Facebook, Junk Food, Suffering, Compassion, and Robin Williams

The hole I dig is bottomless but nothing else can set me free...

Robert Pollard, I Am a Scientist

It is true we love life; not because we are wont to live, but because we are wont to love.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Sprach Zarathustra

 

...a friend posted something on Facebook about how baffling it is to see people...middle-class, educated...who should know better in this day and age...eating at McDonalds...I told him I could relate...it’s the same way I feel about cigarettes, and people who don’t exercise beyond the effort required to walk to the car or find the remote....but that a lotta people I know feel the same way when they see people eating pizza...(which my friend passionately loves)...(real pizza...not that soy crap)...

Dairy and gluten and grease, oh my!

Dorothy Gale, The Yoga Teacher of Oz

 ...of course, thinking about it much at all makes me realize how little room I have to judge...(to paraphrase Bob Dylan, if the full extent of my unmindful consumption could be seen, the granola crowd’d probably put my head in some kinda earnest, self-righteous, painfully passive-aggressive equivalent of a guillotine)...especially since, with a PhD and a decade or so in the crunchy, life-affirming yoga world, I know, like, waaaay better...

 If I don’t know I don’t know

 ....................................I think I know
If I don’t know I know
                                     I think I don’t know
R.D. Laing, Knots

 ...really, I said, what I think it comes down to is that life is hard....(realizing, in retrospect that I might’ve been unconsciously plagiarizing something Kurt Vonnegut wrote about why we keep destroying our environment even though we know better)...(or maybe it was somebody else, and I’m still unconsciously plagiarizing)...(and so the list of my sins of consciousness or the lack thereof continues to grow)...

...I mean...I’m more than aware that a handful of raw organic kale grown in the backyard garden I’m too lazy to cultivate, in an extremely rural region where with a minimal quantity of carcinogens and other toxins in the rain and groundwater, would be a far better choice on just about every truly conscious kinda level than a cupcake or a beer...and yet, I’m probably gonna both eat the cupcake and drink the beer, anyway, for the sheer momentary pleasure of it...(though I will put a handful of store-bought-and-probably-not-organic-‘cause-that-shit’s-too-expensive kale in my daily smoothie)....just like I won’t spend nearly as much  time meditating as I do getting into idiotic arguments with relative strangers on-line...

...with so many sinkin’ now you gotta keep thinkin’ you can make it through these waves:
acid booze and ass, needles guns and grass, lotsa laughs...
Joni Mitchell

 ...and that’s because, deep down, to be painfully honest, no matter how many positive Buddhist quotes I might like to recite while people are holding poses for five minutes at a time in Yin class about the wonder and sheer illimitable awesomeness of the present moment, it doesn’t seem worth it...with so much despair lurking in the recesses of mind and body, those little things that help us through through the minutes of the day, things we love, even if they don’t benefit us in the long run, can't be so easily forsaken...

...Thoreau wrote that most of us live lives of quiet desperation...(and Pink Floyd, somehow, a hundred years later, appropriated that and called it the English way)....Freud’s death instinct...mean, grumpy old thanatos...often powerful as the life instinct, more upbeat and personable eros...sometimes more...no matter how many ridiculous positive affirmations we in the yoga crowd try to force-feed ourselves when we’re not trying to blame it all on being modern and western and thus trying to shed our modern western skins...(without realizing, of course, that there’s really nothing more modern or western than the romanticism that causes us to think that becoming ancient and the far away other will cure us of our despair)...(and now, it seems, I’m pointing the finger of self-righteous judgment in the opposite direction)....(I’ll stop)...(but not quite yet)...
 
...(here, without further ado, is my own painfully pissed off and horribly self-righteous Facebook post from a week ago, following the news of Robin Williams, dead of chronic despair: If there's one aspect of the yoga world that I absolutely loathe, it's how many people there are—including teachers, yoga bloggers with tens of thousands of "likes," and major revered gurus--who seem to think they're experts on depression even though they clearly know absolutely nothing about it—thinking it's synonymous with being bummed out and can be fixed with positive affirmations or an "attitude adjustment" (clearly unaware that depression might be defined as the inability to take on a positive attitude), or that it's synonymous with sadness, and thus, is something we all experience from time to time and should be seen as a natural and beautiful part of life. No, it isn't. And if you don't know that, you should keep your mouth shut on the subject, no matter how many people fawn on you and tell you how wise and spiritual you are.....harsh, but, if nothing else, it’s my own blood in which I’m writing)...

