Whatever You Wish to Keep...

You must leave now take what you need you think will last,
but whatever you wish to keep you better grab it fast...
Bob Dylan, It's All Over Now, Baby Blue

...one last trip to the house where I grew up for any childhood or adolescent relics deemed worthy of occupying a storage locker corner until god-only-knows-when...(that's my dad's old guitar leaning against my official-document-of-bein'-real-smart, and boxed up pictures, paperbacks, comic books, letters, ticket stubs, and a couple Matchbox cars)...

...last week took my beloved mountain/city bike into the shop for a minor repair only to find out the frame was broken...tried to see it as a lesson in impermanence and non-attachment and even came up with a mantra for the experience...

om
shanti
fuck

...since, ultimately, the Philly boy I am values honest expression of feelings as highly as those more proper Buddhist-y yogi virtues....but now feelings are even more complex...leavin' nothin' much to say, for the moment, and nothin' much to fall back on but old rock lyrics...(with gratitude to the fearlessly non-traditional yoga playlists of the inimitable Sarah E.)...(kirtan? wha...?)...

Take me to the station,
and put me on a train,
I got no expectations
to pass through here, again...
Mick Jagger/Keith Richards, No Expectations

Lost My Sacred Mala Beads Last Night at a Hipster Pool Party

Renunciation is not getting rid of the things of this world, but accepting that they pass away.
Aitken Roshi

...everything you gather is just more that you can lose...
Robert Hunter

...lost my sacred mala beads last night at a hipster pool party...yeah, I hear ya: what’s a yoga cynic doing with sacred mala beads in the first place?!...is he perhaps being ironic?....actually, no....got ‘em at Kripalu on one of first nights of the teacher training, passed out with a mantra...om namo bhagavate vasudevaya...even if I can’t say what exactly that means to me....then, a night or two before leaving, passed them around ceremonially through the group...as, you might say, a means of tying us and our experience together like sacred beads on a string...to be taken metaphysically or metaphorically...and I’ve worn them every day since, feeling that connection, in some way or other...but now they’re gone, dropped somewhere, apparently, when I was changing my clothes before or after going in for a swim...

...biked over there first thing after coffee this morning...found nothing but empty plastic cups and broken pool toys in the trampled grass...

...headed downtown to yoga class soon after...felt a drop or two a few blocks from home but didn’t think that was anything...then a light sprinkle along the Wissahickon path....turning to a not so light sprinkle and then a steady rain by the time I got to the Schuylkill...not thrilled to show up soaked and muddy, but no desire to turn around and go home, either...hell, you don’t hear those old school yogis saying dude, I was gonna go meditate naked in the charnel ground with rocks hanging from my junk but checked the weather on-line and looks like it might be a tad inclement...and, really, it's not bad, biking through the rain...