This morning at the United States Supreme Court in support of the nomination of Judge Katanji Brown Jackson.
Please let your elected officials know your support. The naysayers were out with those showing support.
Let us raise our voices in support and have our cheers silence those that would drive us further towards heedlessness and cruelty.
The lotuses are in bloom.
What does it mean to be at home? To feel at home? Inside your body? Your embodied self in the world? In the place you name “home?”
What’s a gardener and concerned for the trees and the health of the planet citizen to do? I’ve got enough water in the rain barrel to water the vegetables and herbs once or twice, but what impact does that really have? At work, people were grumbling because it was cloudy. They seemed shocked when I advised them that we are an inch under normal rainfall for August and have a fairly significant deficit for the summer despite the July rains.
Wouldn’t it be great if we could move some of the flood waters that have fallen only a couple hundred miles away to irrigate our fields without disrupting our eco-system? Part of me just wants not to know about the consequences of global climate change, but it is hard not to notice that all the weather patterns I used to know and understand do not seem to apply quite the same way anymore. What do we do when the systems and practices we have in place for our ease, comfort, well-being, and understood day-to-day peace of mind are disrupted?
Yoga will not fix the big outer problems, but it can provide us with the steadiness and ease needed to stay present and be flexible in the face of crisis, upheaval, or disease. It can also provide insight into how we can live in better alignment. In the meantime, I am practicing gratitude. I know how blessed I am that, so far, the wild upheavals I read about in the news have not kept me from all the food and comfort that a person could possibly want. And I pay attention, because to be ignorant ultimately never serves ourselves or others.
In this society, we tend to think of softness as a negative. If being soft is collapse, laziness, inattentiveness, etc, then it would indeed be a hindrance to growth inner and outer.
We need to soften, though, in order to open or change. When baking a cake, we allow the shortening to soften so that we can cream it with the sweetener. When a seed germinates or a fledgling emerges, the shell softens so that the new life can burst forth.
When I soften as part of the first alignment principle, it is not a collapse, though it does have an aspect of easefulness. It is necessary to soften to invite the support of the subtle energies, to fully experience all the pose has to offer, to expand with light from the inside out. Softening when we start a pose is like the softness of early spring that allows the vigor of full growth to expand.
Being soft in this way — on or off the mat — makes possible the growth of inner brightness and strength that actually makes us less vulnerable then would creating or keeping a hard and brittle shell that can bind or break.
At “Taste of DC” here come (not in any particular order):
1. Respiratory diseases from air pollution resulting from cooking methods, factory farmed meat, manufacture of packaging, and food transportation.
2. Antibiotic resistance from factory farmed meat.
3. Diabetes from refined sugar and carbohydrates.
4. Cancer from food additives, food cooking methods, manufacture of plastic food packaging, and air pollution.
5. Heart disease from fatty and high cholesterol foods.
5. Foot, ankle, knee, and back problems from ill-fitting high heels with a narrow toe box.
6. Tooth decay from refined sugars and carbohydrates and later gum disease and heart conditions from poor dental hygiene.
6. Waterborne diseases from air and water pollution secondary to food manufacturing and packaging and attendant waste and unnecessary medication, surgeries, and other medical treatments for illnesses resulting from food and clothing choices.
And don’t forget lost productivity for sick time. I do not think anyone needs to be rigidly any kind of diet all the time (not raw, not Ayurvedic, not vegetarian, not vegan, not local, not slow), but wouldn’t it be nicer to eat well most of the time (and if you have even the most modest of kitchens, healthy meals are in fact cheaper than packaged junk food–assuming one knows how to cook, which I know is a big assumption), wear comfortable clothing, and have more time, strength and money for creative and loving pursuits?
