Questions to Meditate On...Or Not...

This is the third Yoga for Cynics post in the past week or so that’s featured the word not prominently in the title—could my need for this yoga retreat in Mexico thingy be any more stark?

In the immortal words of Neil Young: tell me why is it hard to make arrangements with yourself when you’re old enough to re-paint but young enough to sell?

What the hell does that mean?

Before Mexico, I’m taking a shorter trip...to New York City....could anything be more appropriate before a yoga retreat than a visit to the world capital of angst?

In the words of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards: work and work for love and sex, ain’t you hungry for success success success success? Does it matter?

Are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards people you'd normally turn to for a critique of materialism?

Is to be or not to be really the question?

Why is a person with love considered a loser in tennis?

Is it possible to snort crystal meth mindfully?

Do you think there are people who fantasize about masturbation during sex?

Written in a shelter register on the Appalachian Trail in a very wet month of May, 1992: if April showers bring May flowers, what do May showers bring?

In the words of a guy named “Rudi” in Stephen Cope’s The Wisdom of Yoga: in the end, we all have to write our own scriptures, don’t we?

Not living in the here and now at all...

...in less than a week and a half, I’m gonna be on a yoga retreat on the Caribbean Coast of Mexico...sleeping in a thatched roof cabana on the beach, most likely barefoot all week...gettin’ very very mellow...in the very place where this blog was kinda conceived...though I didn’t realize it’d been conceived for some time after that...then, isn’t that how it usually goes with conception?...hmmm...seem to be getting into that weird birth imagery again...then, a couple of certifiable women left comments to the effect that it was okay the last time....less acceptable, perhaps, is the fact that the yoga retreat is my latest excuse for not living in the here and now but instead grumpily counting down the days until I’m gone...not as bad as killing for peace, but in the same rhetorical neighborhood...

...for the trip last year, got this cheesy cheap little travel alarm clock that, as it turned out, made considerably less noise than the waves and birds...so, having arrived late the night before, I wake up to see that I’ve already missed the first half of the morning meditation thing...and, having promptly thrown shorts and a t-shirt on and run over, I see that everybody else is there...lookin’ like totally serious yogis....the yoga retreat’s barely started, and I’m already blowing it...yeah, it took me a little while to get into that yoga retreat state of mind...

...at the end of the retreat, having hugged everybody and gotten all touchy-feely for the last time, I headed for the airport, where I was promptly asked if I’d give up my seat, enjoy a free night at the Cancun Hyatt, and fly out the next day....as it turned out, I didn’t think going back to Philly that day was the best idea, anyway...

...some time later, having downed a number of rather large margaritas, I found myself in a hot-tub behind a gigantic hotel...listening to Peter Tosh on my ipod and trying to explain the concept of a yoga retreat to these two dudes from LA with pot leaf necklaces and somewhat incongruous Mardi Gras beads...we gotta find ourselves some sluts, they said, throwing into stark relief just how far I’d come in a few short hours...later, back in Philly, my friend Kara said I bet right then, in another hot tub at another hotel in Cancun, there were two women saying 'we gotta find ourselves some assholes!’...and she could be right...

Plunge

...not far from where I live, there’s a place informally known as the dog beach...just a small stretch of rocks and mud along the banks of legendary Wissahickon Creek, where denizens of West Mt. Airy, state of mild late-winter ennui, USA take their dogs to swim....was sitting on an old stone fence by there a couple days ago and watching this guy throwing a stick in the creek for his black lab to chase...the way the dog plunged into the water as soon as the stick was thrown, every ounce of weight and strength and monomaniacal purpose directed toward the goal, regardless of whatever stood or flowed between...sheer propulsion refusing to accommodate or even acknowledge water as something separate...oblivious to all else...fully engaged, entirely focused...every fiber of dog pluuuuuuuunging deep...to the extent that dog was inextricable from plunge...and me thinking when did I last plunge like that into anything?

...when the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published, there was no author named on the title page...just a drawing of a casually dressed guy with a beard on the page facing...however, anyone willing to plunge deep into the first long poem, Song of Myself, got to Section 24 and found Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son...a poet plunged so deeply into his own poem that he emerges, briefly, as a specific individual with a name and place he's from, if also everything, only halfway through...

