Blossoms Around Town
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Lunch Time Walk to Buy Dental Floss
Today I numbly and rather inefficiently worked. It was rather pleasant weather when I went out at lunchtime. I remembered to notice, despite contemplating the innumerable consequences of the election and about how I can and should best participate going forward.
- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Dance/Contact Improvisation | Meditation | Quaker
Signs Around Town
Signs with intelligent, thought-provoking, and action-inspiring quotes are proliferating in my neighborhood. I took this photo last night when I was walking home after getting a Friday evening massage in the neighborhood.
This morning, after practicing, I took care of cat, house, and garden, reading the news, signing petitions (not as helpful as visiting/writing to a Senator/Congressperson–but I don’t have those as a DC resident) and doing targeted giving (today to support a free press) in addition to my expanding monthly giving. This afternoon, I am attending “Active Bystander” training. Then off to share dinner and then watch friends I know from Contact Improv perform works in progress at Dance Exchange. I will get time outside by traveling as much as possible on foot.
How are you spending your Saturday? Did it help you feel more engaged, connected, and grateful or less? If less, what small shift could you decide to make that would be easy enough that you would actually do it?
When We Choose the Pleasure of the Beautiful (DWTD)
When we choose a tantric path, we choose to experience pleasure as an expression of spirit, rather than seeking to transcend such experience as would one who is on the classical renunciatory yoga path. The choice to remain engaged, to honor mind and body as divine, comes with great responsibility.
When we choose engagement, we choose to experience the divine reality not just of pleasure, but also of pain. The true tantric path does not turn a blind eye to ugliness and suffering. Just taking the pleasure without recognizing its opposite is not authentic practice. If the pleasure of the sunrise is “real,” then the garbage on the beach is just as real.
Recognizing the reality of ugliness and pain as part of the play of the real does not mean, though, that it should diminish our joy in the beautiful and in the dance of the play of opposites of life.
Rather, it is our delight in and engagement with beauty that invites us to serve as best we can to alleviate suffering, to try and clean up the garbage where we can. In other words, as we recognize that ugliness and destruction are part of the play (lila), we seek to be heart-full rather than heart-broken when we witness the suffering from violence to others or our living planet. If we let our hearts break, we become blind to the beauty. Like those who only see what brings pleasure, those who only see the painful are also not experiencing all of the real.
As I head back to the world inside the Beltway, I bring the deepened and replenished sense of beauty and the dance that I always get from collective study and practice. I will try to share the privilege of having this experience by doing my best to clean up what garbage I can, while still dancing and loving in the light.
- Art and Culture | Asana, Pranayama, and Yoga Practice | Community and Family | Food for the Body | Food for the Mind (Yoga Philosophy, etc) | Gardening | Meditation | Photos | Poetry | Quaker
Found Exhortation
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Sadhana
This morning at the Supreme Court. The impeached sitting President avers that he should be able to remove at will the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Pay attention. Cultivate critical thinking (viveka). Make sure you are registered to vote and then do so. Be willing to compromise as need be. The one who is not our favorite may be better than one who would be king.
