The Slow and Gradual Path to Minor Fame as a Yoga Blogger

...time to say farewell to October, month o' major amounts of yoga...including the Philly yoga festival, trip to Kripalu, and only three days in which I didn’t attend at least one yoga class...including this past Saturday, when I went to the Rally to Restore Sanity...which, I think, was all about walking a line between humor and seriousness, accepting others, toning down the rage, and trying to be mindful rather than reacting out of instinctual fear...and, as such, kinda like a really big yoga class...

...but not requiring a mat...which is good since I've had a tendency to leave my mat at yoga studios lately...like yesterday...and last Tuesday....and the week before that, left my shorts...leaving little doubt that my subconscious mind wants yet more yoga...

...which it’s getting...as I ended up marking the first day of the relatively low-key yoga month of November feeling both mellow and energized...and, first and foremost, concerned with going to get my mat first thing in the morning and, though planning on my usual kundalini class in the evening (which I did end up going to, as well...work? what's that?), staying for a most excellent vinyasa class...in which, for the very first time, I dropped back from wild thing...camatkarasana...to wheel...urdhva dhanurasana...on both sides...even if I couldn’t manage to reverse it...(note to non-yogi readers: this is, like, really really impressive...)...(not that impressively performing advanced transitions between asanas is the point, or anything)...

...(...seriously, like, one thing I've come to realize is that, while a vigorous yoga practice while badly out of shape isn't much fun....trust me, I know...sometimes being in shape is even more of a problem...)...(like, a couple different teachers have told me they can tell runners and cyclists...that's me...by their inability to touch the floor with their heels in downward facing dog...)...(...and then there was the time I was struggling to get into a bind and the teacher explained that the trouble came from my arms and legs being so muscular...and I thought hmmmm...she's saying I'm just too buff and studly for this pose....that's gotta be the best reason not to be able to do something I've ever heard.....I think I can live with it...)...

...anyway, along with the practice, this yoga cynic's fame continues...slowly, very slowly...to grow...even as weird, existential stuff is fed to the masses....people meet me and then send really impressed e-mails saying stuff like whoa, dude! I can’t believe you’re the guy who writes yoga for cynics!!!...seriously...there’s talk of a Yoga for Cynics workshop some time in the new year (or, at least, there's been a brief chat after yoga class a couple weeks ago about meeting for coffee at some unspecified time in the future to talk about the possibility of a Yoga Cynics workshop maybe some time next year)...(...then, that's how democracy got its start, too...)...a couple weeks ago, got my latest blog award from the legendary Laura...and Brooks wrote an article at Elephant Journal featuring not only a picture of myself with herself and the uber-famous Seane Corn, but wrote such lovely stuff about me, I’m almost too embarrassed to link to it...but will...check it out...

...so, now, I sit contemplating possible layouts for the Yoga for Cynics ashram...thinkin’ recycled building materials, floppy-eared dogs roaming the grounds, inspiring inscriptions from the Tao Te Ching, Leaves of Grass, and Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols, and a totally laissez faire attitude toward sex...somewhere where the ocean meets the sea and dolphins frolic in the waves...and it occurs to me that I really oughtta be getting back to work...

Old Walt

All truths wait in all things...
Walt Whitman

...I’m recycling myself again, from a comment left on Brooks’ latest blog post...which I was enticed into...even though I always read her anyway...by one of my favorite Whitman poems when I first read him twenty years ago...but that I'd almost completely forgotten until I saw those first few words...unseen buds, infinite, hidden well...god, how I love old Walt...Leaves of Grass remaining probably the closest thing my intrinsically vague personal religion has to a holy book...

...gotta admit I didn’t like him particularly at first...reading bits of Song of Myself and maybe some other stuff in an American Lit class...didn’t do a thing for me, really...but for some reason knew there was something I was missing...got a copy of Leaves of Grass, walked a mile through the woods from campus to the beach on Puget Sound to sit on rocks and open to random pages...generally reading small poems like unseen buds...

...I still have that copy, though it’s fallen apart, gotten yellow and crinkly after living in my backpack through my serious backpacking years...up and down the Appalachians and Rockies, across Zion and Canyonlands and Arches, to the top of the San Francisco Peaks and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where I spent my twenty ninth birthday and the pack got clawed open by a ringtail cat during the night...

...more recently, taught Song of Myself to students at a couple different colleges...making sure to point out the significance of I loaf and invite my soul...which is, essentially, that it’s Whitman’s instruction on how to read the poem...and, as such, the complete antithesis of reading it in a classroom where they’d be required to write a paper about it and end up being graded on their performance, as I was having them do...and told them something like if you really want to understand this poem, read it on your own when you don’t have to worry about papers or grades...preferably lying in the grass or sitting on a beach on Puget Sound, or way down in the Grand Canyon...but be sure to hang your backpack properly...

Plunge

...not far from where I live, there’s a place informally known as the dog beach...just a small stretch of rocks and mud along the banks of legendary Wissahickon Creek, where denizens of West Mt. Airy, state of mild late-winter ennui, USA take their dogs to swim....was sitting on an old stone fence by there a couple days ago and watching this guy throwing a stick in the creek for his black lab to chase...the way the dog plunged into the water as soon as the stick was thrown, every ounce of weight and strength and monomaniacal purpose directed toward the goal, regardless of whatever stood or flowed between...sheer propulsion refusing to accommodate or even acknowledge water as something separate...oblivious to all else...fully engaged, entirely focused...every fiber of dog pluuuuuuuunging deep...to the extent that dog was inextricable from plunge...and me thinking when did I last plunge like that into anything?

...when the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published, there was no author named on the title page...just a drawing of a casually dressed guy with a beard on the page facing...however, anyone willing to plunge deep into the first long poem, Song of Myself, got to Section 24 and found Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son...a poet plunged so deeply into his own poem that he emerges, briefly, as a specific individual with a name and place he's from, if also everything, only halfway through...