Dickens Didn't Know the Half of It...

...for creative types, this is truly the best and worst of times....never in the history of the world has finding a receptive and appreciative audience been so easy...

 ...now is the era where

everybody creates...
Patti Smith

 ...that is, even if what you’re doing is so esoteric that only three or four people in the world could possibly appreciate it...solo upright bass instrumental interpretations of  obscure gangsta rap b-sides, expressionistic black chalk drawings of dolphins in bondage masks, cynical musings on yoga practice...in the past, the chances of those weirdos stumbling upon what you do, even if you could find a gallery, coffee shop, or magazine that’d let you put it on display, would be about nil...but, chances are, one or two of those people is on-line right now...

 No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

Samuel Johnson

 ...and, yet, the likelihood of getting paid for creative work grows ever slighter....(if Van Gogh were painting now, he'd likely feel less isolated, with people all over the world "liking" his art...but he'd still, probably, be broke)....I got fans all over the world, and, until recently, a person with fans all over the world could expect to have royalty checks rolling in....then, similarly, thanks to the virtual world, I’ve got friends all over the world...and, until recently, a person with that many friends had no problem finding a date for brunch...

i don’t understand: my ideas are universal

but my audience is five guys at the shell
station people just don’t get it
Andre Codrescu

...quit looking at the analytics for this blog a couple years ago...and glad I did...was getting too caught up in numbers of readers...or viewers...or visitors...or clicks....ended up using artificial means to get more people here, even if most stayed just long enough to take a glance and click away: gratuitous link-dropping, pornographic tags, posting every other day, whether or not I had anything worth saying...anything for these all-important digital marks of approval...

One of these days and it won’t be long, goin’ down to the valley and sing my song, sing it loud sing it strong let the echo decide if I was right or wrong...

Bob Dylan      

...finally decided to get all Bhagavad Gita-ish and forsake the numbers...simply do my best at putting something good out there, and try not to worry so much about the fruits of my actions..........which is not to say a little money wouldn’t be nice...

Practice Makes...Practice (Running Into the Mirror, Part Three)

It’s been so long since I felt at home
in the mirror...
Jorma Kaukonen

...they say...or at least some of them do...that we call it yoga practice...no matter how much we do of it and for how long, no matter what our level of proficiency...because it’s practice for the rest of life...which might sound cheesy, but it’s also probably true, and valuable...(sometimes that’s the case with cheesy shit)...(but not often)...(this is still Yoga for Cynics for chrissake, not Yoga for People Who Get Their Feel-Good Philosophies of Life From Washed Up Sitcom Stars Turned Motivational Speakers, or something)...

...that includes, of course, the sustaining-the-challenging-pose thing...or the as-far-as-you-can-get-into-the-challenging-pose thing...with poise and aplomb...as well as that continuing-to-work-on-that-challenging-pose-without-concern-for-the-fruits-of-your-actions thing...(also known as, y’know, that-whole-Bhagavad-Gita thing)...

...but also, and perhaps most challenging...the trying-to-feel-good-about-the-fact-that-the-person-on-the-next-mat-who’s-never-been-to-one-damn-yoga-class-before-can-do-a-perfect-bird-of-paradise-pose-(svarga dvidasana...though, judging by my recent Google search, there's some dispute about that)-with-no-apparent-effort-while-you-can-barely-get-your-“peace fingers”-around-your-big-toe thing...as well as its opposite and corollary, the trying-not-to-feel-the-slightest-bit-smug-toward-that-ultra-spiritual-person-on-the-next-mat-who-can’t-come-close-to-doing-gomukhasana-arms-despite-having-practiced-for-years-longer-than-you-have thing....the both of which might be summed up as the acknowledging-that-you're-totally-competitive-about-yoga-on-the-inside-even-though-you're-totally-against-the-very-concept-of-competitive-yoga-on-the-outside thing...

...and, needless to say, egolessness and awareness are even harder to sustain...or achieve in the first place...off the mat...but, then, at least part of that problem is that the taking-yoga-off-the-mat thing is part of a two-way dialogue...in which we, often as not, bring non-yoga onto the mat...so that what we take off the mat ends up being closely related to what we brought onto it in the first place...

...and that, of course, is why we gotta keep practicing...

It Ain't Easy

These times of meltdown are precious.
Stephen Cope

...but it ain’t easy to write about it when yer in ‘em...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 31:922

...a woman at the rehab said she wanted to write her life story, send it in and get it published as a book...I said for now, let’s just write...and, in the last fifteen minutes before I went home, she came up with a good page and a half or so about age five, approximately, to age eight, stopping every sentence or so with questions...how to spell addict and dealer to describe her mom and the guy who moved in, respectively, whether she needed to write out Kentucky Fried Chicken or if k.f.c. was good enough to describe the place where she rooted through the dumpster for food, whether rape or molest was the best word to describe what happened when she was eight...I shrugged, glancing at simple sentences without punctuation or paragraph breaks, said either works, I guess...