....ultimately, I think it all points to the incredible necessity for compassion...for all of us...in all of our junk-food eating, time-wasting, un-compassionate, judgmental, self-righteous, sometimes flat-out nasty glory....because of all that, in fact...because we have pain and because we all do what we do, however unmindful, however counterproductive, to make ourselves feel better...right here, right now...

Whatever You Wish to Keep...

You must leave now take what you need you think will last,
but whatever you wish to keep you better grab it fast...
Bob Dylan, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

...one last trip to the house where I grew up for any childhood or adolescent relics deemed worthy of occupying a storage locker corner until god-only-knows-when...(that's my dad's old guitar leaning against my official-document-of-bein'-real-smart, and boxed up pictures, paperbacks, comic books, letters, ticket stubs, and a couple Matchbox cars)...

...last week took my beloved mountain/city bike into the shop for a minor repair only to find out the frame was broken...tried to see it as a lesson in impermanence and non-attachment and even came up with a mantra for the experience...

om
shanti
fuck

...since, ultimately, the Philly boy I am values honest expression of feelings as highly as those more proper Buddhist-y yogi virtues....but now feelings are even more complex...leavin' nothin' much to say, for the moment, and nothin' much to fall back on but old rock lyrics...(with gratitude to the fearlessly non-traditional yoga playlists of the inimitable Sarah E.)...(kirtan? wha...?)...

Take me to the station,
and put me on a train,
I got no expectations
to pass through here, again...
Mick Jagger/Keith Richards, No Expectations

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

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...

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...

No Direction Home...

History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.
Stephen Dedalus (James Joyce, Ulysses)

How does it feel
to be without a home,
with no direction home...?
Bob Dylan

...sadness didn’t really kick in ‘til the necessary stop back at the old house...the overwhelming sense of need to say goodbye...(unwilling nostalgia jostling with an equally painful desire to have it all done with and move on)...though the house is still there, certainly, though nobody lives there anymore, and, in fact, I’ll be need to be back, probably a lot, in the months to come, to go through stuff, clean up, scrub the place clean of memories and home...

...and though it’s been a long time since it’s been my own address...(though junk mail with my name on it still comes, thanks to the boundless memories of schools, political parties, and non-profits...though now there's nobody to put it in a neat pile on my childhood bed)...it's the home that's always been back there, where mom and dad and then just mom still lived, until a few days ago, when we moved her in to the swanky retirement community with the river view most Manhattanites would kill for....a good and necessary change, definitely...but...

...dogs buried in the yard, traces of pot smoke doubtless lingering in the attic, growth marked in pencil on a wall, since painted over...the world of someone's long-gone childhood and adolescence...not that those exactly constitute a paradise lost...more like a nightmare from which I’ve been trying to awake for three decades...the comfortable old house a burden in more ways than one...and yet, the birthplace, nesting place, launching pad of dreams and hopes...that shit about as ephemeral as ephemeral gets and yet still anchored, there...

Fundamentally, not one thing exists,
So where is the dust to cling?
Hui-neng

...same as it ever was...
David Byrne

...though of course as any Zen monk or Talking Heads singer can tell ya, those anchors, any anchors, really, are ephemeral as it gets, too...that we all, really, have no direction home...perhaps even more so when we don’t realize it...and that realization is, if anything, a good one...even if it doesn’t always feel that way...

Reptiles of the Mind

The man who never alters his opinions is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.
William Blake

...thinking about stuff is generally easier than actually doing it, but less satisfying...unless, of course, you’re thinking about doing something really stupid...
Ancient and Venerable Yoga Cynic Sutra 16:731/2

...just wrote this review for Elephant Journal of a book called Writing Yoga...and, in the process, got kinda self-indulgent...which is what I do...without apology...(I mean, seriously, it’s not like I get paid for this shit)...(and, anyway, like to think I’m working in the tradition of the late great Lester Bangs)...(remember reading Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung while in grad. school, and thinking “why can’t I write literary criticism like this?”...probably shoulda known my days in academia were numbered right then)...