Shuffling Through the Chaos

I used to be lost in the shuffle. Now I just shuffle along with the lost.
Anonymous (but quoted by somebody in my high school yearbook)

I accept chaos. I am not sure whether it accepts me.
Bob Dylan

Carolyn, the legendary laughing yogini, was kind enough to give this humble blog an award, referring to it as a "reality” yoga blog, and praising it for being honest and funny....to plagiarize my own comment on her blog, which I hope she’ll forgive me for (nobody said anything about being original)...I think reality, honesty, and humor go hand in hand...humorlessness pretty much requires you to impose a strict and all encompassing order on reality, denying absurdity...while humor is about looking at absurdity and saying if ya can't beat it, join it....

...of course one thing about absurdity is it’s hard to identify...I mean, just because something doesn’t make sense to me, that doesn’t necessarily make it absurd...though it might make me a bit absurd if it’s something everybody else seems to understand...which seems to be the case an awful lot of the time...

...I’m not really into the transmigration of souls thing...generally far more interested in finding out if there’s really life before death...nonetheless, I’ve read the Tibetan Book of the Dead...and suspect that if there really is a bardo...a place in between lives...there’s gotta be some kinda Bardo State College where they offer courses like How to Be a Functioning Human Being 101...and, if so, I must’ve been sitting in the back of the classroom drawing pictures in the margins of my notebook when I should've been paying attention, particularly during lectures like How to Make Sense of Other Human Beings...then, looking around, it appears at least I wasn’t alone back there...

...the things I do understand that a lot of people don’t tend to be unanswerable questions...or questions with so many conflicting answers that you certainly can’t come to anything like a definite conclusion ...except to say that there isn’t one...and that’s where I tend to be good...I get that both a and b are kind of true and kind of false and kind of neither...confusion is kinda like the air that I breathe...which might actually be a good thing...and a bad thing...and neither...

Not Saying Anything

Concerning that which cannot be talked about, we should not say anything.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
















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Falling Apart Like Poorly Molded Jello

we continue to be born every minute
Thich Nhat Hanh

he not busy bein' born is busy dyin'

Bob Dylan

...I try to reinvent myself constantly...or maybe it just happens, whether I want it to or not...either way, it's harder than it looks...particularly since any particular invented self tends to be hard to see...and starts to wobble and fall apart like poorly molded jello when I try to poke at it a little...to make sure it’s actually there...substance is most certainly elusive...though parts do seem to get stuck at times...feel a bit too solid and unmalleable...as such, it’s hard to know exactly what I’m working with...or, perhaps more to the point, who’s doing the working in the first place...

That Nelson Mandela Quote

...that Nelson Mandela quote in that last post had been sitting in my YogaforCynicsworking file for some time...that file’s kinda the womb of this blog....are you comfortable with me using that kind of metaphor?....I’m not...so I won’t do it again...anyway, I’d meant to bring it up when I had something more to say about the subject...without sounding preachy...

...there was something I wrote about a year and a half ago...just some personal writing...would never end up in a public forum...and that's a good thing...I charted a kind of emotional autobiography in the form of a kind of bar graph...yeah, I find strange ways to spend my time...a timeline at the top and then, along the side, seven levels of happiness and misery: 1) Nirvana 2) Life is good 3) Life’s okay, and I’m pretty optimistic about it getting better 4) Mid-line: life’s bearable 5) Life kinda sucks, but not too bad if I can keep myself entertained 6) Life sucks 7) Hell...

...the bar graph fell apart, and I started writing things out...like Seventh grade: big fat 7...and elaborated...writing out names, with four letter words as a kind of punctuation soon giving away to flat-out hatred and damnation...rage and hatred pouring onto the page...and it was rush...got me pretty wired, in fact...did a bit of yoga to try and mellow myself out...and then, unbidden, started thinking of other experiences...when I’d been nasty...cruel... inexcusably vicious...caring about nothing apart from making sure that whoever I was dealing with would feel as bad as I did...and I felt like shit...and then it occurred to me that if you don’t wanna hate yourself, you can’t hate anybody else either....that’s been recounted here before, but it seems worth mentioning again....

...another interesting realization was that my 20’s—in between spectacular backpacking trips...and other kinds of trips...were a pretty miserable time, while my boring studious 30’s weren’t bad...not so many good stories, but some good friends, mellow good times, and a lot fewer mornings mumbling fuck upon opening my eyes...which says something about spectacular experiences...they’re cool, but, ultimately, it’s the day to day life that counts...

...and that goes for hatred, as well....it’s way too easy to declare yourself an irredeemable asshole because, after so much yoga and meditation, you’ve failed to turn into a glowing floating being of pure love...on numerous occasions in the recent past yelling at friends and family, giving the finger to people on the street, fantasizing about doing horrible things to inexplicably popular talk radio personalities...not that I’ve done any of that stuff myself....

...the important question is: what’re ya gonna do now?