Be Here Now (Var.)?
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Signs Around Town
Om shanti, shanti, shanti.
What Grows in a Very Small Space (and living freely within limitations)
Sometimes when I am blogging about my garden — the joys I experience and its wonderful produce — I feel like I might be presumptuous. I am no Christoper Lloyd or Alice Waters. I just have a tiny space behind my urban, rowhouse that I have turned into a personal celebration.
A visitor from out of town graciously commented that in some ways the limits of my garden make it even more wonderful. In this sense, I know, perhaps best, from my garden the yoga teaching that ultimately to find freedom in this life we need to celebrate all we are within our limitations to find an inner space of unbounded, liberation.
(Shown here, cucumbers, mint, nasturtiums, peppers, greens, sage, savory, basil, okra, onions, more peppers, red and yellow cherry tomatoes (well picked), brandywine and roma tomatoes, eggplant (slow to start this year), echinacea, lavender, orchid.)
- Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation
Humility
Last night at house practice, we were led to think about humility (in Sanskrit vinaya). Yoga, similar to religion, tends to privilege the idea of humility.
From a one perspective, it is easy to think of the benefit that those in charge–the priests and the moneyed and privileged classes that support religious institutions to get help staying in power–get from preaching the virtues of humility. If the relatively powerless are led to believe that they will benefit spiritually from practicing humility before humans and institutions that hold sway over them, that certainly helps perpetuate a patently unfair status quo.
We can recognize our own skills and talents and relative worthiness and actively seek justice and fairness, though, and still be humble. However much intrinsic power we have and extrinsic fairness in distribution of power we seek, we can still recognize that we are not ultimately in charge of exactly how our life will play out in the vast and complex web of being. Feeling humility in the face of all that we do not and cannot know is just living in awe at the wonder of life. This, I think, is true and sustainable humility.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
