With the paths that we’ve traveled and what we have encountered and what we have done, as a given, not as something to wish had happened another way or another path chosen, how are we going to best flourish now?
For the fall session, we have been examining in detail and in sequence how each of the Anusara physical alignment principles can deepen our practice and awareness. It is my practice to start each session with the overarching principles of “attitude, alignment, and action,” which invite us in every moment, on and off the mat, to invoke an attitude of grace, to use the precision of alignment to refine our practice, and to use the cultivation and refinement of the principles to express in our poses and actions, the ultimate attitude of grace. Last week we explored how the actions of skull loop serve to refine organic energy and enhance the strength of reaching out and making offering, while ultimately drawing our gaze softly back to the heart.
Here I am, just in time for the holidays, intensely busy at work and overfull with all sorts of other commitments, feeling blessed to have this reminder to come back to the beginning, to soften, to open to the grace of the season, and not to get helplessly caught up in the details and the demands (though those are inevitably present).
“Sometimes,” said the woman in red sitting outside the courthouse.
“Sometimes you gotta,” she said to her co-workers, the red jersey
Of her dress clinging to her ample curves while she kicked
The granite ledge where she sat amidst a din of everyone talking
At every one else, not listening, some smoking, but not eating, on a break
Of some kind. Maybe they were jurors not court staff or perhaps visitors.
Funny that they didn’t have some kind of badge, all of them talking.
All of them talking and looking like they did the same type of work or had something
In common, talking all at once to a group that was familiar, but didn’t care to listen.
Amidst the talking, too many at once, and the clacking of her heels, like a kid, against
The granite ledge, “sometimes you just gotta be quiet,” she said to nobody listening.
I was talking to my Dad earlier today. My parents live on Long Island, where they are in the middle of getting three to six inches of snow. He said that the weather forecasters indicated that they were just missing having a blizzard, and he was grateful they were not. For the same reason Long Island is not getting a blizzard, we are seeing sun instead of a couple of inches of snow. We actually needed the snow. Last week’s ice was the first precipitation in almost three weeks, and now, once again, a storm has shifted away from us. It is good to see the sun, but it would be better for the trees to get some rain or snow.
We get what we get and then we have to choose whether to be happy or sad about it. I am happy not to be shoveling. And the chard is starting to come back. Next week, with highs forecast in the 40s and 50s, I’ll be harvesting again.
