Art, Love, Yoga, Baseball, Peaches

Yoga is all about love.  The deepest postures crack your heart wide open, so especially when you feel that your heart is breaking and you feel vulnerable then you can rest assured that your practice is doing exactly what it should be doing.  

 So many people think that love coming into our lives is just about the happiness, but love is so big that it sometimes needs to break our limited notions of self before it has the space to move in.   

Yoga practice does just that—it breaks our hearts so that the new expanded terrain of the inner world is big enough for love to embrace all the aspects of our life, light and shadow, pleasure and pain, with compassion and equanimity.         —KinoMacGregor

Things are changing. The equinox has passed. Green diminishes; earth colors emerge. Dawn comes later; dusk, earlier. She sweeps the back deck daily; more leaves appear. Her hair whitens even as she watches the inevitable lurch toward another birth anniversary.

We have lingered in chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown. *

Kino's beautiful encouragement to embrace all aspects of life—light and dark—leads to tranquility in facing every circumstance, sorrow to bliss. Back bends, my personal heart breaker, are said to be heart openers. And indeed, this beating core with its "limited notion of self" has been cracked—wide open—by this practice and by life itself. 

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.**

And art and yoga mats and love and baseball and autumnal joy and kitchen demolition and striving and pain and anger and fear of losing what? Vigor, ego, zest, a yoga pose, life? Is it not all the same? Call something by one name and does that particular name also include every other name and thing? 

I grow old...I grow old

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. ***

There is a such an overt melancholy to Prufrock—that to me has always seemed funny. In high school a pal named Georgeanne Coffey (later called Annapurna) and I, full of youthful mockery, used to quote Eliot and giggle. "Dare I eat a peach?" and "I grow old" were cues for fits of laughter. (Dear Georgeanne, here I am, long after you have gone, quoting TS Eliot, enjoying doleful Prufrock in a new way and remembering you fondly.)

Ah, Monkey Mind—Tarzan Mind—swings from tree to tree this anniversary eve, never settling, never still! Is everything happening all at once? We leave for India in about six weeks; the kitchen will rebuild itself before friends arrive in two; and this broken (open) heart is vulnerable, full and loving now and will be long after "I" have disappeared. 

Is spring not included in fall? Summer in winter? And vice versa?

All is well!

Dare I eat a peach????

Metta

 *  ** *** from The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock, by TS Eliot
In its entirety (undeconstructed by teenagers) this is a truly beautiful poem!