small change

hairried

My head started the day shrouded in lots of hair, not so much in the count of strands as in sheer length. I don’t know when it was the last time I let settle into a chair of a stylist, or even just in the capable hands of someone who knows his or her way with shears, but it seems like a long time. Judge it for yourself, from the length of this lock:

As much as this braid is a talisman of sorts, something that grew with my yoga practice, I suddenly found it burdensome. Or maybe I was just getting bored. Or, maybe this “itch” was a symptom of how upsetting it has been to watch YogaWorks, the corporate entity, take over our yoga studio, formerly known as the YogaStudio – and a place that nurtured a range of practitioners through the range of classes given by a wide range of truly excellent and seasoned (senior) teachers. The YogaStudio, started by Joan Barnes (who had started Gymboree decades ago) was very much a local enterprise. It was a place that nurtured community among the people who worked there and who frequented the place. That the discipline of yoga helped me get back on track is indisputable, but the fact is that the friends I made in that community, young and old, have been a lifeline in terms of new friendships, leads for healthier living, and even jobs.

Over the last few weeks, one by one, the senior teachers started to leave, since their pay was cut drastically and were given policy directions that run counter to the kind of yoga discipline they teach. But not counter to the business of aerobics classes, I suppose. Since a good number of us have signed up for the year, hoping to save a considerable amount, happy as we were in our routine and riches of teachers, are now left a bit like sheep wandering around. Though this is upsetting in a personal way, I am more discombobulated over this process of destroying a community by an insidious cooptation of its life-sustaining principles into market-boosting techniques.

The practice of yoga is ultimately my affair, as it should be. Every situation, of course, is a teacher on the road. But some situations, like some teachers, are at the heart of learning, which is also about teaching. Our community was diverse in almost every sense. Young and old, the ailing and the athletic, the entrepreneurial and the free spirit – we shared the yoga, and through the yoga an interest in each other’s lives. While this makes perfect sense in terms of building a community, it obviously makes no cents when it comes to business. And so, as I understand, the pressure is on to fill the classes with more people. Which is fine, because community and making money are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The trouble comes when a corporate entity decides to draw up strategy at headquarters, without understanding the difference the local can make to the bottom line. I have a feeling that “corporate” is thinking of consumers as the young and trendy. But guess what? Here where I live, it is the “old” who tend to be the more trendy, and they also command more disposable income. They are also more health conscious. By letting go of a cadre of teachers whose students were heavily weighted with babyboomers, the YogaStudio will lose a lot of customers.

Then again, maybe this is their particular strategy, since they managed to extract a full year’s fee from some of us up front. Maybe in a year’s time, they will rid themselves of this particular studio, while running a leaner operation with those of us taking fewer classes. And, with talking about ridding oneself, it’s time to get back to the topic of this post: hair today and hair gone. Yep, I did cut it. Gone corporate myself, it seems -- tough I did donate the hair that was cut off, in the spirit of comunity!

photo friday: iconic

This week's Friday photo challenge was iconic. I was truly at a loss for a photo for this one, since I kept thinking in the traditional sense of the term, in religious terms, which had me looking for those venerable images of gods and goddesses. But deification, done as it is by people, is inclusive of more than just people. Its objects can be as grand as the dizzying statues of gods and dead kings, or they can be objects, when the religion is more a matter of personal choice, as is the case with those from whom the old saw about the body being a temple becomes literal. For these worshipers, a pair of shoes is iconic of their aspirations, and they can become the set of hands clasped in prayer, or the chalice, which they fill with feet of clay, while they wait for the wings promised by Nike (not the goddess, mind you, but the manufacturer of such rubber dreams):

cutting the string

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to knit myself a scarf, for a change. I chose a lace pattern, something I have never done before, and faithfully followed it. The yarn I picked for it was soft and a beautiful color – well, beautiful to me, as such things are subjective. Last night, the end loomed near. That is, the unblocked scarf was almost as long as I am tall.

After I bound it off, finished the loose ends, I came across one incredibly loose stitch. I tugged on it some, making it looser, so I would have plenty of yarn for what I was the solution to the problem of the glaring imperfection in this work. I cut the yarn and tied it and tucked in the ends. Then, I pulled on the scarf, and there went a bunch of rows, making a void of what was just a slightly larger whole in the pattern.

