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- Art and Culture | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation | Photos
After (or Perhaps Between) the Storms
I hear a lot that there’s always a rainbow after the storm. That platitude is looking for and being open to joy and not toxic positivity unless we recognize some people do not survive the storm and some people are not situated to see the rainbow through no fault of their own.

- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation | Photos
Hare Om Ganesha
A friend wrote an email to me this morning that in a recent office move, the plaster ganesha he’s had on his wall broke. Not to worry, though, he had been given another one to sit on his computer. Ganesha, though sometimes hailed as the remover of obstacles, does not so much remove them as help us navigate through life so that the inevitable challenges and hurdles will feel less like insurmountable obstacles and more like opportunities to move in new directions.
It seemed almost everywhere I turned in India, I bumped into another image of Ganesha. He’s a powerful one. I did not attempt to photograph them all, and these are not all the photographs. One of them is not ganesha–sometimes an elephant is just an elephant, even in a sculpture devoted to the gods.
If you are enjoying one of these images in particular, click on it so that you get to it at the largest size and then right-click to make it your wallpaper or background. Enjoy!
Snow and Blossoms (Morning Walk via the Capitol to Dupont Circle)
I got out of the house by 7:30 this morning because I knew the dusting of snow would not last long, and I wanted to enjoy the combination of blossoms and snow making every thing vibrate with beauty. I was not disappointed. The sun started to come out just after I had fully circumnavigated the Capitol. By the time I got to Lafayette Square, the snow was all melted, but the blossoms sparkled even more. It was such a glorious walk through the neighborhood, I was quite ecstatic, and at one point, I thought perhaps I was hallucinating when I first crested the Capitol grounds around 8am; from loudspeakers on the Mall (presumably there for Cherry Blossom Festival events), someone was blaring the Clash, singing “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
Could I really have been hearing the Clash being broadcast on the National Mall at 8am on a Sunday morning? I remembered thinking we were making a statement when we blared the Sex Pistols as we drove across the 14th Street bridge towards the Capitol on July 4rh in the mid-80s. I remembered how disappointed my friends and I were when Joey Strummer disappeared the year I was living in London, and we didn’t get to see the Clash in Brixton. I allowed the flood of memories to rush in and then fade with the music. I thought of all the years I have been walking around this city, and how many times it has snowed while the blossoms are in bloom–more frequent than one might think.
I watched the melting snow start to glitter in the sun and the blossoms vibrating with their ephemeral beauty. And then I walked on through downtown, past the White House, and up to Dupont Circle, stopping to buy apples and mushrooms at the Dupont Fresh Farm Market before attending meeting for worship at Friends Meeting of Washington.




