Rites of Passage (Moving, part two)

The only cure
I know
is a good ceremony,
that’s what she said.
Leslie Marmon Silko

...if I were so inclined, I might accompany this move-down-the-street with some kind of ceremony of beginning and renewal...with, like, candles or incense or pig’s entrails or something...then, gotta admit I’ve never been much of a fan of that kinda thing...or ceremonies in general...can’t stand weddings, funerals, skipped most of my graduations...and everybody else’s graduations...grew up going to a Quaker meeting, which is about as unceremonial as houses of worship get, but even that was too much...even if I am kinda excited I just got invited to a yoga mala & summer solstice party...

...then, it may just be that I don’t like ceremonies when they’re prepackaged....one August got invited on a trip to the Adirondacks...some time after accepting, realized that the third day of the trip would also be the first anniversary of my dad’s death...and was actually glad when the friends said they had to cancel...and went by myself...climbed to the top of Mount Marcy...Tahawus...Cloudsplitter...the tallest peak in New York state...and, there at the top, sat by myself on a rock looking out over the broad expanse of the mountains, thinking about my dad, who’d taken me on my first hikes, and loved the outdoors, listening to a couple of mp3’s that made me think of him...including Helpless by Neil Young...though he’d never liked most of the music I listened to, one day he walked into the room right after I’d listened to that one—the Last Waltz version, with the Band, and Joni Mitchell on backup vocals...in my mind, I still need a place to go...chains are locked and tied across the door...leave us helpless helpless helpless helpless...he was strangely quite moved by it....then, he was a guy who lived his whole life, I think, feeling like he lost something essential very early on...and I’ve often felt the same way....he asked what it was, then actually went out and bought the CSN&Y album the studio version was on...and, listening to it there on top of that mountain, I felt very moved as well....

...elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong...
Leslie Marmon Silko

...actually, did go my PhD graduation...since my mom made me promise after I skipped the Master’s one...went and ate mushrooms in the desert that day, though I didn’t tell her that...nor that I was skinny-dipping in Puget Sound when my college graduation was happening a mere mile or so away....so, there I was, feeling a bit nervous, watching somebody go up the steps to get his diploma, thinking for a second about how embarrassing it would be to stumble on my way up to the stage...which suddenly flashed me back to fifth grade...and a self righteous and humorless teacher who, after I tripped over a chair, to the laughter of the whole class, said the sad thing is, he did it on purpose...then I heard my name called, and walked up, without stumbling, to formally accept my doctorate...

I got nothin’ more to live up to...
Bob Dylan

...sometimes, still, I realize I’m watching myself through the world’s eyes...or what I think are the world’s eyes...wondering, as I move into another cheap one bedroom apartment, if I’m not somehow failing to live up to the expectations of my socio-economic class...though, if that’s the case, it’s only fair...as my socio-economic class has certainly never made any attempt to live up to my expectations...too many arbitrary rules blindly followed, not enough imagination...too much expensive crap, not enough soul...not nearly enough Walt Whitman, but way, way too much Donald Trump...

...the world doesn’t owe you anything is a popular phrase in the self-help world...and I'm cool with that...one thing I’ll add to it, though: I don’t owe the world anything, either...

Moving, part one

...I’m moving...not far, just a few blocks, a bit deeper into West Mt. Airy, State of Heavily Caffeinated Sadhana, USA....nonetheless, it causes me a lot of anxiety...not that there’s really that much to do...just packing crap up...dealing with the fact that Comcast cut off my internet service five days early, so that I have to go to the pizza place around the corner to get on-line....no, despite what you may have heard, the blogger’s life is not always glamorous....getting the new place ready and gradually lugging stuff over, then renting a truck for the bigger things, then cleaning up the old place....shouldn’t be too much work...I don’t own that much...certainly a lot less than most people I know, particularly those anywhere near my age...though, actually, I’d like to own less...or, at least, to feel like there’s less that owns me...

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

...I’m feeling the need to let go of a lot of stuff...much of which doesn’t require a moving van...and requires more than a toss into a dumpster to really be rid of....though I’ve got ideas, my brain's been feeling all gummed up...stuck...weighed down by seemingly endless clutter....wouldn’t even be making this move if a friend hadn’t talked me into checking out the new place...owned by his soon to be mother-in-law...and, even then, only if it was still available once my lease was up...

