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    Neighborhood Walkabout (and Concealment and Revelation)

    ByElizabeth

    First I spent a couple of hours in the garden, then I walked to the grocery store and the pet supply shop. The next walk was a loop first to the hardware store and then to the farmers’ market for fruit and eggs.

    The last walks were round trip to the Sunday contact improv jam. I mostly did asana in the corner, which is not really dancing, but nobody seemed to mind.

    On the way home I extended the walk to do one last errand. The weather was perfect. Gardens everywhere bright and lush from the unusual rain.

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    Misty Dawn Walk

    ByElizabeth

    I just returned from a trip to the Catskills for a long weekend of yoga, meditation, and a swimming lake in green mountains. I woke each morning before dawn and went out to be with the rising of the light.  One morning dawned with a dense mist and fog.  The doe was about to bound across the path as I was walking.  She stopped short.  I stepped back.  Both of us equally startled.  We looked at each other benignly curious.  Then she ambled off and I did the same. On the way back to the guest house, I saw a porcupine run across the lawn.  I understand that they are great pests, but I truly enjoyed getting to see one.  I think I might like the porcupine as a spirit animal.

    Lake 1a Lake 1bShe was lake 1c

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    Advice from a Spammer (and Niralamba?)

    ByElizabeth

    “Write more, that’s all I have to say.” There were several more lines of text, but none so coherent or compelling as this.

    Yes, spammer, I would like to be writing more imaginatively and more about the yoga here and elsewhere. I am fully occupied, though, with a technical writing of quite some magnitude if magnitude were to be measured only by the number of words and ideas included. With the social and substantive complexity relating to the project and how it fits within the fabric of creating the rules that govern our society, it is a creative in its own way, but it is more draining than inspiring.

    The exercise involves many drafters who come from a wide range of perspectives, training and background, and who have different responsibilities and senses of responsibility.  Most everyone is feeling stressed and under-supported in their own way and acting in the multifarious ways people act when that’s how they are experiencing things. I am struggling to stay compassionately present for myself and all who are engaged in the endeavor.

    Reminding myself of reasons to be grateful always helps.  The yoga and meditation practices, in addition to my creative pursuits, are at the top of the list.  The practices are the only truly steady back up that I have. Perhaps that is true for everyone to a greater or lesser degree.  The philosophies that inform the practices–whether renunciate or tantra–ultimately would not, I think, disagree.

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    Earth, Water, Fire, Air, and Ether

    ByElizabeth

    We are composed of nothing different than earth, water, fire, air, and space, and much of yoga practice  (as are related practices such as ayurveda) is designed to recognize and align our elemental identity.  It is human nature to manufacture, just as it is the nature of a beaver to make a dam or a termite to make a mound of mud that displaces what was in its path.  Why then is it so common to  think of man-made as completely separate from “nature” rather than to recognize the wild and extraordinary creations of humans as an integral part of the complex fabric of being on this planet?

    Photos taken on a Thanksgiving trip shared with friends and family:  DC to NJ, Cape Cod, and back to NJ before heading home. Without the time on highway and train, I could not have seen so much “nature” in so short a time.  Nor, might I add, would I have appreciated being out exposed to the wind and water without the shelter and protection of manufactured goods (including houses, cars, and clothing, etc).  This does not mean, of course, that to live better, we should not seek to balance and diminish our consumption of resources for our protection and comfort.

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