{index of lines from unwritten blog posts}
...dug out my first yoga mat...purple, bought at a Wegmans in Rochester in 2001...more craters than the surface of the moon though none, quite, going all the way through...wasn’t till I got to class that I realized I hadn’t used...or washed...it since the trip to Costa Rica...pungent waves of nostalgia rising with each sharp and mellow scent of suntan lotion, insect repellent, and year-old sweat from hours of vinyasa practice morning and night in tropical weather...
A year indoors is a journey along a paper calendar; a year in outer nature is the accomplishment of a tremendous ritual.
Henry Beston
...a guy I hung out with almost twenty years ago died recently....found out about it on Facebook...where he’s still got a page....according to status updates, he’s still making new friends...
No one respects the flame quite like the fool who’s badly burned...
Pete Townshend
...slow day in the coffee shop...or slow me...the place itself is booming, Steve Reich, Sonic Youth, Ornette Coleman, and early Frank Zappa blasting through earphones a person with a history of serious ear problems shouldn’t be using...both drums surgically reconstructed, and chronic ringing in the left....my older brother a long time ago had a Black Sabbath album called We Sold Our Souls for Rock n’ Roll...can you help me? help me find my brain?...if they can sell their souls, I can at least sacrifice an eardrum or two...
...the desire for community was only strengthened in a month of such yogi-proximity, making the line between solitude and loneliness more hazy than ever...
...any god who is threatened by new truth from any source is clearly dead already.
John Shelby Spong
...it can be fun to have a friend full of juicy gossip and clever cutting remarks about absent people....only trouble is, you know damn well whose dirt’s gonna be dished the minute your back’s turned...
...been told, quite dismissively, that my attitude is very American...and it is...(to be more precise...or pretentious...it’s very Emersonian...very Whitmanian)...in the same sense, that is, that yoga, traditionally, is very Indian and something else is very Chinese, very Italian, or very Brazilian....since anything, ultimately, can be reduced to context...which is exactly what makes taking things out of context so valuable, sometimes...
Whatever we do with our hybridized yoga, the old man in the forest cautions against writing it down. Yoga has always been an oral tradition, fostering intimacy between its speakers and listeners, and resisting the dogma and myopia that fester in words written on anything more substantial than breath.
yoga 2.0
...people who meditate or practice yoga have been known, sometimes, to fall into the trap of feeling superior...ironic as that might be when it comes with claims of overcoming the ego...more grounded, higher-minded, more spiritual than thou....while I often suspect that what leads us to these practices is, in fact, simply being more fucked up than other people, who don’t actually need to sit in quiet rooms for hours on end or learn to feel comfortable with their feet behind their heads...
...I might feel perfectly fulfilled, I thought, glancing surreptitiously across the room, if I could only kiss the inside of that black-stockinged thigh...
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
Anatole France
...and even if I am getting better as I get older...(the cells don’t lie...whatever the attitude or aptitude...if you prick me I still bleed, but it takes a hell of a lot longer for the cut to heal)...I’m also getting older as I get better...
...strangely, sometimes, a refreshing tinge of possibility can be tasted right there in the midst of that deep, crushing sensation...if I can stop and tune in to it...swish the bitter wine around my palate it for a moment instead of gulping or trying to spit the bitterness out...
...the key is, I think, not to strip off the junk only to find different junk...
A genius is the one most like himself.
Thelonious Monk
