never to be able to come inside? I am reminded again how fortunate I am not only to have a warm, well-provisioned, pleasing place for me to bring my body inside and protected from the elements, but also for having the sweetness of the practice of going within.
To walk around and marvel at the clouds. Even on the busiest of days, or ones when work or other commitments make it so that we do not have much time for sky-gazing, we still always have a few moments to marvel and delight.
It is my understanding that unless I wear a sari, I will not be able to go into some of the places that are on the itinerary for the trip to India I will be joining. “Just think of it as playing dress-up,” suggested my sister when I told her the idea of wearing a sari perturbs me. It is not just feeling strange in foreign dress and having to expose that vulnerable fold of flesh at the waist (I have never even owned a bikini because of my discomfort in exposing my waist). What is unsettling me is that to witness what the men can witness while wearing comfortable clothing, the women must agree to wear confining, complicated, and cumbersome clothes. And the sari has come for centuries with the expectation that the woman demurely follows behind doing what she is told by the designated man.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
One of the ways I prepare for a restorative workshop is to spend some time looking for new music to play quietly in the background to enhance the fullness of the experience. In the past couple of days, I have enjoyed listening to quite a quantity of new and new to me music appropriate for my upcoming Finding the Warmth Inside: Relax Into Optimal Alignment with Anusara Restoratives on February 25th at Willow Street Yoga Center (click on the link for details and to register). Among the music I downloaded, which I am thoroughly enjoying (though it might be too upbeat for the restorative workshop playlist), is C.C. White’s “This is Soul Kirtan.”
As I was listening at my desk and swaying to the beat, I thought about the non-dual tantric philosophical principle that exhorts us to find the good in everything, to recognize that in all there is still a “divine” spark that is expressed in the creative effulgence of the universe itself. The music is joyous, delightful, offered with love, delivered with a high degree of professionalism–both the musical performance and the recording and presentation. I tried to fathom just how many centuries of human migration, suffering, oppression, bigotry, and then fighting for tolerance, education, equal rights, spirit, and freedom had to occur for this music to be able to exist at all and to be published and embraced, it being an extravagant blend of Indian spiritual/religious practice, American soul and blues (and all its history), and classical Western musical technique.
Yesterday I went out into the garden first thing and fed and deadheaded and trimmed and harvested and pulled seedlings and rearranged and swept for several hours. One of the most delightful things about planting decoratively with herbs and greens is that trimming and pulling things back transforms directly into meals and gifts for neighbors and friends. My visitor to the garden walked away with bunches of oregano, lemon balm, and mint and lemon balm with roots to plant in her own garden. We drank a cool lemon-mint infusion (mixture of spearmint, peppermint, lemon balm, and lemon verbena) and ate a few strawberries (some from the garden, some from the farmers’ market). Later in the day, my lunch included a salad with lettuce, radishes, baby spinach and chard, spring onions, and various herbs. For dinner, I used chard, beets, and green onions to make a stew of chickpeas and greens.
With today’s rain, everything will keep flourishing, and I’ll be out there doing the same later in the week. My morning visitor and I agreed that one of the great delights of gardening is that the garden always welcomes more attention. The garden never asks to be left alone; it drinks in whatever attention and nourishment we are able to offer and returns it with grace. There are few things that both are comfortable with steady attention and fully nurture us the more attention we give. I find that meditation, too, always gives and receives graciously steady attention, which is one of its great gifts and joys.
