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...

Planning on Not Planning on Anything

I loafe and invite my soul,

I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
Walt Whitman

...too sluggish-in-the-membrane to come up with original subject matter, I stole this from Anthroyogini’s blog:

I’ve learned that taking it easy and following your natural rhythms is much more important than productivity. What matters most is how much joy you’re currently experiencing in the present moment. If you’re putting off your happiness until you accomplish something, you’re failing at life.
Jonathon Mead

...where it was part of a post about her incredible shrinking yoga practice...which made me feel better about my own kinda falling apart in recent weeks...particularly the more-and-more-occasional at-home every-morning end of it...especially if one considers that lighting up the incense and putting on Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way or Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidinanda to sit in a sloppy lotus pose and do a neck stretching routine for five minutes, all the while thinking shit, there’s so much stuff I should be doing now instead of self-indulgently sitting here fits only the most liberal definitions of yoga practice in the first place...does wonders for preventing tension headaches, though...

...then, as those who’ve read this blog for a while have no doubt picked up, I’m all about the liberal definitions...

...and, alas, the morning yoga practice is far from the only aspect of life where I’ve been sluggish and unproductive...which is probably a major reason for the anxiety about shit-that-needs-to-be-done while I’m trying to do that at-peace-with-myself thing...

...overall, I’ve been inclined to think that the key is finding a balance between setting goals and not beating yourself up for failing to meet them...though that’s a balance that makes that eagle pose thing look like child’s play...

...anyway, this Jonathon Mead dude seems to take things a good deal further than that...suggesting that doing away with goals altogether might be the way to go...as long as you don’t make a goal of that, presumably....when I first read it, I thought hell, my natural rhythm is to just fuck around all day...but, perhaps, it just seems that way because I've got so many conflicting goals, plans, expectations slamming around in my head, entangling themselves in desires and fears...leaving me, yes, fuckin’ around all day...

...might be interesting to see what would happen if I could just open the brain and let all that out for a while...might get a lot more done if I stopped yelling at myself to get stuff done...which can leave me too mentally exhausted to do much of anything...

...at this point, I’m thinking that, late tonight, I’m gonna get in my car and drive a couple hours to get to the seashore, and wake there the next three mornings...just to see what happens...