Some years ago, my yoga teacher told me about a retreat she was leading on a beach in Mexico, involving instruction in not just yoga but writing.** The yoga and beach-in-Mexico parts sounded awesome, but thought I’d probably skip out on the other in favor of more wandering-on-the-beach time—I mean, I got me a PhD in English, done taut reedin’ n’ ritin’ at the college level, for chrissake, completed a novel, and published all kinds o’ crap; so y’know, what could be more fun on a trip to the tropics than having somebody correcting my split infinitives and instructing me not to end my sentences with prepositions?**** As it turned out, the writing teacher, Ann Randolph, was more holy lunatic than didactic schoolmarm. Right from the get-go, she had us radically stretching, pushing boundaries, moving beyond comfort zones into all kinds of places I really wasn’t expecting to go.***** At the end of the week, when asked how I felt about the balance of yoga and writing, I said I didn’t feel it was a combination, per se. Rather, it felt to me like it was all yoga, the writing as much as the asana practice. And this, along with, according to what I’d read, a desperate need for writers these days to have something called a web presence, led me to create my semi-famous blog, Yoga for Cynics…(mentioned in Yoga Journal and yada yada yada).****** (And, when people point out that, often, the content isn’t really about yoga, I point out that writing the blog is yoga…and, at least fifty percent of the time, I mean it).

...(yes, in this blog where, in better times, I’ve shared the words of Whitman, Shakespeare, and Kinky Friedman, I’m now quoting myself...at length)...(you’ll have to read the actual article to see the hilarious snarky footnotes, as well as get to the point where I move beyond shameless self-promotion and actually mention the book I’m reviewing)...(and yes, this is also shameless self-promotion)...

Oh, help me in my weakness, I heard the drifter say...
Bob Dylan

...so, anyway, running through this bit of personal history, particularly the cryptic web presence thing, reminded me that part of what got me into the blogging thing...in addition to, y'know, becoming one with the blogosphere and spreading peace and contentment throughout the interwebs...was a need to market my writing...(for which I also need to work on the shameless self promotion thing...as I’m doing in this post)...specifically the novel I put the finishing touches on nearly four years ago, but still haven’t gotten published, Drifter’s Escape...(yes, the title comes from that Dylan song)....(what are songs and poems good for if not to provide titles?)...(note how well that Blake line fits with the pic from my trip to Costa Rica, up there...even if it doesn't have all that much to do with the content of the post....can't have it all)...

...though, as it turns out, Yoga for Cynics has kind of taken on a life of its own...and perhaps the strategy of continually planning on getting back to the process of querying agents really soon but never actually doing it might be reevaluated...though whether that means actually getting back to querying agents, or developing a different strategy...(and, y’know, actually implementing it)...is up to question.....more on this, perhaps, as it develops...

...trying to get shit published might be yoga, too...but we're not too sure about that...
Ancient and Venerable Yoga Cynic Sutra 121:97

Creative Enough?

If the roof doesn't leak, the architect hasn't been creative enough.
Frank Lloyd Wright

...heard a song in a dream, with a chorus that kept playing in my head as I awoke, a particularly nasal Bob Dylan-like voice singing...

you’re an interesting victim but you’re
in this way

...I have no idea what this means...

...sometimes feel like a drug addict without the drugs....a writer who goes days without doing any actual writing...a yogi who sees the sun go up and then down while failing to move beyond the I should stage toward actually practicing any yoga....the old crap, resolutely failing to crumble to dust and blow away under the light of awareness, lingers on...but so do I...

...one time overheard a conversation in a restaurant between two men in suits, one of them passionately extolling his credentials as the kind of original thinker any employer would die for, announcing to anyone within earshot...which, in this case, had to include dishwashers and maybe even people in the parking lot...I think outside the box!!!...to which the other responded, consolingly, I know you do....I could sympathize, but had to wonder if someone who'd use such a hackneyed cliché as thinking outside the box actually did...

