Found Exhortation (with missing words)
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Found Sculpture
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I saw this beautiful roll of chicken wire in the Enid Haupt garden when I was walking back to the office after a quick visit to see the Gods of Angkor exhibit at the Sackler Gallery (sorry about the absence of links; blogging from the BB).
I was first introduced to the idea of “found poetry” in junior high school and have developed a life-long habit of photographing words to change, enhance, and/or question their meaning and hidden beauty by the act of extracting them from their original place and presenting them as a photograph. Marcel Duchamp and others did what poets and photographers were doing with words with ordinary objects by presenting them as sculpture.
Here, where I have photographed the chicken wire roll, is the art a sculpture (because I could treat it as such) of which I have taken a photograph–the photograph being mere documentation? Is the art the photograph of what I have seen to the extent I am offering it as a vision and a dialogue generated by what I saw? Or is the photograph merely a snapshot taken with a hand-held computer device documenting an object that happened to be sitting there–not art at all? If it were not for artists such as Duchamp, could I or would I even be able to ask this question?
I think that analogous types of questions have been and can be asked about the variety of religious and mystical experience. Is there a particular way they must be experienced? Do such experiences have to fit within a prescribed framework to be valid? When are such experiences madness or delusion and when are they the voice of the spirit? Who gets to decide? Does it depend on the era and the culture in which the experiencer lives? Does the answer to any of these questions matter if the experiences lead one to a more loving, compassionate, and beauty-filled life?
“It’s All Good” (and Voltaire’s Candide at the Shakespeare Theater)
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Last night I went to see the revival of the Bernstein musical version of Voltaire’s Candide, now playing at the Shakespeare Theater’s Harmon Hall (discount tickets available), which was absolutely a delight — fantastic staging and direction, luxurious costuming, enthusiastic performances. Throughout his journey, which is beset with cruelty, hardship, natural disaster, and other mishaps wherever he goes, Candide sings of his tutor’s optimistic advice that “all’s for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” The application of this philosophy leads to some silly results, including the Monty Python-worthy lyric “it’s a great day for an auto da fe.”
I have a friend who, after telling me of various life challenges and griefs, inevitably signs off with the phrase “it’s all good,” though I am not sure she believes it. I thought of her repetition of the phrase “it’s all good,” while I was watching the musical. Later in Candide’s travels, he encounters a second philosopher scholar who (I’m paraphrasing loosely) contradicts the “it’s all for the best” philosophy of Candide’s tutor by telling Candide to just look around and he will know that things are not in fact always for the best. A fluffier version of the debate in the novel, as to whether things are all for the best when there is so much cruelty and devastation, is interwoven into the rest of the play.
I’ve never had a desire to wear the t-shirt proclaiming that “it’s all good.” I look around me, and I simply do not believe it. I do believe wholeheartedly, though, Voltaire’s premise that we have the responsibility to “cultivate our garden.” As my teachers John Friend and Paul Muller-Ortega espouse, we should “respond from the highest,” regardless of what we experience and encounter. By having our response make the best of all possible worlds from things that are not evidently for the best, we bring more light into the world, whatever is our world view. I can only hope that with steady practice of yoga and meditation, I can keep ever truer to these teachings when I am seriously challenged.
The Sky Is Just As Big Wherever You Are
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The sky was luminous and beautiful early this morning when I headed out to teach. The air was scrubbed clear by the cold front that passed through in the night, leaving behind fluffy clouds to highlight the luminousity of the sun rising.
As I enjoyed looking at the clouds and light in the sky on my walk to Union Station to catch the metro to go teach, I thought about seeing the sky in Arizona next week. When I am there, I always feel a keen delight when I look at the sky. Then I thought that the sky is just as lovely here. It is that things on the land are bigger and farther apart out west that make the sky seem bigger.
When life is easeful and we are feeling spacious, then the inner place of meditation can feel more luminous than when we are struggling through the day. But just as the sky is just as big wherever we are on the planet, the inner space of meditation is just as vast and luminous no matter what is going on in our lives. The more we remember that and the more we look, the more we will have the opportunity to be lit up from the inside.