Maybe I was too attached to the outcome, and so the lesson is plain here, as is the whole, with which I do not know what to do. Darn it – I mean, that is what I need to do. Right?

For the moment, though, I decided to begin from the beginning. Different needles, different yarn, wilder color, but the same old pattern. Hoping that I won't have the same old problem at the end.

In spite of the unraveling, it is obvious I have not cut the string.

beginnings

Instead of snow, the cover of petals -- on this January day. This may be out of season, but certainly not out of place.

meditation: friday photo challenge

This week's Friday photo challenge is meditation. I haven't perused the links posted to photos of such yet, but I bet that there is a rich offering of Buddhas. In that spirit, here is my offering in the genre:

Now that this is out of the way, I am left with the challenge of how to capture something as unsubstantial (though not insubstantial) as meditation. Neither the Buddha nor the quail are meditating, for both are beyond the act of probing the mysteries of the Self. If the quail is searching for dharma megha samadhi, she won't be getting it from this stony teacher. But she'll find a grain, if not of Truth, of millet and corn, scattered by us.

And yet, stony teachers, even the ones made of stone, have taught some people about stillness, or settling, if not the mind, at least the body in the most unusual circumstances. One such student is this person, for whom the fake Venice inside the bustling Venetian hotel in Las Vegas provided a platform for sharing stillness -- at least near stillness:

Just like I wonder what the Buddha would think of those imagined likenesses of him cast in stone, metal, wood, you name it, I wonder what Dante would think of this enacted alabaster likeness of him standing there inside the kaleidoscope filled with shards of Italy seen through a lens strangely. Surely he would find another circle of hell for it....

But, forget the feathered student, the stony teacher, or the madness of the fake statue in the fake piazza, for here is a photo that struck me the most as I went through my picture looking for an appropriate one for this week's challenge: the colossal chorus line of water in the middle of the desert -- the fountain at the Bellaggio:

 

the winter mind

For some artists, depression appears to be the most intimate muse, it seems. Once treated for the symptoms, the drive to create (let's say write) leaves with the muse for those darker shores elsewhere. This is not the case for all creative people struck by depression, of course. There are those who are freed of the demons and go on to find a new muse, perhaps not one that delivers the same seductive words or images, but just as willing to spur creativity in other -- and perhaps less obvious -- ways. 

I was thinking about these matters lately and went hunting through my library for books I used to collect on the topic of depression and the experiences of creative people. So this is how I came to this passage on writer's block and brain state from Alice Flaherty's The Midnight Disease:

Other writers argue that depression is not necessary for creativity directly, but is an inevitable side effect of the mechanism that produces elated, creative states. As Rilke said, when it was suggested that he be psychoanalyzed, "If I lose my demons, I will lose my angels as well." Several more recent writers have described how their desire to write disappeared as their depression lifted, but blame the antidepressant -- not the loss of their depression -- for their decreased creativity. Lauren Slater depicts such a state a year after starting Prozac:

It's been almost a year now since I've completed a short story or a poem, I who always thought of myself as a writer, all tortured and intense. I can just manage this journal. So maybe I am not a writer anymore. Maybe Prozac has made me into a nun, or a nurse, or worse, a Calgon Lady. Why can't I manage a simple story? Why is my voice -- all my voices -- so lost to me?

Every morning before work, I come to the blank page and look at it. It looks like winter. It is February in my mind. I think of the things people have said about the blank page, all the images. Sheet of snow. Anesthetized skin. To those images I add my own: the white of Prozac powder, spread thin.

The biochemistry of this side effect, if it is real, is unknown. One possibility is that it occurs through mood flattening. Some antidepressants, at least in some people, seem to not only decrease their low moods but diminish their excited or high moods. Without their highs, patients may find they have less desire to write. This occurrence can be misinterpreted as more depression breaking through the antidepressant -- sometimes causing the physician to increase the dose, which only worsens the symptoms. [Emphasis mine]

I have this sneaking suspicion that antidepressants may not be the only muse-repellents for some artists. A dedicated spiritual practice, such as meditation, may well bring on the same mood flattening effect for them.

And yes, like Lauren Slater, I have been staring at sheets of snow -- though not of Prozac. I am no longer writing poetry -- it has been nearly two years since I wrote a poem. However, I do not mourn the loss. My poetry muse and I had an amicable split, something we have done on and off throughout my life, as I moved from place to place and "space" (or phase) to "space" in my life so many times before. 