...even some recent posts here have felt rather obligatory...from my perspective, at least...as if the energy’s shifted somewhat from got this amazing stuff I gotta share with the world toward shit, it’s been three days since the last post, time to crank another one out....then, without a doubt my worst discovery as a blogger has been that of the omnipresent stat counter...carrying with it the poisonous idea that a thousand unique visitors—most of them winding up here thanks to misleading google searches and leaving quickly once they find there are no mp3’s of Dylan and Lou Reed songs I’m always quoting, or instructional diagrams for eka pada kapotasana or supta baddha konasana—are somehow more important than a handful who’ve actually connected in some meaningful way with something or other written here...and, apparently, based on comments, there've been a couple of those...so, fuck numbers...better to write from the heart, or else write nothing...

...my point is to make a move that involves doors opening to more than just a different couple of physical rooms...to go from stagnation to clear flowing vitality...to slip gently out of old patterns, let go of used-up perspectives, old thoughts and feelings that might’ve been useful once but now would best be left in the dumpster with all that styrofoam crap from all those boxes I’ve been digging out to pack up my books...

...though that, of course, is easier said than done...

Really Deep, Intense Discussions With Myself...

and if my thought-dreams could be seen,
they’d probably put my head in a guillotine,
but it’s alright, ma, it’s life and life only...
Bob Dylan

...haven’t been talking much to people lately...at least not in much depth...though I’ve been having a lot of really deep, intense discussions with myself...

...that’s included trying to do some writing by hand every day...which is notable because I never, if I can help it, write with anything less than a full-sized QWERTY keyboard...don’t even get me started on how I can’t stand text messaging...and yet, I've found myself letting loose with some personal thoughts the likes of which I’ve never let see the light outside my brain...often painfully embarrassing, shameful...offensive to anyone other than...or, sometimes, including...myself...and, it occurs to me, the reason for this and the reason I don't normally write by hand might be one and the same...that what comes out is thoroughly incomprehensible to anyone but me...and, sometimes, to me, as well...thus eliminating the worry that, no matter how well hidden, someone might stumble upon and read it...and freeing me to write absolutely anything I want...

...of course, it could be decided...possibly after my death...like with William Blake, Emily Dickinson, or Henry Darger...that what I write’s important enough for scholars, handwriting analysts, or freelance pharmacists to go combing through the hieroglyphics...then, that might be cool...would make my unauthorized biographies a lot more interesting...certainly, people talking about how boring I am after I’m dead would be adding insult to injury...comb through my hieroglyphics, baby, comb through ‘em all night, dig into my present past darlin’, bring it all to light...then, I could also end up buried in intensely dull jargon filled written-for-no-reason-except-to-get-tenure scholarship...

BALD heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love's despair
To flatter beauty's ignorant ear.
William Butler Yeats, from “The Scholars”

...then, such are the perils of posthumous fame...probably better to be alive and obscure...

The World's Only Imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

...read a book by this guy named Alan Clements about, among other things, his experiences as a Buddhist monk in Burma/Myanmar, being expelled by the government a bunch of times, then returning covertly after many of his fellow monks had been murdered, along with countless others, by the military junta that had seized control of the country...finding his Buddhist concepts of pacifism and enlightenment challenged as he met ex-monks fighting on both sides of the conflict...as well as the Burmese people’s legitimate leader, and apostle of nonviolence, Aung San Suu Kyi...

Freedom must be separated from the packaging and additives our consumer culture has manufactured around it.
Alan Clements

...I vaguely remember reading about Aung San Suu Kyi some time ago...how she won the Nobel Peace Prize but couldn’t fly to Scandinavia to accept it, as she was under house arrest...it was probably somewhere in the middle of the Sunday New York Times...and I probably thought bummer before moving on to the next section, looking forward to the Ethicist column and perhaps a particularly nasty book review or two...

Fearlessness may be a gift but perhaps more precious is the courage acquired through endeavour, courage that comes from cultivating the habit of refusing to let fear dictate one's actions, courage that could be described as 'grace under pressure' - grace which is renewed repeatedly in the face of harsh, unremitting pressure.
Aung San Suu Kyi

...more recently, as I probably read somewhere in Salon or the Huffington Post, Aung San Suu Kyi has been imprisoned, as the result of a visit from a foreigner...apparently some Western spiritual seeker who swam across a lake to meet her...no doubt, like Led Zeppelin singing about magical mystical Kashmir, failing to grasp the sociopolitical realities of his mystical southeast Asian spiritual destination...my shangri la beneath the summer moon, I will return again...

