Return to Hogwarts

...January hit like a giant hunk of ice in the forehead...days of severe lassitude...not much work but that little bit took all day...endlessly seeking minor forms of stimulation, trying and often failing to avoid the ones that make things worse in the long run...

...this morning, dragged myself out early through a brushing of snow, drove five hours north to Kripalu, for the first time since the yoga teacher training two years ago...where I'm gonna spend the week in a meditation retreat with Jack Kornfield...Meditation for Freedom and Compassion Everywhere...(should definitely work better than meditating to right-wing talk radio to teach myself to be less compassionate...in line with my reverse-Boddhisattva vow not to attain full enlightenment until all sentient beings in the universe are as miserable as I am)...(just kidding)...

...hugged some old friends, mindfully chowed down the healthiest lunch I've had in a long time, took a walk in the woods, went to yoga class, had the healthiest dinner I've had in a long time, went to the first meditation retreat session...where they urged me to turn off the electronic devices and be silent for the week...oops...felt like I had a minor yet satisfying psychedelic experience, took a walk down to the beach in the dark to look at the stars while listening to Miles Davis In a Silent Way on the purple ipod...oops, again...maybe gotta wean myself a bit...

...now, it's almost 11:00 and I got yoga class to go to at 6:15 in the morning...oh yeah...

Life in Motion

...the time change confused me, as usual...spring forward, fall back seems simple enough, but somehow always so complicated...particularly considering the tendency of some, but not all, high tech appliances these days to update on their own...I quit wearing a watch long ago, and, more recently, my old clock radio broke...(actually, it still works, but the knob used to change the time on it doesn’t)...(so, I just need to turn it on at exactly midnight)...(which I’m gonna do...one of these days)...

...(that plan, however, is complicated by my recent efforts to get up earlier)...(while also cutting down on junk food and caffeine)...(which makes the early to bed part easier)...(but also leaves me kinda wandering in a dream)...(like, even more than usual)...(weeks going by like long, highly involved years)...(not that that's a bad thing)...

...have been going to the local meditation studio where people sit, generally, a bit too early for me...or, sometimes, more than a bit...and this is where the time change became an issue...waking up this past Sunday, saw my cell phone and computer both had the same time....so...did that mean they both changed automatically, or neither did?....as I was up, anyway, assumed the former and, since I was too late to walk, headed out to the car, hoping I wouldn’t be an hour early...to find that the car clock was an hour ahead...its wrongness letting me know what time was right...relatively speaking...

...watching Koyaanisqatsi...(wonder what the spell-check's gonna think of that one)...(Hopi for "life out of balance")...Godfrey Reggio’s masterwork of ecological chaos, fancy camerawork and Philip Glass minimalism.....first time I saw it was with a buncha people from the Philly Greenpeace office in the mid-80’s...passed around an eye-dropper, watched it along with The Lorax...("I speak for the trees, for the trees have no tongues")...and Star Trek IV...(the one where the Starship Enterprise goes back in time to saves the whales)...on somebody’s VCR...kind of a serendipitous psychedelic eco-film festival....certainly, never saw a mushroom cloud quite the same way again...

...time slowing up and speeding down...Hopi prophecies meeting momentous ill-conceived housing developments...embedded in the inherent contradictions of so beautifully using cutting edge technology to make a statement about technology growing out of control...dazzling unspoiled spaces and toxic wastelands...

...there in the midst, though, a kind of third term represented by moving images of people on the street...faces, hair, clothing...caught up in the maelstrom and looking very strange...and yet, they’re us...

In Which Nothing In Particular Is Said

Man is quite insane. He wouldn't know how to create a maggot, and he creates Gods by the dozen.
Michel de Montaigne
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into

fragments

by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms toward

perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its

way into

the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-

widening thought and action—

Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my

country

awake.

Rabindranath Tagore

That first quote came from Claire, and the second from Lisa Allender, who got it from Lydia, who got it from...I guess somebody named Rabindranath Tagore...whoever the hell that is...yeah, yeah, yeah, I know who he was...lighten the hell up, folks....Anyway...don’t worry, I’m not gonna use this poem to make any kind of statements about the upcoming election, or anything of the kind...What, me worry? Lately it seems like every conversation I have turns into an argument, including those that have nothing to do with politics—that sense of vicious competition, accusation, shameless lying, and overweening indignation is simply coursing through the lifeblood of the culture as we stumble through our days, always a little bit more edgy, anger fueling engines, now that it’s so much cheaper than gasoline. Last night I went to yoga class, which, like the past few Monday nights, kept crossing amazingly back and forth the line between intense workout and psychedelic experience....I suggested to my teacher, the legendary Jennifer Schelter, that we have a non-stop class for the next eight days, but I don’t think she took me seriously....

So what’s left but to drink coffee and steal poem fragments from other people’s websites? Anyway, what interests me is that one bit up there: Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; which, y’know, as my old hippie freak friend, and noted poetry critic, Jedediah, might say in between bong hits: duuuuude...that’s some intense shit...but that’s not, actually, what I’m gonna say about it...then, maybe I’ll just leave it to speak for itself...thereby, I hope, avoiding that desert sand, myself, and instead thank my blogger friend Christa for bestowing another award on this humble blog before wandering back out in the rain....