Practice

My regular yoga practice fell apart over the last two weeks.  I awoke before dawn today to attend a class.  My body simultaneously let me know that I had slacked in my daily practice and welcomed the movements.  I like that yoga sessions are called practice.  Saying, “I’m going to practice,” leaves room for feeling on the way to something and offers little expectation of achievements.  I think we should view more of our endeavors as practice.

Today’s definition comes from the dictionary installed on my computer and offers the following for the verb practice.
1.  perform an activity or exercise a skill repeatedly or regularly in order to improve or maintain one’s proficiency
2.  carry out or perform a particular activity, method, or custom habitually or regularly
3.  actively pursue or be engaged in a particular profession or occupation

Life offers many opportunities for improvement. Just as I can train my back muscles to engage and strengthen in salabhasana (locust pose) I can train my mouth to utter kind words instead of harsh ones.  If I repeatedly force myself to be patient, even if at first merely an external action, the more I perform tolerance the more improvement I find in my patience proficiency. 

When we attempt actions that seem hard it can be a sign we need practice.  Only in repeated, regular practice can we maintain adeptness.  If we don’t practice kindness, generosity, honesty, rest, perseverance, temperance perhaps we lose those habits and our skill at them.  Intentional activity makes habits.  Inattention can also make habits.

We must nourish ourselves to have the energy to practice.  Practice requires moments of rest.  It does not require looking around to see how we are doing compared to others.  We can learn from others when appropriate, certainly, but don’t need to rank.  Honor injuries.  Honor fatigue.  Honor natural strengths and weaknesses.  Honor the body you are in.  Honor the circumstances of your life.  Practice what is good for you and others and watch the collective goodness scale tip toward a positive direction. 

Exercise

again
be space
open to love and freedom
camel lowering to knobby, kneeling, knowing knees

again
be air
flow joy and excitement
touch a half-moon breeze with fingers free from fists

again
be fire
burn to understand and recognize
sight restored in kapalabhati’s heat heaving obstructions

again
be water
stream content and compassionate
horizontal in the comfortable corpse that fears not death

again
be earth
offer strength and forgiveness
visionary warrior steady standing heaven-reaching heart

attain or maintain what repeatedly moves
through practice become your Self, Truth.

Return

The weather today feels perfect.  For five days I have enjoyed sunny skies and temperature in the upper 80’s - ideal for the trip the Atlantic shore I took this past weekend.  The Carolina coast offers beautiful beaches and family-friendly, uncrowded places to relax and play.  I return to this trip each year.    

Dictionary.com defines the verb return in its first entry as “to go or come back, as to a former place, position, or state.”

Vacationing with my family has evolved through stages of my adult life.  Accompanying my future husband fifteen years ago I attended his family beach trip as a guest.  I arrived with one small bag, slept separately, played board games, read on the beach.  Flash forward five years and the vacation involved being married, having a two year old and being profoundly pregnant.  I arrived with two suitcases, swim diapers, a portable crib, beach toys, kid friendly sunscreen, set bedtimes and early awakenings.  I scooped sand, hid the board games with small pieces, chased a toddler up and down with the flow of the waves, tried to stick to nap time, and fretted over how three and 8/9 people would all sleep in one room.  Advance five more years and the trip involved a car-top carrier to hold all the stuff needed for two adults, two kids and a third baby.  Several suitcases, boogie boards, beach toys, water shoes, and travel bed all had to go outside the car now because five people filled the inside.  The packing and the unpacking itself was an immense undertaking.  I never sat that year.  Hours passed getting little bodies SPF slathered to go to the beach and scrubbing them free of invasive sand twice a day, providing snacks and meals, keeping towels dry and toys from floating away.  Upon return I needed rest.

Another five year jump brings last weeks’ trip.  The luggage carrier atop the car remains as the five people still necessitate space but we each required one slight suitcase.  I carried one bag with a small collection of beach toys and sunscreen.  Everyone can pack and carry their own things.  All my children possess the sense not to plunge heedlessly into the waves thereby freeing me from my one foot tether.  They are happy to create sand structures with cousins instead of me.  I borrowed a chair and sat under my big hat with a book and read.  I felt the pleasure of the beach return. 