What’s the one small step you can take to change an unhelpful pattern? If the answer is ‘Nothing,’ you’re not being creative enough.
Ana Forrest, Fierce Medicine*


* cool book...see my review here

Botticelli's Niece

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
Rumi

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
William Faulkner

Gotta hurry on back to my hotel room, where I got me a date with Botticelli’s niece...
Bob Dylan

...trying to write but can’t ignore that classic profile...pre-Raphaelite...if moderated by a nose ring...hair straight outta Botticelli, eyes staring into another world...but there I’m editorializing...or, more accurately, fantasizing...more likely she’s thinking of some boyfriend with six-pack abs straight outta Jersey Shore...and, certainly a lot younger than I...but maybe that’s just cynicism...hard to stay out of these frames...a year or two ago on my birthday, a younger guy I was talking to said he bet I got laid a lot back in the day and asked if I regret never getting married...since, apparently, a man in his mid-forties is ineligible for either marriage or sex...no matter how much time he spends on the yoga mat...then, I always say, while it’d be great to have a twenty year old body again, I’d rather hold on to the mind I’ve got now...and sometimes believe it...and, anyway, now she’s stepping out the door to get away from a screaming child, carrying a paperback copy of To the Lighthouse, which, to tell the truth, I saw before coming up with the eyes staring straight into another world thing...and Botticelli’s Venus always looked more classically vain than anything, a yoking of Renaissance ideals with those pretty girls who wouldn’t talk to me in high school...which was exactly what appealed to me, wandering through the Uffizi after crouching awake all night on the train from Brindisi, having last slept, for only an hour or two, the previous afternoon...passed out from all those godawful early morning shots of Ouzo on the boat from Patras...covered by my rail-pass, of course...I’d slept out on the deck and rolled over in my sleeping bag at around seven a.m. to an invitation from that somewhat older guy I’d been talking to the night before to join him for a drink...and, later, somebody lent me a Walkman and I passed out blissfully listening to a scratchy Dead tape...twenty years old beneath a Mediterranean sky...

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...

What I Didn't Write in that Last Post (Epilogue to Notes from the Kripalu Teacher Training Thang)

Every time you judge yourself, you break your own heart.
Swami Kripalu

Welcome to the camp, I guess you all know why we’re here...
Pete Townshend, Tommy

Friday morning, when we were hanging out on the couches after breakfast, procrastinating about packing and looking vaguely forward to the big graduation ceremony, somebody asked us about just how many hours of yoga a day people in the teacher training actually have to do....we were silent for a few seconds, and I told him it was kinda like we’d walked into a yoga class a month ago and were still there...

...a couple hours later, procrastinating about leaving, sitting in the coffee shop with my lap-top, getting up to hug people goodbye whenever they walked past, tried to post some thoughts I’d been writing up in the previous days...which went kinda like this:

Tadah drastuh svarupe vasthanam
The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, 1.3

...but don’t believe everything the Yoga Sutras say...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 121.341

...last Friday, went into bridge pose and stayed there half an hour...earlier this week, wrote I HATE YOGA on an unused notebook page, later scribbling the words out, though they could still be read, and tried to use them in a kind of photographic still life with the Ganesha statue on the Kripalu lawn, but the page came out blank...two nights ago felt myself a winged and carapaced insect, struggling to escape its chrysalis....one day, it might’ve been last weekend, dreamed in a deep savasana that I’d misplaced my head, but it didn’t seem too much of a problem...

...as well as a bunch of other stuff I kept deleting...(not even mentioning the performance of You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman...in a bathrobe...with backup singers...including a guy in a bikini...in front of the altar with the statue of Shiva and pictures of Swami Kripalu...to Devarshi, dean of the Kripalu School of Yoga, sitting up front in full lotus...and about seventy other people, instructed to maintain dirgha and ujjayi pranayama...and not to laugh....but you’d probably have to've been there for that)...

...drifting in and out of lifetimes, unmentionable by name...
Bob Dylan

...anyway, then, early Friday afternoon, after the big graduation ceremony...they got ceremonies for taking a crap up there at Kripalu, but this one was actually kinda special...the post felt insufficient...too vague, too slight, too focused on myself...

