Found Exhortations (for Sale)
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- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Meditation | Photos
Found Exhortation
Any true exploration and study of the self (svadyaya) looks not just to the light, but within the shadows.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Pre-Season Gardening (and diksha)
In yoga practice the concept of diksha — initiation or threshold — carries with it a sense of right timing and conscious understanding of readiness for the next level. For example, knowing I was not yet strong enough, this past weekend I chose not to try to jump from adho mukha svanasana (downward facing dog) to svanasana (headstand), but instead concentrated on doing the poses one at a time, even though I was surrounded by people who could do the transition with ease and my ego was challenged. Until I am stronger and better able to hold the alignment in poses at that level, I would be too much at risk of hurting my neck and shoulders.
In the garden, it is easy to be fooled by a beautiful weekend to move right to activities that are still 3-4 weeks premature. Even though it will hit 70F this weekend, it is not time to plant (other than perhaps an experimental row or pot of kale, chard, or beets, which like the cold). The best gardening you can do in the beginning of March when the weather is swinging wildly from below freezing to unseasonably warm is to read and plan and start seedlings indoors, just like it is best to warm up and work on strength, alignment, and flexibility before going for harder asana in your yoga practice. It will be tempting to get out this weekend, but do the prep stuff and the clean up.
Here are some favorite books of mine to get ready for planning. It is mostly more practical stuff (rather than the super glossy, beautiful garden as splendid art and architecture picture book reading) with some food and yoga overlap and a bias for small urban gardens.
The Yoga of Herbs — An Ayurvedic Guide to Herbal Medicine, D. Frawley and V. Lad (Lotus Press, 2d Ed. 1988)
Gardener Cook, C. Lloyd (Willow Creek Press 1997) (OK — this one is kind of cooking, gardening porn)
The Edible Container Garden — Growing Fresh Food in Small Spaces, M. Guerra (Fireside, 2000)
The Bountiful Container, McGee and Stuckey (Workman Publishing Co., 2002)
Small-Space Gardening — How to Successfully Grow Flowers and Fruits in Containers and Pots, P. Loewer (The Lyons Press, 2003)
Kitchen Herbs — The Art and Enjoyment of Growing Herbs and Cooking with Them, S. Gilbertie (Bantam, 1988)
The New Kitchen Garden, A. Pavord (Dorling Kindersly Ltd., 1996) (Also pretty and glossy, but still practical)
Approaching Samhain
The space between the spheres thins and the wind creates passageways.
The spirits are outraged; how could they be otherwise? Their dance tramples
And blows things down, but still cannot help but create beauty.
The leaves–green, red, gold, brown from the drought, that distant memory–
Hang listlessly with the weight of rain and a bit of slush
Hardly even dancing in the wind, but still becoming perhaps
More extravagantly lovely by the storm’s grey light.
To do list? (Yoga citta vrtti nirodaha)
Twitter? What would be
The point without an I-phone?
Buy one? Save the nation?
Last night I wrote this “twaiku” (why is it not a “twittiku?”) after having read yet another series of articles on why or why not to Twitter and still more articles on why it is important for a nation of consumers to keep consuming even if that is what got them into trouble in the first place. One of the articles was lamenting the loss of true communication that comes with being limited to 140 characters, and it set forth some examples of how peculiar, when taken out of context, some twittering can sound, especially to the uninitiated. In my attempt to keep an open mind about devaluing language while still communicating in language, I was led to think about haikus v. sonnets and other longer poetic forms. A haiku easily fits into 140 characters. This led me to wonder whether anyone had created a haiku trend on Twitter? A quick Google search revealed that I am way behind the times in terms of the twaiku?
One of the articles suggested that Twittering is about being in the moment. Contrarians say it fosters attention deficit disorder and a host of other language-loss ills. This led me to think of the Yoga Sutra of Patanjali “yoga citta vrtti nirodaha” (yoga is stilling/aligning with the thoughwaves of the mind). When evaluating what to consume, when to consume, and how to consume (whether it is language and communication methods or electronic goods or anything else), if we are serious about taking yoga off the mat, it is good to think about whether our consumption eases the trials of being embodied or makes daily living more agitating, and whether our consumption brings us more into alignment with nature/spirit (brahmacharya) or turns us away.