Coming Back

travel away to play by the sea, watch

nature’s vicissitudes be, shells sometimes

found whole although more often ground

multicolor amalgamated specs, sand flecks

flow marking each predictable tide low

or high, hardly recounting wondrous why
               

mighty mote-guarded castles construct

waves wash walls away as old day hassles

salt splashed eye sting, cleaned in teary cry

noon sun’s fireball fry and gritty breeze

brought to knees set free in walking back

cicadas sing the ocean rhythm in return

   

   

Food

Bringing food into the body is essential.  We must eat to live.  We should eat well to have good health.  I know what food is beneficial for my body.  I know where to buy it, how to prepare it, even how to grow some of it.  But that doesn’t always matter.  Toss into three cups of leafy greens a box of busy day, three ounces of kids to please, a cup of tired, a pinch of running late, and a generous dollop of emotions on hand and watch a quick stop for milk become an ambush.  A smiling girl in a straw hat and blue plaid top proffering snack cakes gets a resounding, “Oh, yea.  That is the food to sate my rumbling, empty self because it is easy, cheap, fills some childhood happy spot, and incites my children to cheer.”

Dictionary.com offers the following first two entries for the noun, food.
1.  Any nourishing substance that is eaten, drunk, or otherwise taken into the body to sustain life, provide energy, promote growth, etc.
2.  More or less solid nourishment, as distinguished from liquids

Eating food has a basis in biology for certain.  But it can be so much more.  Even the definition misses the mark in my opinion because there exists plenty to eat that is not at all nourishing!  Food can often be a spiritual thing as well as cellular.  It can become a hobby, an aversion, an addiction.

Through study of yoga and reading Eckhart Tolle’s The Power of Now I learned the concept of becoming the observer, the Self who watches the self.  When I cave to crappy eating I suspect it is a failure of maintaining myself as observer.  The garrulous, venerable Gary Taubes gathered all the science available and taught me everything I could ever need to know about good calories and bad ones.  I believe.  I know.  Sometimes I ignore.  Once my mind makes emotions my body may react and shove whatever I can in my mouth to shut it up.  It rarely really works.  The real solutions for me are my mat, my laptop, my quiet room. 

Sometimes real solutions feel hard to come by.  We can endeavor someday to have watched ourselves long enough, practiced long enough that we can more often truly not want empty food.

Sugar Seeking

a gauge goes directly from grumpy to gorging

foraging in the fridge, grab-nabbing icing straight

late night garbage dumping God knows what

into the gut to disguise growing empty that says

we are not okay. Eating away, old stale crust dusted

cold pepperoni and red sauce stinging bite of tongue

stung in heated chewing, gnawing thru banana bread

nothing said of ice cream and taco chips gathering

growing the pit of self-sacral seat screaming for pie

wondering why someone ate the last cinnamon bun

without caring about leaving an empty package sit

offering not even a bit of sticky sweet salvation

Thunder

Night storms are part of southern summer.  Torrential wind-whipped rain pours, lit up by lightening dancing with its sound soul mate, thunder.   Typically my sleep is deep enough that I only know the storm occurred by the puddles and perky plants of morning.  But, as last night, there happen the occasions of thunder that so shake that they wake me.

Dictionary.com defines the noun thunder.
1.  a loud, resounding noise produced by the explosive expansion of air heated by a lightening discharge.

Also at dictionary.com The American Heritage Science Dictionary published by Houghton Mifflin in 2002 explained thunder.  “Thunderstorms occur when moist air near the ground becomes heated, especially in the summer, and rises, forming cumulonimbus clouds that produce precipitation.  Electrical charges accumulate at the bases of the clouds until lightening is discharged.  Air in the path of lightening expands as a result of being heated, causing thunder.” 