...(when someone like Maya Angelou writes about this kinda stuff, the punch in the gut's devastating but lyrical...a resounding song of the phoenix....the cruder tune of someone struggling with everything she’s got to get above the flames is something else entirely...a view of an apocalypse that’s always right now)...

Mature in yoga, impartial
everywhere he looks,
he sees himself in all beings
and all beings in himself.
Bhagavad Gita

...tomorrow I'm supposed to teach a free yoga class to some friends...told 'em it's guaranteed...reach enlightenment or your money back...

The Yoga Cynic Goes Native (Notes from the Magic Mountain #3)

...so far, my proudest accomplishment may be that, during my first practice-teach, somebody fell asleep during savasana....not that nobody ever dozed off back when I was teaching college English, but...

...I’ve been acquiring a reputation for going outside in the mornings in sub-freezing weather, barefoot...

...two weeks ago, parked my car in the upper lot, planning to go up and charge the battery once or twice a week....then, maybe four or five days in, went to get something and found the car so dead the clicker thing wouldn’t even work...thought guess I don’t have to worry about keeping the battery charged...

...after 6:30 am yoga and breakfast, Devarshi Steven Hartman led an morning-long “impolite conversation” of the Bhagavad Gita...following lunch, we undertook, as a group, a deep exploration of our individual pain and self-loathing, before closing out the day with an active vinyasa.....during dinner, ran into somebody from the coffee shop in West Mt. Airy, here just for the day, who asked what the teacher training was like.....I thought for a minute, said I’ll tell ya about it when I get home...

Bored?

...hiking at high elevations reminds me of advice given to people who get bored following the breath in meditation...

Take the thumb and first finger of either hand, clamp them tightly over your nose, keep your mouth closed, and notice how long it takes before your breathing becomes very interesting to you!
Jon Kabat-Zinn

...ten years or so ago, was sitting on a rocky beach in Maine reading To the Lighthouse, a novel in which the most commonplace situations are described with stunning color and intensity...making for a beautiful reading experience, though it made me think that, if Virginia Woolf actually experienced passing moments of life like that, without any kind of off-switch...as, I suspect, she did...it’s not hard to to understand why she filled her pockets with rocks and took that last fateful walk into the pond...

There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T.S. Eliot

...maybe twenty years ago, was backpacking in the Weminuche Wilderness in southern Colorado, just north of Durango, and, one afternoon, was in kind of an...ummm...ahem...altered state....things got kind of intense...way too much happening in mountains or groves of trees or the sky to keep looking at them....so, decided to simplify things....told myself I’m just gonna look at this rock here...nothin’ too intense or scary, there.....except there was...once I bothered to see...

Look: the sun gods, the gods
of fire, dawn, sky, wind, storm,
wonders that no mortal has ever
beheld...
Bhagavad Gita

...boredom, it occurs to me, is really a defense mechanism...guarding our eyes from the truly dazzling nature of everything around us...

Flying Words

...with debates raging on about commercialism, body image, and what should and shouldn't be termed “yoga,”* I’m pleased to announce the impending publication of my new translation of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras...

...re-titled, for the sake of commercial viability, Patanjali's 196 Secrets for Tight Buns and Rock Hard Abs...

...to be followed, early next year, by my interpretation of the Bhagavad Gita...in which Krishna counsels Arjuna on how to use the Law of Attraction™ to lose dhoti fat, meet attractive virgins of appropriate caste, and avoid paying taxes...

Most people become bankrupt through having invested too heavily in the prose of life. To have ruined oneself over poetry is an honour.
Oscar Wilde

...the longest word in the world is 189,819 letters long.....technically, it’s a chemical formula...it’s not in any dictionaries...and, I would guess, it’s very rarely been written...and, quite possibly never spoken at all...or used in a sentence...almost definitely never used in Scrabble...in fact, after a good bit of google searching, finding only abbreviated versions, I started wondering if it existed only in theory......until I found it here...(at the bottom is a recording of part of it read aloud...sped up...but, apparently, the work of a speech synthesizer...leaving open the question of whether it’s been spoken by a human voice)...I’d like to be the first person to use it in a poem...

…frameworks of the One (derived from mysticism) and the Many (derived from common experience) falsely polarize individuation and merging, which are actually embedded in each other…
Diana Alstad

...might silliness and seriousness be a false dichotomy as well?...isn’t everything we see or do to some extent vitally important and to some other extent ridiculous?...isn’t it all just a matter of degree...or perspective......or could it be that I just ain’t smart enough for none o’ them non-dichotomous paradoxes?...

*see here and here and here...