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...

Building From the Ground Up, Part One

...sitting at the usual coffee shop, drinking the usual coffee, thoughtlessly cogitating the usual misgivings, apprehensions, and regrets...self-judgment, ennui, and mild depression...life as usual seeming like one big obstacle course with no clear path apart from that defined by the obstacles themselves...

To be able to free oneself is nothing; the hard part is being able to live with one’s freedom.
André Gide

...trying to fly away might have been your first mistake.
Bob Mould

...but, idly there in my favorite sunny window seat, the thought comes that I like where I live......(not my apartment, so much...though it’s not bad, really...its problem, for the most part, its messy inhabitant...and the messy thoughts he wakes up with...more internal, that is, than external...though the Upanishads, I think, say that’s all one & the same)...(Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 438:901: ...don't believe everything ya read in the Upanishads...)...coffee gone, irresistible high-calorie toasted buttered cheddar and black pepper biscuit reduced to tasty crumbs I pick up with a dampened fingertip to eat one by one...thinking I really should be getting on with the day but focusing dreamily out at the corner, naturally illuminated...center of my laughably crunchy community...food co-op, meditation studio, alternative bookstore, alternative pet store, alternative whatever the hell that store is, alternative kid's store...run by somebody who’s also a yoga teacher...more certified yoga teachers here than plumbers, certified public accountants, or Republicans...by far...more organic vegan gardeners than people who’d admit to eating fast food or shopping at Wal-Mart...tree lined sidewalks, bicycles with baskets, two churches down the hill, one Unitarian, the other Presbyterian but with a lesbian minister...a community justifiably famous for its effortless integration, though the skin tone in the coffee shop's conspicuously lighter than that in the public school across the street...but, it takes just a beautiful seven mile bike ride following the Wissahickon Creek and Schuylkill River through the park, past the sculpture gardens and Art Museum, to get downtown...residents notably friendly, usually laugh at my jokes about scoring organic crack on the way to yoga class and wanting to call myself a Mt. Airyan but concerned that might give the wrong idea...moved all over the country to live in famous hip communities: Boulder, Olympia, San Francisco, Burlington, Flagstaff, Ithaca, had some fun but couldn’t wait to leave each and every one...then ended up back in this area where I grew up somewhat unwillingly, out of necessity...it's a long story, and kinda personal...to find myself nearly four years later thinking, sea of troubles and all, I wouldn't mind staying for a while....and that’s not a bad place to start...

Doors Going Through Doors

...we never really know what’s on the other side of a door...

...we tell ourselves we do...armed with speculations, memories, plans, wishes, and peeking through keyholes...but, even if a door’s open, or transparent, we see only what’s visible within a thin frame...the tiniest sub-section of an ineffable everything...not to mention that ladies can turn out to be tigers, and tigers, ladies...that the simplest decisions turn out, almost invariably, to be the most complicated...

...trust in beliefs, gods, attitudes...come up with what seem to be a likely few out of infinite contingencies...endless facets of the great unknown invariably to be found on that infinitely mysterious other side.....though, let’s face it, that's true of this side, as well...

...so that, sometimes, there’s simply nothing to do but open ourselves and go on through...

I Saw Walt Whitman Strolling Through the Park Today

I saw Walt Whitman strolling through the park today...alive as you and me, like they say...along Forbidden Drive...called that—this is true—because you’re forbidden to drive on it...above the legendary Wissahickon Creek....I’ve seen him along there before...maybe up in Mt. Airy, too...though this was more notable because it was right near the broken bench with the inscription from Song of Myself that they got wrong,
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 that I sit content
adding that that that doesn’t belong at all though somebody—maybe Walt himself...certainly this sighting makes me suspicious—kind of corrected it with a black magic marker....anyway, he seemed content enough...if a bit worse for wear...which you can’t blame him for...I mean, the guy is closing in on the end of his second century...and the Civil War really seemed to take something out of him...

I am nothing, and therefore I am everything, and all energy
J. Krishnamurti

Energy is Eternal Delight
William Blake

Tonight the bottle let me down, and let your memory come around....
Merle Haggard

It’s raining outside, started while I was in the park, and I brought the rain into the coffee shop. The rain follows me, and I follow the rain, and maybe I am the rain. The rain is in my hair and the rain is inseparable from my hair...though my eyes are two suns...sons absent a father brain, wandering aimlessly from place to place, but never lost because knowing always that lost is where they belong....

Coffee is energy. Then, so is everything else...maybe. Energy is in crisis, always. We fuel the wars we fight for energy with energy, though it’s often lacking when I need to go home but can’t get away from this window seat, looking out at the rain. Coffee fails me sometimes, like Merle Haggard with his inconstant whiskey bottle...like anything, really, but it tastes good, at least...and that’s not like just anything.

Walt Whitman wrote about Nature without check with original energy but he doesn’t come into the coffee shop to talk with me about it, at least not when I’m here. Perhaps he’s made his peace with the rain.