...and now I’m back in Philly, where there’s police sirens, pollution, and people aren’t nice to each other all the time....but, the snow’s all gone, early flowers taking its place along the sidewalks, and I get to sleep in my own bedroom, crap in my own bathroom, and don’t have to get up every morning for 6:30 yoga....so there’s a balance, kinda...

...and what I really wanted to say, but couldn’t quite get the words out onto the virtual page on Friday...(or was worried about how they’d translate beyond our magic mountain)...(which is still a concern)...(think I’m corny or done drunk the kool-aid if ya wish)...was this: that, on the first night at Kripalu, we were asked about fears and concerns regarding the training, and someone said something to the effect that she was the kind of person who...and Devarshi responded promptly with something to the effect that we could expect any assumptions about what kinds of people we were to be challenged...

...and, a month later, standing there amongst the people with whom I’d shared so much, I was struck with the realization that, far beyond learning how to lead people through downward facing dog...adha mukha svanasana...or upward pigeon...raja kapotasna...not to mention a whole lotta Sanskrit...atha yoga nushasanam...we were all actually a little bit kinder, a bit more open, a bit more compassionate, a bit more conscious human beings than when we arrived...

Decaffeinated

Coffee is prana.
Patanjali*

Since every pleasure’s got an edge of pain,
Pay for your ticket and don’t complain...
Bob Dylan

It’s been a week since my last cup of coffee...and you were wondering why this blog’s been so quiet?**

...then, I’m probably quitting the whole yoga thing, anyway...been reading so much about how healthy it is...which is a problem, since I'm currently working on gettin' me a new health insurance plan...and...unlike most people, who end up paying far more than they ever get back...making the insurance industry so profitable it buys senators and congressmen like yoga folk buy expensive crap with Om symbols on it...I wanna profit from the arrangement...

...so, from here on, my health is the insurance company’s problem...no more yoga, no more meditation, no more fruits and vegetables...organic or otherwise...no more biking (except in busy traffic...without a helmet...preferably drunk)....might even change the name of this blog to Sitting in Front of the Tube Eating Ho-Ho’s, Smoking Cigarettes, Drinking Cheap Booze, Snorting Crystal Meth and Letting the Insurance Company Pick Up the Tab for Cynics...but, it occurs to me, that might be a tad redundant...


* yeah, I know, that’s not in your copy of the Yoga Sutras...that’s ‘cause it’s an exceptionally rare out-take, available only as part of the outrageously expensive digitally re-mastered limited edition Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras: the Complete Sessions deluxe boxed set...along with a few alternate takes (Sutra 1.1: “let’s party”) and the legendary, unexpurgated, Vedic Times interview with Patanjali...in which he admits he was joking about celibacy....***

** not to mention that this particular post is, let’s face it, not up to the usual quality standards...loose though they are...really not much more than an excuse for that cheesy Patanjali joke....I recommend skipping the rest and checking out my far more inspirational Thanksgiving post at Elephant Journal...or going back and reading that last one, which was pretty good: One Breath at a Time....namaste & all that...

*** wha??!!... You think I’d make this stuff up???!!!

Time Passes Slowly

Time passes slowly up here in the mountains...

...less than three days from my not-too-far-above-sea-level home in Philly, tromping up to 13,223 feet...used to spend a lot more time at heights like this, now try to work a bit harder...usually...at gaining equilibrium wherever I find myself...


Time passes slowly when you’re lost in a dream...

...still, it’s nice to get out to wild places...if only to see through different mirrors than the ones we’re used to...

...continue to idealize these high sylvan landscapes...colorful, quiet, peaceful...appearing like little paradises, off in the distance...always in the distance...though, as becomes particularly clear when barely able to walk up a rocky path in the face of strong icy winds in September, elevation making the lungs burn and mind get fuzzy, they’re about as inhospitable as places get...gorgeous to look at, from a distance, and then go home...

Time passes slowly and then fades away...

Bob Dylan

Roadmaps for the Soul

...the National Bank at a profit sells road maps for the soul to the old folks home and the college...
Bob Dylan

...was teaching this freshman writing class and started talking about the next paper assignment...said something like I’m not sure what the topic’s gonna be...and, before I could continue with but, it’s gonna be along the general lines of...one of the kids said how ‘bout whatever we want?...and was quickly echoed by other voices in the room...yeah, whatever we want!...whatever we want!...