My “Black Friday” Spending
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I paid to take a yoga workshop with Paul and Sommer Sobin back in town for their annual day after Thanksgiving workshop at Willow Street Yoga, which was just delightful. I spent the money for round trip transportation between Union Station and Silver Spring. I had lunch with friends and paid for my share of lunch: green tea salad, ginger salad, and tofu with sour mustard at Mandalay in Silver Spring. I am grateful for what Willow Street Yoga offers me and the community, for easy access to public transportation (I wish we would spend some of our defense budget on public transportation), and for a wide variety of restaurants with delicious vegetarian and vegan alternatives near to my home.
I chose to spend money today to have a refreshing and rejuvenating vacation day before teaching tomorrow and to support people whose livelihood is providing services and goods that make the community a better place to be and that enrich my own life. I express my gratitude by, in the method created by the consumer society, contributing to the livelihoods of those who will, in exchange for livelihood, provide life-enhancing services and creative gifts to the rest of us.
Happy Thanksgiving (and some self-massage techniques)
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I wish you all a day in which you recognize and celebrate inner and outer abundance. Show your body how grateful you are for taking you around in this life-time with a few minutes of self massage (and share with your friends and family).
First, take care of your feet–those of you who are regulars know the routine (sorry no pictures). Then, with reverence and gratitude for the practices, the earth for supporting you, and what and who brought you to the mat, come into balasana (child’s pose).
In balasana — you can also do this sitting in a chair at a desk or table; just put your head down the way you did in elementary school — leaving your elbows and forehead resting on the floor or table, bend your elbows so that you can massage your upper back, neck, and head without having to use the muscles you are massaging to massage them.
Try squeezing the back of your neck.
Or finding some spots that would benefit from giving gentle pressure and motion.
Massaging the scalp usually feels good.
When you are done with the self-massage in child’s pose, come up to vertical to sit on your heels. Then dig your fingers into your hair or the scalp and squeeze. This will help get energy flowing and brighten your day. (Be careful: doing this too frequently might give you big hair.)
An Example of How One Door Closing Opened Another (and Article in Yoga Journal)
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I think snow can be beautiful and enjoy the hush when it first falls, but it’s not my favorite thing, which was one of the reasons I settled this far south (yes, DC is pretty far south for a native New Yorker). Last winter with its record snow falls felt at times as a seemingly endless exercise in looking for the good and trying to respond in the highest. Among other fallout of the snow, the February blizzard grounded my flight to San Francisco where I was supposed to go to celebrate the start of John Friend’s 2010 workshop schedule and to visit friends. Instead, I was home shoveling. With the arthritis in my spine and some other old injuries to groin and shoulder, I had to be extra careful with my alignment so that shoveling could be an enjoyable work out instead of a dreary and potentially debilitating task that I was doing instead of playing with friends and yogis in San Francisco. Being grounded at home and needing to be in alignment with the shoveling, led me to blog about Anusara alignment for snow shoveling. Putting this advice out there led to an editor at Yoga Journal discovering my blog and interviewing me for a short article that (I haven’t seen it yet–waiting for my copy to arrive in the mail, but a friend who was reading the most recent edition at Willow Street’s Silver Spring studio gave me the heads up last night) is in December’s magazine (page 22).
While missing out on a vacation due to weather is not exactly a momentous disappointment or life challenge, this story is an example of how we never know what life is going to bring our way. We cannot choose what life gives us, but we can choose how we respond, and how we respond will change how the path unfolds. I persist in the yoga and meditation and share my teachings and experiences because it has been so helpful in opening my perspective and finding more delight and opportunity in life. In that regard, one of the reasons I challenge myself on the mat, inviting myself into places of discomfort and effort and staying with them until I find ease and even delight, is to help me be able to see the good and to respond in the healthiest and most optimal way on and off the mat. While I love sometimes just to do the easeful poses, what has brought more strength and joy to all of my life is going deep into the hard places and staying with them.
Light is Always There
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always there, we just have to remember it is there to see and to recognize it when we do. The first is just Anusara’s “first principle”–opening to grace. The second is practicing and studying with increasing depth and refinement (viveka) so that we can recognize the light and know how to bring it into our lives.
Found Exhortation
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We Are Reminded That No One Place Is Any Better
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Curator’s notes at the exhibit John Gossage’s “The Pond” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
