Prepared for Lift-Off...All Systems Go

Now it’s time to leave the capsule if you dare...
David Bowie

...for the next month, Yoga for Cynics, along with its affiliates, partners, and corporate subsidiaries, will be shifting its base of operations from West Mt. Airy, Land of Mellow Sadhana and No Snow Plows, USA, to the mystical highlands of Kripalu...the Berkshires, Massachusetts...cloud hidden, whereabouts unknown...(or, at least, the Google Maps directions are really, really confusing)...where its proprietor, webmaster, chairman, publisher, president, CEO, CFO, Grand Poobah, consigliere, Most Exalted Muckamuck, First Citizen o' Love, minister of information, malcontent-in-residence, spiritual advisor, guru, sensei, Grand Vizier, Imperial Lama, First Among Equals, and most humble author will be attending a 200 hr. Yoga Teacher Training...

...(which, yes, represents a significant step toward laying the groundwork for the long-promised Yoga for Cynics ashram.....anybody out there got a tropical island you’re not using for anything?)...

...was planning on some serious tidying up around the place before I go...but decided spring cleaning’s better left ’til spring....last night my mom gave me an early birthday present a sweater to replace, she said, my old favorite, now full of holes, which she tried to get me to promise to throw out, or, at least, never wear when anybody can see me...I explained that it didn’t matter, because I’ll still be the kinda guy who wears ratty sweaters with holes in them....even if I’m wearing a custom-made, designer-original tuxedo, anybody talking to me will always figure that out in no time...

He who binds to himself a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity's sunrise
William Blake

...had coffee three or four...maybe five...times this week, after three months off... which, whether defensible in terms of yamas and niyamas or not, lemme tell ya, felt like three or four big steaming cups o’ happiness...

...which I’ll try to kiss as it flies, before heading up to Kripalu tomorrow, where, most likely I'll spend a month largely without caffeine, junk food, alcohol, T.V...probably a whole bunch of other minor vices, as well...while learning all about yoga...and god-only-knows-what about myself...and beyond that, who knows?...will I come back a Floating Glowing Being of Pure Love?...or at least muster up the energy to clean up that filthy apartment?...throw out that rancid sweater...or perhaps more fully inhabit it?...

...guess we’ll see...

Life in Motion

...the time change confused me, as usual...spring forward, fall back seems simple enough, but somehow always so complicated...particularly considering the tendency of some, but not all, high tech appliances these days to update on their own...I quit wearing a watch long ago, and, more recently, my old clock radio broke...(actually, it still works, but the knob used to change the time on it doesn’t)...(so, I just need to turn it on at exactly midnight)...(which I’m gonna do...one of these days)...

...(that plan, however, is complicated by my recent efforts to get up earlier)...(while also cutting down on junk food and caffeine)...(which makes the early to bed part easier)...(but also leaves me kinda wandering in a dream)...(like, even more than usual)...(weeks going by like long, highly involved years)...(not that that's a bad thing)...

...have been going to the local meditation studio where people sit, generally, a bit too early for me...or, sometimes, more than a bit...and this is where the time change became an issue...waking up this past Sunday, saw my cell phone and computer both had the same time....so...did that mean they both changed automatically, or neither did?....as I was up, anyway, assumed the former and, since I was too late to walk, headed out to the car, hoping I wouldn’t be an hour early...to find that the car clock was an hour ahead...its wrongness letting me know what time was right...relatively speaking...

...watching Koyaanisqatsi...(wonder what the spell-check's gonna think of that one)...(Hopi for "life out of balance")...Godfrey Reggio’s masterwork of ecological chaos, fancy camerawork and Philip Glass minimalism.....first time I saw it was with a buncha people from the Philly Greenpeace office in the mid-80’s...passed around an eye-dropper, watched it along with The Lorax...("I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues")...and Star Trek IV...(the one where the Starship Enterprise goes back in time to saves the whales)...on somebody’s VCR...kind of a serendipitous psychedelic eco-film festival....certainly, never saw a mushroom cloud quite the same way again...

...time slowing up and speeding down...Hopi prophecies meeting momentous ill-conceived housing developments...embedded in the inherent contradictions of so beautifully using cutting edge technology to make a statement about technology growing out of control...dazzling unspoiled spaces and toxic wastelands...

...there in the midst, though, a kind of third term represented by moving images of people on the street...faces, hair, clothing...caught up in the maelstrom and looking very strange...and yet, they’re us...