...I, needless to say, was about to smile and say no...like teachers generally do when students express a desire to do whatever they feel like...but paused and thought for a second or two...then said okay...whatever you want....

...the kids, of course, were thrilled to be granted so much freedom...amazed at what a cool teacher they had....

...a week later, though, when I asked how the project was going, there was an uncomfortable silence...until, finally, the same kid who came up with the idea said this is a lot harder...

...I smiled, said yeah, I know...

Truth is a pathless land...
J. Krishnamurti

Springtime Ebbs and Flows...

April is the cruelest month...
T. S. Eliot

...or maybe it’s just me...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 126:97

...when spring first hit...felt an awful lot like summer...went out and overexerted myself, ending up exhausted, sore, and sunburned...banged up my knees after catching a bike wheel in an old trolley track that still exists, far as I can tell, for the sole purpose of catching bike wheels...

...more lately it’s been wetter and colder, if greener...been feeling uninspired...not writing much...apart from being virtually eco-conscious by revising, refurbishing and reincarnating old Yoga for Cynics posts*...

...do I understand your question man, is it hopeless and forlorn?
Bob Dylan (in as crappy a mood, apparently, as T. S. Eliot)

...then, perhaps it’s really all a matter of ebb & flow—old-school well-worn zen-like metaphor in progress—and the only trick is to realize it...meaning not just in the sense of hey, maybe it’s all just a matter of ebb & flow—think I’ll write something about that on my blog...but to really realize it...take it in...accept it...stop expecting the world to stand still long enough to make sense...

Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.
Andre Gide

...but, maybe the not being able to believe in that...the suspecting it’s all bullshit...is simply part of that ebb...faith and doubt not pulling in a tug-o-war, but operating more smoothly in a kind of dialectic tide...unceasing movement avoiding the stagnation of self righteous surety, fanaticism and fundamentalism, as well as the dry sand of fatalism and despair...nothing definite...except that wherever ya end up, ya won’t be there for long...


*...like this one...about the haiku Allen Ginsberg wrote for me...which I then spilled something on...posted earlier today...

Yoga, Surfing, and Pot (El Yogi Cynico en Costa Rica Parte Tres)

If dogs run free, why not we, across the swamp of time?
Bob Dylan

...ubiquitous surfboards, dreadlocks, thongs, and tattoos...far more yoga teachers and artists than cops, doctors, or clergy...as many bikes as cars...t-shirt shops full of flagrant, fragrant smoke...Argentines, Israelis, and Americans intermingling with the almost invariably warm and friendly locals...a mellow postmodern trinity of, as my friend put it, yoga, surfing, and pot...


...of which, it should be mentioned, I indulged only in the first...along with so many of those less-than-$1 empanadas at the tiny bakeries...carne, pollo, frijole, queso...Bimbo chocolate cookies, and as much fresh tropical fruit as a body can safely digest....one thing about Latin America in general: you don’t go there to lose weight...and the crummiest little convenience store can be counted on for a produce section to make the northern jaw drop....and that’s not even mentioning that this is the culture that gave the world hot pants...


...they got the fun, they got the palm trees,
they got the weed, they got the taxis...
Joe Strummer, Safe European Home

...it’s always important, I think, for Americans proud of living simply out of their backpacks to remember that they’re probably sinking more money into their week-long vacations than most of the locals see in a year...and yet, Costa Rica can make one feel a bit less the great white imperialist...seeing little of the overwhelming poverty, trash, and heavily armed cops and soldiers impossible to avoid in much of the region...which, actually, has something to do with the country going without a standing army for more than half a century....relative prosperity deriving, to a significant extent, from putting funds that might otherwise go toward the military into education...

...that said, gotta confess to having made an attitude of semi-blissful semi-oblivion toward world events an essential aspect of my retreat....got on-line once early in the trip to give family members contact info in case of emergency, and then again in the bed and breakfast near the airport the night before flying home to clear junk accumulations from in-boxes, but that was it....and, except for stray bits picked up here and there...like last week’s snow in Philly we all hoped would delay our flights home...heard and saw nothing about the world beyond our beach...realizing when I got home that I hadn’t so much as thought about Tea Partiers, Sarah Palin, or the health care debate in over a week...and, with that, finding myself quite reticent about getting re-informed...spending far less time on-line now than before the trip...even if that’s meant unconscionably neglecting many of my blog friends, along with the news....sorry...I’ll be back...

