According to yesterday’s Washington Post, we are officially in a drought. We are short 7.3 inches of rain since October, 5 inches since January. The recent rain is merely returning to near normal rainfall and is not addressing the deficit. Please do what you can to conserve water. See previous post for some tips: https://rosegardenyoga.com/2009/02/rain-not-quite-enough/
Please comment to share your own water saving tips.
For the past hour or so, one of my neighbors has been shoveling the sidewalk. He is a young teenager; for a while a younger girl was out with him, too. They both had shovels and were working pretty vigorously. I always wave and say hi to these neighbors, but have an uneasy relationship with them. In the 19 years I have lived on the block, various members of the household (though not these particular kids) have broken into my house and threatened me and my neighbors. People who live in the house and their visitors regularly throw litter into my yard, and other neighbors have reported that they have caught kids currently living in the house throwing stones at houses and cars.
The shoveling was going on for a long time and the sounds were getting closer. Sure enough, this young man, perhaps because he was feeling trapped by being stuck in the house all day and was feeling full of energy, was shoveling the entire sidewalk, including the space in front of my house. I am delighted and grateful. I was not looking forward to going out and doing it myself. I will make certain to thank him. He has reminded me that I need always to be open to receiving the good from whatever source, however unexpected.
Invitation to Gratitude and Inspiration
Free Streaming Yoga Christmas Eve (TODAY!) and New Year’s Eve
Nurture Your Gifts and Release What No Longer Serves
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Date: Thursdays–December 24 and 31
Register at: https://www.suzannelynchwellness.com/holiday-yoga-classes
We’ll be signing on early if you just want to say hello.
Please feel free both to forward and to ask any questions.
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With each new horror — another I have been blessed to avoid proximity and immediate impact—I ask myself (and make some follow through) on how I can contribute more both to speaking out against injustice, inequality, and warmongering, and also to making collective life more joyous.
On a day I grieve and speak my outrage , I share work, and food, and moments of beauty.
I saw this water main break while I was walking to work this morning. Several people walked past it without a glance–could they really not have noticed? It looked relatively recent because the puddle was still modest and had not started freezing. I paused, took out my mobile device and telephoned the mayor’s city-wide call center (in DC “311”–whoever answers will transfer you to the right place; in this instance, “water emergencies”). A couple of people who saw me calling looked at me as if it must have been my fault or else why would I be calling,
I thought about what it was that moved me to call. I saw harm to the environment (colossal waste of water while we are in a drought if the leak was allowed to continue without the earliest possible intervention) and potential danger to people from spreading icy water that will turn into ice late this afternoon. What is it, though, that leads one to take action to change or fix something that is technically not one’s business. What makes it part of one’s duty or responsibility when it is not directly related to one’s individual property or person? At some levels, it is just social contract. By choosing to live together in closely proximate society, it is in all of our self-interest to take care of shared areas, though the ubiquitously unshoveled sidewalks leads me to believe that most people haven’t been taught or grasped the principle that if we all contribute “our share” the whole place and our own lives would be far more enjoyable.
These thoughts led me to think of the application of the yamas and niyams in Patajali’s Yoga Sutras and in particular, the principle of brahmacharya, which is one of the five yamas on the first level of the eight-fold path of yoga in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras.
Brahmacharya literally means being like Brahma, but it is often translated as celibacy. Brahmacharya, from a less socio-morally result-driven interpretation, could also be thought of as aligning with the divine. Before we are enlightened, though, how do we know what will help us align with the divine? I once heard Professor Douglas Brooks say, in a lecture I attended a number of years ago, that the yamas and niyamas, the ethical precepts that lay a foundation for the practice of yoga are for the goal of the individual reaching enlightenment. I was a bit taken aback by the statement at the time. It sounded as though the yoga precept was that the purpose of ethical behavior was self-interest, and was not because ethics was summum bonum. I am less troubled by the idea after much contemplation. What is the harm of the goal enlightenment serving to motivate and shape our behavior? The methodology that includes the yamas and niyamas would have us engage in certain ways of living and practices in order that we can change our karma by shifting the patterns (samskaras) that take us away from spirit rather than lead us toward spirit.
To me, this means acting in away that not only does not harm (ahimsa–the first of the yamas), but seeks to expand the possibility of fostering the collective good, including the good of the earth. In this sense, to the extent that brahmacharya is a precursor to enlightenment–the merging of the individual self with the greater “Self” or spirit, acting from a placed of enlightened self-interest can be seen as helping us to find the true Self (as long as we are not attached to a particular good or outcome, but that is a whole other topic).