I like to look at kids’ sites for explanations of science.  They typically help me understand what is happening in the physical world without phrases like “Sound velocity is proportional to the square root of temperature” which I encountered on Wikipedia.  Having been awake most of the night I cannot comprehend that sentence right now.

The science of thunder, however stated, has evolved over time.  Early theories of thunder and lightening involved angry gods wielding mighty power to keep man in his place.  The vacuum theory I learned in the way back nineteen-eighties whereby lightening produced a vacuum along its path and thunder was due to the air rushing into the vacuum has also been replaced.  Contemporary science says thunder is a kind of sonic shock wave.  The sudden increase in pressure and temperature from lightening produces super-fast expansion of adjacent air.  The expansion of air moves faster than the speed of sound making waves that result in something similar to a sonic boom. These sound waves produce the clap, crack, or peal of thunder.  The rumbling is sound vibrations bouncing around among clouds, the ground, and such.

Isn’t nature grand?  It offers so much awe-filled inspiration.  Isn’t the internet also grand?  I can think about something, look it up, learn, write and share with the world all before the sun comes up.  Today’s awesomeness truly began with thunder. 

Lightening’s Voice

thief of summer night rest

clapping, slapping, crashing

expanding into what seems

blank space, burned hot

heavenly electric pull

smashing hands of air

particles and remaining charge

speeding toward boom

with abandon accompanying

light of positives and negatives

draw violent beauty far

rumbling, trembling, calling

babes to fear awakening

they hear loud, divining

harm comes of sonic sound

fierce flash companion, sky

storm percussion stomp

of Zeus or Thor washed away

torrential tears, age tells us

it passes as it always has

power present, pound and shake

the foundation, sleepy minds

try to believe it will blow away

tired stubble dark eyes wide

with wonder and livid sighs

Game Show

Looking back, looking forward, being presently here I feel perched between past choices and many yet to come.  Contemplating beginning, middles, and end lends to scrutiny of options taken.  Sitting in yesteryear’s future there is no way to know what would have become had I chosen differently.  I remember proselytizing pamphlets handed to me as a kid in which a person who seemed a game show host sits a man down to watch his life.  How interesting to think of life as a game show offering unseen prizes if we choose well.

The noun game show is defined at dictionary.com as “a television or radio program in which contestants answer questions or play games of skill or chance in order to win money or other prizes.”

I did not stay in my home town for college.  I could have investigated compounding interest in the eighties.  Eventually I took an option to move to Maryland.  Could have stayed home and rented a movie the night I met my husband.    

I’m feeling like a player in a global “Let’s Make a Deal” episode.  Remember that show?  People dressed up, assuming characters to get attention.  Folks waved signs and brought stuff to trade.  The unknown behind doors was sometimes wonderful, sometimes a zonk.  In tense moments contestants were offered something in a box instead of the door.  The host always got a kiss from the ladies. 

My game show feeling, unlike the sixty minute TV event, encompasses the on-going nature of life.  We get multiple sets of hypothetical doors to choose from.  The options keep coming and our life path unfolds.  I’m working to toss out the idea of anything being a punishment or reward and endeavor not to dwell on the mysterious, unopened doors.  We keep playing until we win the gift of being the kind of person we want to be.