...have always believed in keeping informed...taking part...little interest in being the kinda yogi who holds up non-attachment to justify non-engagement or the greater scheme of things as an excuse for apathy...but there comes a point when engaging with the wide world out there...particularly when doing so by surfing the interwebs ’til the early hours of the morn...becomes simply a mode of escape from the world nearer-by...and, perhaps most of all, just another of the infinite futile ways of trying to push away the vast universe inside...

...and sometimes, it seems, ya hafta go somewhere far away to see what’s really goin’ on with ya back home...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 12:291

Making Imaginary Snowpeople Out of Rain

To recognize the basic goodness in everyone takes courage.
Tara Brach

...the holiday season is upon us....and I thought about being really postmodernly ironic and cute and putting a syrupy sweet Thomas Kinkade holiday image at the top of this post....trouble is, there’s kind of a fine line between being postmodernly ironic and cute and seriously sucking up the place...and that might just cross it...

...and, anyway, this is a time of year...or so I'm told...for dropping one’s cool, ironic stance and getting all warm, fuzzy, and spiritual...like so...

***THIS BWOG WUVS YOU***
***AND WISHES YOU A VEWWY MEWWY CHWISMUS***

...okay...that went waaaaaaay too far...and was kinda painfully ironic, anyway...so...perhaps an inspiring line from The New Testament?...

...I was stoned...
2 Corinthians 11:25

...alright, forget it...

...Bob Dylan came out with a Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart...and I’ve been listening to it while roasting chestnuts on an open fire, redecorating my apartment to look like a manger, and making imaginary snowpeople out of rain...all the while thinking if I keep listening to this, then maybe, just maybe, I’ll come to see it as something other than yet another twisted ironic joke Bob’s playing on his dedicated fans, like me, who he knows would buy a CD of him blowing his nose...which, truth be told, might sound better than his rendition of Here Comes Santa Claus....but, at least, the proceeds are all going toward providing food for people who need it...and that’s what it really should be all about, anyway, isn’t it?...

...(yes, I actually ended that last paragraph with something sincere...even providing a link...as if my Grinch heart grew three sizes...)

Laughing Matter

...Shakespeare had one of his characters say All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players...which would indicate, by dramaturgical standards of the day...reaching back to festivals of Apollo in ancient Greece, when theatre first emerged from religious ritual...that life is either comedy or tragedy...

...Bob Dylan, some time later, wrote there are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke...which would appear to indicate wide support for the comedy thesis...though how you take that might depend on your definition of the word joke...seriously...

...someone I knew well seemed to view life...or at least his own life...as something like a Greek tragedy....little to do but keep up a noble bearing, marching on toward a preordained doom with moral uprightness and dignity...knowing that even therapy and religious faith can only do so much to cure the inevitable tragic flaw....and that a joke is something inherently trivial, and often inappropriate...as life is no laughing matter...

...Ken Kesey might have said always star in your own movie...which could present a few more options in terms of genre....I’ve tended at times to see life as a dark comedy...like Heathers* or Dr. Strangelove...since, when tragedy seems to be attacking from all sides, tempting one to curl up into a ball and pretend not to exist, laughter can smell an awful lot like victory**...

Laughing at our mistakes lengthens our life. Laughing at someone else's shortens it.

Cullen Hightower

...Shakespeare also wrote a play called Henry IV...then a sequel and a prequel to cash in on the popularity of one of its characters...that’s not a joke, by the way...let’s face it: Shakespeare was no more aesthetically pure than George Lucas or Mick Jagger...or whoever created those brilliant Mentos commercials...and you have to decide for yourself whether I’m joking about the brilliance of Mentos commercials.....anyway, the character, Falstaff, makes no claims to purity, either...he's a drunken, amoral buffoon...though he often speaks truths that could only be uttered on stage safely by a fool....anyway, at one point...I think it's in the sequel...he responds to mockery with I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men...takes it as a compliment, that is...and there might be something to be learned from that...

