Original writing, unassigned, unprompted
Christchurch left me with a feeling of early spring, when it’s still chilly at dawn but the sun is definitely warm in the late morning. When the snow crocus shoots appear, when the buds swell and the light green tiny leaves unfurl. Before the allergies, before the bugs emerge, way before the days start getting shorter. Continue reading “Christchurch Seven and a Half Years after the Earthquake”
One of the books I’m reading now is “Sapiens” by Yuval Noah Harari. To be precise, listening to the the audiobook version.
While I occasionally could use a reference for this or that statement, and often feel depressed reading this, it’s a mind-twistingly fascinating read.
For instance.
I wrote this several weeks ago, at a yoga teacher training at the Esalen Institute, in response to the prompt to write a poem or something about everything being connected. At that point I was blissfully offline for two weeks and counting. A day or two before that point we were in silence for 24 hours, which for me included zero screens and no books.
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We are born of mud, we are made of stardust. We are what we eat, what we take in.
I take in coffee, bananas, nuts; letters, words, abstract concepts; lately, little screens.
What comes around goes around. Goes nuts. Goes bananas. Goes words and letters. Goes little screens.
I let go of the little screens, the words, the letters. Maybe loosen the grip on that banana. My eyes drink in the ocean, the mountains, the sky.
I am the ocean, I am mud, I am stardust.
The author looks at the Foveaux Strait. That’s the one between South Island and Stewart Island in New Zealand or between the Tasman Sea and Pacific Ocean, depending how you look at it
Here is another quote, saying it like it is, from the “Buddha Brain” by Rick Hanson, my “yoga grad school” assigned reading: Continue reading “There You Are”
A couple of years ago, a communication coach at my desk job suggested starting a gratitude practice. I’ve heard of the concept before, and even after Kathleen the coach explained her own and her family’s gratitude practice to me, it seemed a bit out there. First of all, not like I am ungrateful or anything, am I? I know I am lucky and all that. What difference cataloguing the body parts that work and such in a journal would make?
Still, Kathleen was a truly gifted coach and a loveliest person, so even though I dismissed the idea as a suggestion to not follow, it got put aside in a not too far away corner of my brain. This post is about what happened when the time came to bring it back up and put it to work. Continue reading “Gratitude, Contentment, Heat”
Love letters understated 