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...

Venomous Spiders, Handstands, Elephants, and Trying Yet Failing to Move With the Peculiar Grace of a Three-Legged Dog

...you’re the blessed, we’re the spiders from mars...
David Bowie

...bourgeois as this might sound, Yoga for Cynics will soon have a second home...as I’ve been asked to write for Elephant Journal...based in Boulder, Colorado...home to Tibetan Buddhists, organic vegan mountain oysters, and ludicrously expensive real estate inhabited by people who wear socks with sandals...(this blog is, as always, best read barefoot)...

...not sure yet how what ends up there’s gonna differ from what’s here...maybe written under my full name...possibly with proper sentences, without ellipses...perhaps a bit less self-indulgent...meaning you’ll still have to come here to find out why I spent all day Monday in bathrobe, fuzzy pajama-type pants, and the ratty t-shirt I’d had on since Saturday’s eleven o’clock yoga class...(featuring my first American handstand)...(as opposed to those laid-back Costa Rican yoga retreat handstands anybody can do)...after which, as rain continued to fall steadily for the second day in a row, decided there was no more optimal use for the day than sitting around drinking coffee...which I did....yeah, I know, there’s much disagreement about coffee amongst the yoga crowd...pure-living non-(as opposed to anti-, since they’re too positive to be against anything)caffeine types on the one hand, irredeemable bean junkies with their steaming mugs filled to the brim with tasty rationalizations on the other....but I’ve got a far more potent and dangerous issue to discuss...we’re talkin’ spiders, people...

...because, that evening, started feeling pain and noticed swelling in my upper foot/lower ankle...which I promptly blamed on yoga...though couldn’t actually think of exactly how, in this instance, yoga could’ve done it...(alright...can feel the eyes rolling from here....change that to how I could’ve done it by bringing a stupidly competitive attitude to yoga and not listening to my body...are ya happy now?)...or why it took all day for the damage to kick in....

...then, as the weekend wore on, pain and swelling steadily increased...compromising my ability to walk...leaving me staggering, limping, hopping, crawling...trying yet failing to move with the peculiar grace of a three legged dog...as well as feeling strange chills...fever...and noticing a little red mark right in the belly of the swollen area...dismissed, at first, as simply one of countless little red marks left over from the Nicoya Peninsula...but, then, remembered this nasty little spider hanging right by my comfortable-yet-stylish IKEA chair earlier in the day...which, out of a deep commitment to ahimsa...or extreme laziness...I left alone...and the realization dawned that this thoroughly non-ahimsa-practicing spider had, in fact, bitten me*...

...now, Tuesday afternoon, I’m on the mend...even changed out of that ratty t-shirt...went to the doctor...who prescribed antibiotics...without bringing up the word amputate even once...though still probably a few days away from doing any more handstands....anyone so inclined is more than welcome to send healing energies...or cash...

* not, actually, the gigantic Costa Rican banana spider in the photo...though thinking that made the story more interesting, didn't it?

Yogi Don’t Surf! (El Yogi Cynico en Costa Rica Parte Cinco)

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

...someone told me the forecast for Philly for the following week, when we’d be home, had highs in the upper forties...which’ll feel just balmy, said she....or would if we hadn’t just spent ten days down here, said I...


Charlie don’t surf!
Colonel Kilgore, Apocalypse, Now

...the Pacific coast of the Nicoya Peninsula is renowned as a major surf haven, attracting incredibly buff wave riders from around the world...including most everybody else on our little retreat...and yet...alas...this cynical yogi...(with a history of ear problems...culminating in chronically infected scar tissue from operations meant to remove other chronically infected scar tissue resulting from previous operations meant to stop chronic ear infections)...(all of which makes water sports that involve submerging the head highly inadvisable)...does not surf...

...and, anyway, there are an awful lot of underwater rocks, there...so ya never know, when floating about the surf, just what might be lurking underneath....and this is starting to sound like yet another metaphor...

You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.
attributed to Swami Satchidinanda

...there’s a book called In Search of Captain Zero, about a couple of surfers and ex-weed smugglers who, earlier in their lives, decided that someday they’d find the perfect beach with the perfect surf break...paradise...to spend the rest of their lives...

The Paradise is in the desire, not in the imperfection of accomplishment...

Allen Ginsberg

...in time, though, they lost one another...and the author, Allan C. Weisbecker, has the idea that his friend, Christopher...Captain Zero...may have finally found it...so heads down through Mexico into Central America...doing lots of surfing along the way...

That ‘s how thick the wave was and how deep within it I found myself. I was in a crouch, which is pretty much instinctive in that sort of situation, but I could have stood up and still not gotten my hair wet. For the three, maybe four seconds before that wave spit me back out into the sunlight with my feet still planted firmly on my board, I was exactly and without doubt where I wanted to be on the surface of the planet earth. And there was not a drop of water in my universe that was out of place.