For life is quite absurd, and death's the final word

You must always face the curtain with a bow.

Forget about your sin - give the audience a grin

Enjoy it - it's your last chance anyhow...
Eric Idle

...ultimately, it’s all there...the tragedy, the comedy, the tragicomedy, and everything else...but allowing for improvisation, and not at all bound by classical unities or conventional plotting....and, like any poem, wide open to interpretation....

...maybe it all comes down to matter...we are matter...and things matter...and yet we laugh...making us, essentially, laughing matter....these are the jokes, folks...



* just googled Heathers...turns out Winona Ryder says a sequel’s in the works....I hope that’s a joke...

** yes, that was a darkly comic reference to Apocalypse Now and the smell of napalm...

How You React...

It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters.
Epictetus

...a long dry summer ending, finally...at Hemlock Lake, down a brutally steep, glacier-carved hill from the trailer I was officially living in for the summer, water was so low it created a beach you could walk along for miles, into areas you couldn’t normally get to easily...saw a bald eagle, maybe three or four miles in, resting on a branch maybe twenty feet above...

...actually for most of July and August lived an hour north of there, at a friend’s house in Rochester...matters professional, personal, and really really personal having unleashed something that had been bubbling underneath for a long time...leaving pristine isolation too frightening to deal with....then, the same could be said for life in general, but that wasn’t quite as easy to get away from...put the dissertation on hold, along with some bad habits, got into yoga for the first time, and that, along with therapy, and the wonders of modern psychopharmacology, seemed to help...but only so much...

...apparently was feeling better somewhat, enough to be back at the trailer that morning, if getting ready to head into town for a few days...had a writing center meeting that afternoon, a class to teach to medical students...Liquor, Drugs, and Literature...came up with the title and course content myself...and was looking forward to picking up a copy of the new Bob Dylan CD, Love and Theft, released that morning....phone rang as I was walking out the door...my mom...asked if I knew what was happening...which I didn’t...

...everything was cancelled, but I drove to town, anyway...spent the afternoon at a friend’s house...nursing a migraine, she kept watching the news, while another friend puked in the bathroom...I took her dog for a walk...it was just another day to him...got stopped by a T.V. crew...said I thought it was important to be absolutely sure who was responsible before talking about striking back at anybody...or something...never saw it, but a couple people who did told me they appreciated whatever I said....gotta admit, there was some comfort that day in knowing everybody else felt as fucked up inside as I did...

We begin where we are and how we are, and whatever happens, happens.
T.K.V. Desikachar

...was going to yoga classes with a guy named Francois Raoult...great teacher as long as you appreciated his sense of humor....was wondering, hoping he was gonna mellow us all out somehow...lull us into some cosmic mellow head space far removed from all that... tell us it was all ephemeral, and didn’t matter, anyway...and actually make us believe that...

...instead, he said something to the effect that there were, in fact, very legitimate reasons for the anxiety we were all feeling...but that didn’t mean we should let it paralyze us, or prevent us from functioning...

...and that was the key...no mystical la-la land to escape to...nothing to do but deal with exactly whatever it is was we had to deal with...

shanti shanti shanti

Morning, September

We try to kill time but time ends up killing us.
Jack Fate (Bob Dylan)

...woke from a bad dream, started right off thinking nasty thoughts about myself, mumbled shit shit shit dragging myself out of bed...not the most auspicious start to the day...

...meditated with early Grateful Dead in the background, ate high fiber cereal, and checked e-mail...three comments on the new blog post, one of them spam...also checked the political news...don’t ask...

...headed out for coffee...September making itself known...needed more layers than I have in months...bright out, though...took some pictures of stray flowers growing out of people’s bushes...in two blocks saw two cop cars going by slowly...figured somebody was having a rougher morning than I...

...turned out it was a thief grabbing an i-phone off a woman’s table at the very coffee shop I was heading for...a friend, a marathon runner, was beating himself up for almost but not quite catching the guy, who leaped down a ten foot drop by the railroad tracks....personally, I’m inclined to think that apprehending a criminal with your bare hands is a far better idea on T.V. than in real life...where people get hurt...as such, things really didn’t end so badly...