When we chatted last week, I hesitated to ask you a favor.
The favor was for you to write to me once or twice. I hesitated, because I wasn’t sure how well that would serve either of us, and because the time for asking favors ran out. If I were to do what I hesitated to ask of you, it would go like this. Continue reading “A Monday Letter”
You walk late into the philosophy class. You carry a name I want, you are wearing a hat with a pompom. You sit next to your friend. Your friend made space for me before the class; you sit behind me. Continue reading “Hands and Hats”
There may be a day some time in the future when I no longer care about you. The familiar feeling of your embrace would be like a memory of a good book I’ve read, or a movie I’ve seen. Like a memory of my hand in David’s in the Azalea Garden, in June of 2007. So what if I remember the month and year, I am good with calendars, that’s all. It might have been May, too. When do the azaleas bloom? It was a Tuesday.
About you, I’ll remember there were Mondays. Continue reading “Mondays”
“So often when we sit to meditate or find ourselves on the yoga mat, we get bombarded with the samskaras of the mind and the aches and pains of the body, and we can wind up feeling worse than when we started. It’s not that things are really worse – it’s that the practice of yoga and seated meditation shine the light of awareness squarely on the blocks in the mind, and this can be quite uncomfortable”
– Darren Main, Yoga and the Path of the Urban Mystic
The “born again yogi” may sound all enthusiastic. This (somewhat lengthy) passage from the assigned reading points to the other side: the practice includes the difficult choice to turn around and look directly at what is gripping us in life. Difficult, because it’s immediately unpleasant, difficult because of the years of building the prison walls and growing into the shackles. On the other hand, there is only the trust in practice to hold on to, the trust that looking at the walls and the shackles would eventually loosen their grip, allow the slivers of freedom into the cracks.
In the beginning of the yoga teacher training, one of our faculty warned us against turning into “born again yogis”, that is, talking everyone’s heads off about how great yoga is and how they should do it.
But it’s OK. So far, lots of my recent learning has been practical. Continue reading “Anatomy and Ice Cream”
Love letters understated 