Let’s Make a Life

search your purse for a teacher or nurse to guide you

heal you or worse, convert you to carrying a coin sack

and several pair of sandals shluffing heaps of supplies

what lies behind each door offered as prize temptation

wishes you take to make everything really right and end

daily happiness fight with one well-picked winning ticket

door number one could be a snake with relentless hissing

about what you might be missing without dissing dainty

forbidden fruit hanging lushly from above a vacation spot

another way is left to say behind a velvet curtain, compelling

yet untelling of what the soft supple drapes might conceal

maybe a red-hot-diggity  deal sizzling, steamy, expensive

slide aside wooden panels, decide as they glide that the shiny

new car will take you away, far from the start toward finish

gleaming garishness full of leather scented assurances

bounty or bust behind different doors dangling mysterious

possibilities that relinquish others but regret  nearly nothing

worse than living or laughing at an empty seat after the hour

still time to trade, karmic cascaded choices made to honor

yourself in knowing you take the best  option at each given

moment over time selections arise so that you need nothing

C

Did you ever have an assignment, project, or report that you simply did not have any inspiration for completing yet you had an obligation to get it done?  In actuality you wanted to do it but the work just wouldn’t get going, get cracking, get flowing.  You deem it totally unacceptable to shirk the thing.  In hopes of making something out of nothing you begin offering words to the mission, fleshing it with what little you have and perhaps hoping to ramble enough to fill the space on the paper you were given all the while holding hope for the benevolence of the evaluating reader to give you a pity C for some variety of effort. 

C is defined as a symbol at dictionary.com (yes, it’s true – look it up!).
1.  the third in order or in a series
2.  (in some grading systems) a grade or mark, as in school or college, indicating the quality of a student’s work as fair or average.

Maybe it happened in Senior English your last semester of high school.  Maybe it was during a science lab your sophomore year of college.  Maybe it transpired last month when evaluations of first quarter performance were due.  Maybe the task was last week’s projected plan for an increase in company morale.  Maybe it was this week’s lesson plans.  Maybe it is at this very moment my blog.

Struck Dumb

Seriously, munificent, evaluate mercy
on the emptiness of my mouth mind
south in a state of rare, undetermined
speechlessness have not a thing to say

Even after typing over two hundred
words, the absurd reality, is I have still
said nothing of any meaning, shall
speechlessness surely begin this day

I offer four more lines of type holding
babbled hype a visual façade of work
longer growing below mere mediocre
speechlessness permits silence give way

Winner

I happened to be in a restaurant during the Kentucky Derby Saturday.  Everyone at the counter on one side of the place shouted and cheered for those beautiful horses galloping their hearts out in a giant oval.  I’m guessing no one in the tiny band of locals at a small watering hole in South Carolina personally knew the participants.  Nonetheless, folks love a winner, a first place finisher. 

Dictionary.com succinctly defines winner as a person or thing that wins; victor.

If we ourselves cannot BE the winner we enjoy the next best thing:  supporting the victor.  It’s fun.  It pays for a lot of college bottom line budgets.  It gives camaraderie.  It feels good to see folks prepare, compete and win in a contest.  It also offers an opportunity for people to act negatively toward each other, to boo, call names and say things like, “In your face.” 

I’m contemplating whether this winner-loving attitude bleeds into our everyday approach to life?  Are we competing to affiliate with the champion in a race, cheering for our chosen pony, denying anyone else’s performance at the finish?  Do we even know who these metaphorical ponies are?  Do we manufacture hate toward those who connect with a group other than our own? 

I am undoubtedly a slow trotting pasture pony inclined to say, “I dunno” in response to a lot of questions.  I have no desire to start a smack-down declaring any one idea, club, team, or group right, wrong, good, bad, winner, looser, animal, vegetable or mineral.  My interest is introspection.  I’m not saying join in supporting any one thing.  I’m not saying don’t speak out for anything.  On the contrary, I think it is good to be passionate and connected to what you believe or enjoy.  Root for a team that you dearly love to see triumph. I think competition can be healthy and beneficial.  Don the hat, t-shirt or button and go for your cause.  I simply noticed a lot of folks got highly heated about horses running on TV and maybe, just maybe people get carried away with cheering or jeering and getting all worked up about winning without thinking about what or why we are yelling.

Quoted by The Associated Press after the Derby the second place horse’s owner said, “That’s the only time I’ve run second where I’ve been happy because he [the horse] ran his race.”  Amen.

Marathon

race to final place with fast and furious pace

pounding hearts and fists insist that the right

rests in the best way, the one say truth and life

can there be only one path on a planet or sun

full of things  to know and hearts to show just

how much foul we inflict or endure, each pure

wanting winner of what might be a bit better

would that we want everyone, daughter or son

to arrive hereafter in whatever order they can