If I post a picture of a rainbow a few days after I took it, is it still worth looking at? Or does it need to be in the moment?
I took formal leave from work at midday today to bear witness to those who rearranged the rest of their lives to speak to their elected officials and others about their convictions in this democracy. I wanted to let them know how much I appreciate their efforts.
January 6 is yet another day so historic it warrants reflection and impetus to action on every anniversary. (That might be resting, by the way, if you spend much of your temporal, energetic, and emotional resources in the efforts to make change and ward off evil.)
One of the yoga practices is exercising discrimination and acting with discernment (viveka) in response to changes in the world, the human collective, and ourselves. Discernment requires learning and admitting to the difficult truths and learning from experts and innovators.
Meditation, contemplation, reflection, and being present to oneself is all very nice, but without study and discriminative participation in the collective, it starts being more like spiritual bypassing than not.
What are your thoughts on this day? How does staying present to the reality of it make you feel? How are you balancing taking care of yourself and participating in shifting the narrative?
It seems somewhat fitting that DC has been crippled today by the first significant snow storm in quite some time.
Just because I don’t write about asana often, doesn’t mean I am not practicing. The storm was just beginning. Longtime student and friend A came over to practice. We did hot water bottle restoratives, inviting ourselves to return our attention to the warmth whenever our minds got too busy.
I don’t know about the tacos. I didn’t feel drawn to eat at the restaurant, but I liked the sign.
A year or two before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was released, I went to a panel discussion and film (alas, I cannot remember the title of the film) about global climate change. One of the speakers was a Nepalese attorney who was working on a case in the World Court that sought to address the impact of various corporate practices on the Himalayan snow cap.
One of the things this man said continues to resonate with me: “Why is it,” he asked, “that Americans are always turning on lights in the day time? Do you ever think about how much energy we could save and dangerous, climate-changing emissions we could stop, if we just relied on day light during the day instead of adding unnecessary electric lights?”