...eventually finding Christopher, and it, on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica...only to learn that, having found his paradise, Captain Zero’s developed an addiction to crack....sometimes, it seems, there’s nothing more dangerous than finding your ideal...especially if the plan is to try and hold on to it for good instead of simply enjoying the perfect moments you get before letting them go...

...back in slowly-melting-snowy Philadelphia, found my difficult adjustment to cold weather after ten days struggling to stay cool, itchy skin flaking off from sunburn, arms and legs so bug bitten they've been compared to Saint Sebastian, garnered little sympathy...

...and, anyway, here’s where I am now...and, with temperatures reaching up toward the low sixties, and purple flowers blooming where snow was days ago, it's probably best to let go of that beach...for now...

Sutras While the Sun Sets (El Yogi Cynico en Costa Rica Parte Dos)

...it really says something about this town that a big hairy guy can get picked up hitch-hiking in the dark by a girl in a bikini...or so I announced, manic frenzied energy bursting into the improvised yoga studio on the cabana’s front porch facing the ocean as everyone else prepared quietly for candle-lit kundalini...and I think I was misunderstood...

...getting lost is often essential in getting where you need to go...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 18:339

...first day or so in Santa Teresa found me gravitating between a kind of elated relief and lingering dread carried over from home...shedding layers of clothing and watching the mountains and jungle go by on the six hour bus and ferry ride to the Nicoya Peninsula, buying armloads of fresh papayas and mangoes, avocados and bananas...body where I wanted it to be, but another part remaining, as if caught in a web of ice, elsewhere...

...but working on it, getting up to sit on the rocks as the sun came up, morning yoga and running out into the waves to wash off the sweat...setting out to make a meditation of wandering through the day...

...culminating in a long afternoon walk, about as far down the beach toward the south as bare feet could comfortably take me, before turning around, expecting time to kick back a while, maybe take another swim, before evening yoga...just had to turn right into the trees at the rocks in front of Punta Coco...purple i-pod playing Buenavista Social Club, Peter Tosh, Astrid Gilberto, and Cowgirl in the Sand...(Fillmore East version)...orange sun fading from sky to sea...

...and yet, after some distance, nothing, apparently, but thin sandy high tide beach up ahead...seeming to go on and on...sun now red, continuing its descent as I moved faster, fueled by just a bit of anxiety in paradise...thinking, after a while, I must have gone too far but certainly didn’t recall seeing those rocks...then worrying I was gonna miss yoga class, and racing into the descending darkness...adrenaline coursing through every capillary even with the realization that I was likely running away from instead of toward home...feet padding rapidly on wet sand as light diminished...

...it’s not an adventure unless, as some point along the way, it really sucks...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 532:42

...and yet, the beach only seemed to get more narrow, unfamiliar...just about ending....no doubt about it, I’d gone too far...possibly way too far....turned off on the first dirt and gravel passageway, finding a strange collection of houses connected by wooden walkways, followed by a steep rocky hill...though things were completely flat where we were staying...meaning I was way off...shit...not wanting to go back to the beach, though, with little reason to think I’d have any more success finding Punta Coco going the other way, with even less light...so continued trudging upward...barefoot, on gravel...finding this little jaunt had stopped being fun some time ago and showed little promise of getting anything but worse...at last reaching the road, now in full dark, turning knowing I had quite a way to go on it, though still not at all sure exactly where in this strange foreign land I was...and my feet were already sore...

...saw an SUV coming...not many cars other than SUV’s and ORV’s in those parts...the roads are too rough...and, just for the hell of it, stuck out my thumb...hoping, from past experience, for some big burly guy...typically the only kind of person who picks up big burly guy hitch-hikers...though even they generally don’t so in the dark...

...instead, the Spanish speaking surfer girl in the green bathing suit calmly pulled over upon sight of my upraised thumb....even if she seemed a bit nonplussed when her dirty, barefoot passenger seemed unclear on where he was or where he was going...and what I could explain she couldn’t understand...finally managing to sputter out perdido...en la playa...she smiled and said aaaah...fully aware, it was clear, of the intoxicating nature of the Costa Rican sunset...

...all in all, take a poet over a guru any day...intrepid searchers make far better conversation than those who claim to have found...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Cynic Sutra 561:87

...seemed at least two miles before the sign for the little hamburguesa joint near the gate to Punta Coco...and so, after another barefoot jaunt down the short jungle gravel road to the cabanas, made it to yoga class on time...heart pumping, crazily invigorated...there, completely...