I've never been monogamous when it came to my form of communication -- how could I be, being a polymath in the first place? In fact, I have even tried music and painting and photography, not to mention fiber arts.... Still, at first I was at a loss without poetry, only to realize later that though my intensity of focus has shifted down, the area it now covered has widened.

This confessional may well show that when it comes to art, in whatever form, I am an eternal amateur and dilettante. Be that as it may, when it comes to packing and carrying the baggage along the journey through it all, I am as hardy and seasoned as any veteran profesisonal!

white: friday photo challenge

This week's Friday photo challenge is white. Well, the obvious is snow, but we have not a trace of it here in our currently very sunny corner of California. The next best thing to trying to capture the depth of white in snow (at least for me) is trying to take a photo of fog with a so-so digital camera. When my first son was a baby and we lived on a rocky outcrop with great views of US 101, San Quentin prison and a sliver of the bay, I spent many a night and early morning up with the baby watching the shifts in the fog, regardless of the season, trying to repaint the landscape, like some disgruntled artist. 

At this house, we have great views of Mt. Tam, but since we live in a warmer climate zone (a mere 2 miles or so from our old place), the fog,  apparently happy with the lay of the land, appears less frequently at our door. last night, however, it snuck in, bringing a tributary of white, towards which the lights from the valley, like restless birds, flew up is a quixotic quest.

stress test

So, I am babysitting one of my laptops, trying to install a huge update form Microsoft, making sure that I catch every message from my very paranoid vigilant anti-virus software, and to pass the time, I am surfing the 'net on another laptop. This is how I came across this test on the Sharp Brains website for one's stress level. I highly recommend it!

disorder - friday photo challenge

Oops, last Friday flew by without my realizing that there was a photo challenge from photo Friday. I suppose, the theme of "disorder" is apt, given how the holiday broke the week in half, making two weekends where there should have been only one. Add some other rumpled relations and disruptions of dispositions and I think that my New Year's photo of a corner of my desk a little past midnight of December 31, 2008 and the first few minutes of January 1, 2009 make a perfect contribution to disorder:

A book on neutrinos, several dice fro Las Vegas, the nearly visible business card of an importer of fine organic green teas from China, along with a heap of other cards from knitting stores to Buddhist centers make a fine background for the swirling foam of that Lump of Coal -- which really tasted more like caramel. But, there you have it.

In the spirit of this last Friday's theme, better late than never.

And thanks to hoarded ordinaries, whose post reminded me of what I missed so early in the year!

shield

After yoga class today, I took a very long bath. Perhaps the combination of poses held for a long time and the long soak in hot water, left me a bit softheaded, if not exactly softhearted. I had to face some unwelcome truths about aspects of my relationship with a certain family member lately, and yesterday, it all came to a head, wounding me deeply, even as I struggled to contain not just the current emotional damage, but also cut through the fog of the past attachments that keeps (at least me) disoriented when it comes to finding a way out of this situation that has been stuck in a groove for years.

So, it was with great interest that I read Sally Kempton’s current article in this month’s Yoga Journal, called “Protective Services.” Last night, as I was devising small rituals to help me shed, and so contain, some of these ancient feelings that shut of all possibility for change and openness, little did I know that I was practicing one of the core principles of vulnerability: building boundaries in order to be more open.

The practice of opening to vulnerability is not for wimps. It’s an advanced practice, requiring strength, discernment, and boundaries – all qualities your yoga practice will give you, if you give it time.
...
The spiritual journey often looks like a dance between the two distinct poles of vulnerabilities and boundaries. It’s a continuing dialogue between the impulse to soften and open and the impulse to contain and protect.

Of course, as a recovering wimp, I remember the days when containment was as easy to be had as it was to pour a glass of wine, or ask a doctor for some pills. None which made for good dialogue. In fact, that kind of containing was an endless performance of the same monologue in an empty theatre.

I am aware that it's not going to be easy. There will be days when the performer in me will want to opt for the monologue, even in the empty theatre, rather than let either the impulse to contain or the impulse to soften have it's say and have either heard. 

There is more, of course, but it's time to go catch that light that is beckoning from the top of the stairs. It's a gorgeous January day here, and it's best to seize it before I miss it by writing about it.....