. But, there's still one way that makes all the others pale: they can die on us, cause a major foundation of our reality to disappear...even if, or maybe because, we hadn't seen it that way before, hadn't realized we didn't really know it could happen...except that it isn’t actually like that at all...it’s people dying that’s the reality, not the illusion that they won’t.

in spite of how it feels when you inhale, you are not pulling air into the body. On the contrary, air is pushed into the body by atmospheric pressure that always surrounds you….The energy you expend in breathing produces a shape change that lowers the pressure in your chest cavity and permits the air to be pushed into the body by the weight of the planet’s atmosphere.
from Yoga Anatomy, Leslie Kaminoff, Amy Matthews, and Sharon Ellis

Is there something strangely liberating in the notion that life’s most basic act is not, as we Americans might be wont to think, one of grabbing and consumption, but opening ourselves to the universe?