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...

Maybe it’s been too long a time since I was scramblin’ down in the street...

...still midwinter...following weeks of writing about misery and nostalgia for happy teenaged years that never happened...see recent posts...and not much else...had a conversation with somebody about a not-too-expensive trip to Costa Rica...involving a week...(coinciding, coincidentally enough, with my forty-fourth birthday)...at a distant Pacific beach...lounging out, doing yoga, letting wintry eyes get lost in tropical skies...five hour bus rides across the Central American countryside, nights hosteling in San Jose...and brief layovers at George Bush International Airport...yeah, really...at each end...just a matter of weeks away...but still way beyond my budget...

...I said okay, I’ll go...

...given the details, seems like travelin' light's gonna be the way...perhaps limiting myself to one bag...toothbrush, a few shirts, changes of underwear, a book or two...and...here it comes...seriously...no c.o.m.p.u.t.e.r...

...though working my habit-driven mind around that concept may take a while....have avoided these crazy interwebs on yoga retreats in the past...mostly...but...to forsake this metal and plastic block containing my writing, music, pictures, etc., entirely...haven’t done that for so much as a day in a long, long time....which, actually, makes it seem all the more a good idea...

...maybe it’s been too long a time since I was scramblin’ down in the street...
Joni Mitchell

...used to go for months living out of a backpack...no ipod or cellphone, either...(for that matter, they weren’t even invented yet)...leaving the pack with everything in it in an almost complete stranger’s unlocked van to go see a rock band, harboring little doubt it was worth the risk...sitting on the rocks by a little Greek village in Paros, finding a strange contentment in being so far from anything familiar, anyone who knew my name...scrawling life is good all along the northern reaches of the Appalachian Trail, happy with being warm and well fed, nothing too blatantly feeding on me... unencumbered...relatively speaking...

...not to suggest running away as a solution to anything...nor to romanticize poverty...or a rootless life based on amassing frequent flyer miles like George Clooney in that movie....what’s important, I suspect, isn’t to escape from anything...or even to refuse oneself that new i-Pad thing everybody suddenly needs...(I’m certainly not about to preach asceticism a mere couple paragraphs down from saying I'm gonna go jetting off for a week of downward facing dog in the tropics)...

...voluntary simplicity is a wonderful thing...so long as you remember that, for most of the world, there’s nothing voluntary...or simple...about it...
Ancient and Revered Yoga Sutra 333:76

...but to realize you’re complete with or without all that...non-attachment not in the sense of breaking off from anything...but realizing none of it was ever truly essential to you in the first place...

...thanks to April for the photo of some unidentified individual standing in a Rocky Mountain meadow...