...Burma, alas, despite lots of orange robed monks and trippy scenery is not exactly shangri la....it’s ruled by a military junta, which renamed the country Myanmar and has no qualms about slaughtering nonviolent protesters and wiping out entire villages by the thousand...in 1990, Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the country’s nonviolent pro-democracy movement was, while under house arrest, elected prime minister by 82% of Burma’s population...a result ignored by the junta which has continued to brutalize its people, recruiting over seventy thousand child soldiers, engaging in ethnic cleansing and systematic rape, even refusing international aid following natural disasters...and, now, they’ve locked up Aung San Suu Kyi because a guy visited her house...

The quintessential revolution is that of the spirit, born of an intellectual conviction of the need for change in those mental attitudes and values which shape the course of a nation's development. A revolution which aims merely at changing official policies and institutions with a view to an improvement in material conditions has little chance of genuine success.
Aung San Suu Kyi

...by this point, I’ve already quite badly violated Yoga for Cynics' most sacred rules against being in any way informative, or overly serious, and have even come close to appearing almost but not quite poised to make some kind of a call for action...shudder...so, instead of saying anything more, I’ll simply suggest that readers might visit here or here...namaste, folks...

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...

Yoga Unites and the Willie Nelson Autonomous Zone

...biked downtown in a cold light rain this morning to join hundreds of other people in a gigantic yoga class on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art...known locally as The Art Museum...yeah, those are the steps Rocky ran up...which, on this occasion, were soaked...I put my yoga mat down in a puddle...in the cold...never done yoga wearing anywhere near that much clothing before, but it worked out...legendary yoga teacher and founder of Yoga Unites, Jennifer Schelter, kept us moving...doing sun salutations until the sun actually kinda came out...

...the event, Yoga Unites for Living Beyond Breast Cancer, happens on the third Sunday in May, and this year raised over $100,000 for the LBBC, an organization that provides services to women who have survived or are currently struggling with breast cancer....and, overall, it's a hell of a good time...whatever the weather's like...

It's been rough and rocky travelin', but I'm finally standin' upright on the ground.
After takin' several readings, I'm surprised to find my mind`s still fairly sound.
Willie Nelson

...after that was over, got back on the bike and headed into South Philly...yeah, Rocky ran through there, too...for brunch with friends...and somehow ended up spending much of the afternoon in a bar...it’s all about balance...discussing, among other things, the recent talk of Texas seceding from the Union....I asked what about Austin?...Varina didn’t seem to care....I pointed out that Willie Nelson lives near Austin, and anyone who’d wanna deny U.S. citizenship to Willie Nelson clearly hates America...which is when Marty suggested that a Willie Nelson Autonomous Zone might be created...I suspect pot will be legal there....obviously, there’s a lot that’s gonna need to be worked out...

...photo stolen from most excellent yogini Melissa...who I think’s probably gonna be cool with that....

A Metaphor For...Something....

...got lots of response to that skeleton post...about skeletons as metaphors for...something.....a couple nights ago I was walking past this health club...in my peripheral vision coulda sworn I saw naked people...so, then, turned and looked more closely...turned out they were skeletons, next to the massage tables...so, basically, I was right...it’s just that they were really really naked people...

...one time when I was a kid my mom was reading this book...think it was I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou...I asked her what it was about...she told me it was about this girl growing up in the south and dealing with racism and...basically nothing to do with birds or singing....I said so why don’t they just call it that instead o’ this misleading crap about birds singing?...or something like that...quite indignant about the willing obfuscation...

...my understanding of metaphor has evolved since then...somewhat...though, I still don’t actually know why the caged bird sings...since...gotta admit this...I still haven’t read the book...but I have a copy and I’m planning on it...

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
Shakespeare

...Shakespeare was good with metaphors, but he didn’t seem to like them much...since neither a summer’s day nor the sun itself really seemed to do justice to anybody worth writing a poem about....Lawrence Sterne went on and on insisting that, when he mentioned a nose, all he really meant was, in fact, a nose...and some time later, Freud said sometimes a cigar really is just a cigar...though I’m less likely to believe him...

One problem with Yahweh, as they used to say in the old Christian Gnostic texts, is that he forgot he was a metaphor.
Joseph Campbell

...of course it’s also been suggested that life and existence are themselves nothing more than metaphors...though the question remains for what?...then, if that could be answered there might not be any need for metaphors in the first place....anyway, what if it’s the other way around?...what if those great unspeakable mysteries are all just metaphors for stuff that’s in your kitchen cabinets?...or what if everything’s simply a metaphor for itself?

...if this blog is a metaphor, I can only hope it’s for something not too onerous...like a minute or two spent sitting in full lotus on a rock in the middle of a rushing stream, margarita in hand, music whirring through the pines, and a loved one nearby...

...as opposed to slopping through rancid muck to get nowhere....though, if it’s that, you really should’ve stopped reading by now...