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    Sometimes When the Complexity

    ByElizabeth

    Sometimes, when I step back in awestruck wonder at the complexity of human society and what it means to be engaged in rulemaking in that complexity, I like to take a moment and look at pictures from India, a whole other version with much the same and much different.

    I invite myself to  think about being human in this time and place with this many billions of others.  And then I return to my work, confident that my work is both absolutely essential and completely meaningless in the grand scheme of things.  In other words, I try to do my best, but still keep in perspective  stumbling blocks to completing some mission in the way first intended.

    Bridge to Rameshwaram I took this photo when we stopped on the bridge to Rameshwarum.  I doubt I have either the fervor or the fortitude to have gone without the safety and comfort cushion of the bus.

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    Talking About the Wisdom Goddesses (and February Willow Street Book Club)

    ByElizabeth

    I am looking forward to February’s meeting of the Willow Street Book Club this coming Sunday, where we will be discussing David Frawley’s, Spiritual Secrets of Ayurveda:  Tantric Yoga and the Wisdom Goddess. Especially since many of us will likely have been to hear some or all of Professor Douglas Brooks’ discussion of the great goddesses last weekend, the meeting promises to be full of lively, thoughtful, and insight-provoking discussion.

    One of the things I have been pondering on this latest read is how I can fully imbibe the wisdom that is offered with the imagery and stories of the goddesses, without getting caught up in being troubled from a feminist perspective.  Many yoga practitioners I know rely on the call in the texts to worship the “goddess” as a way of saying that women are not diminished in the classic texts.  My conundrum is that when one looks at the texts and the images about the goddesses, all the stereo-typical notions of beauty and youth are inextricably intertwined.  Like the Western fairy tales I gobbled up in my youth and their entrancing but insidiously prejudicial archetypes, the sweet, loving, desirable goddesses are the young and fair; the fierce and powerful goddesses are the ugly crones.


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    Carbon-Free Website

    ByElizabeth

    For those of us living fully in our modern material world, as I am, it is important to think not so much about denying ourselves things or giving them up, but rather, seeing how we can make shifts to living more lightly.  One of my heavy impacts on the environment is computer usage.  Right now, I have on my work computer, my home laptop, and my Blackberry.

    All of you who are reading this blog are doing so via computer or by a personal device with web access that requires battery charging.  I’d hazard a guess that most of these portable computers are not being powered by sun and wind.  I am still waiting for Pepco to come and change the meter to hook up my newly installed rooftop solar panels to the grid, and I don’t have a solar charger for the Blackberry.

    One thing I thought I could do to help make enjoying this way of connecting have less impact on the environment would be to go carbon-neutral.  In the world of plastic, the ideal is don’t use, reuse, repurpose, recycle.  In the world of electricity, it is don’t use, use from better sources, off-set.  With respect to my blog, I am choosing to use the necessary electricity, but go solar with my house, buy electricity from a source that uses offsets (Clean Currents) for that electricity that is in excess of what the solar panels will provide, and I’m choosing to offset this blog’s impact based on readership through the Carbon Fund.

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    Creativity

    ByElizabeth

    We may not be able to change much of what we get in life–where and when we were born, certain innate talents and physical attributes, but we have the choice at every moment what we will create with what we have been given.

    Will we create beauty and happiness where we can?  The point of the yoga practices, I think and have been taught, is to lead us to choose what best serves more and more often.

    For example, I cannot create a monumental sculpture if the only art material I have is a point and shoot camera.  I could do nothing but lament my lack of resources, or I can still make art.

    What do you choose with what you have?

    creativity

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