On the Way to William Penn House for Tuesday Night Yoga Practice


One of my yoga teacher trainers used to say that though he loved all of his students, that did not necessarily mean that he liked all of them or everything about them.
Recognizing and honoring universal worthiness and connection — which I think is essential to our getting along in this crowded world of ours –does not mean that we will not have preferences both innate and trained.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
The “occupy” movement has all but disappeared from consciousness. Other stories have grabbed the short attention spans of the press, hungry to be the one to be telling the nowest thing. Most of the occupations have long since been evacuated by the powers that be (in charge). The buzz words remain part of advertising and political sound bites, but not much else remains. Being of the moment is so very different from truly living in and for the moment.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
I’m pretty sure the Sanskrit word for wonder is abhuta. I found myself contemplating my conviction that part of the practice of yoga (and my photography, which is a practice for me) is to instill everything with a sense of wonder.
I still find plane travel–as wearily familiar as it is–completely miraculous and awe-inspiring.
To go, in just a few short hours, from perfectly temperate to cold and gray with an impending storm (and, of course the reverse) is an outrageous feat indeed. I’m happy to have the cat in my lap.
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!
I’ve been living with blooms from bulbs since just before Christmas. The amaryllis in the vase is the third bloom from a bulb I bought at the beginning of January; the third stem got too tall, so I put it in a vase, so it would not topple over. The orchid I have had since it was about half this size and have been tending it by bringing inside and out with the seasons for over a decade. It has bloomed every February without fail. The paperwhites were a gift. I enjoy a little of the scent, but find the usual presentation of several flowers simultaneously overwhelming. I have brought them to flower one at a time. As soon as the bulb flowers (and inevitably needs to be propped up somehow), I have cut the flowers to put in a vase and started the next bulb. By the time the flowers in the vase have faded, the next bulb is budding.
The cherry blossoms — this is why I dreamed of cherries blossoming; I had them in my bedroom. In a previous post, I showed the nearly bare branches from a tree that had fallen in the blizzard. Although gardeners would call bringing the branches inside “forcing,” I wonder whether I really “forced” these blooms. What I did was take branches that would have gone to a landfill, brought them into an auspicious environment and invited them to bloom. This seems to me, not unlike using props in yoga: I might not be able to experience the full opening of a pose myself, but if I properly use props, I can expand what I can experience. It is not the same as doing it on my own, but it still gives me a different sense of the beauty that can be experienced, just like bringing in branches that otherwise would have fallen or need to be pruned into the house to reveal their glory in advance of the spring blooming outside.
The last photo is of dogwood and cherry that were on the side of the street two days ago (cherry tree down at the Japanese War Memorial); dogwood in a pile on the north side of the street in the 300 or 400 block of D Street, NE. Start your own blooms, there is more winter in the forecast. I am fairly certain from my previous experiment that the cherries will start blooming in a couple of weeks, but it remains to be seen whether the dogwood will want to open.