What Are You Going to Do With It?
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We all have one of these. The question is whether we can learn to use, repurpose, refine, release, and dissolve to best serve ourselves and our environment.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Walk to William Penn House Class (Tuesday Nights @ 6:30pm)
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It is beautiful rain or shine, bright or dark, every season of the year. Come join us if you are in town. All levels welcome. Therapeutic and more advanced alternatives offered where needed.
More About Eating Local
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Some great reminders and interesting new tidbits of information in this article/book review about globalization and Columbus. With a little help from our friends, some dedicated scholars, and a willingness to learn, we can have a better understanding of the complicated web of being.
It wasn’t so much the Columbian trade that did it as much as other international trade and travel, but our modern Western yoga practice has much of the same cross-culturing, ocean-criss-crossing intermingling as does our diet and agriculture.
Before the Rain Was Truly Earnest
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The rain started when I was about half way to Union Station to catch the metro to Takoma Park to teach the noon gentle/therapeutics class at Willow Street. Thanks to all the regulars, make=up students, and drop-ins for coming to practice to get ready for the storm. The rain was steadier en route home, but I made it home before it really was coming down fully as it is now and will only get fiercer for several more hours.
“Do you have an umbrella?”
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As I was headed out at lunch, a co-worker in another office whom I know only from the hallway, asked, “do you have an umbrella?”
“Yes, I do, how are you?” I replied, knowing that she was trying to be helpful. So many of us work in spaces without windows, it was not unreasonable for her to think I might not know it was raining.
Another woman who I did not know said, “I heard it might rain all weekend,” revealing herself as one who gets all knowledge of the weather from tv.
I thought, but did not say, “yes, there is that pesky hurricane coming.”
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
The Garden Thrills to the Thunderstorms
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Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Magical Mushrooms
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Spontaneously growing in a crescent.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Have You Noticed
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Have you noticed that there are fewer butterflies than there used to be? I am missing them.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
It’s About the Money (and Solar or Wind Power for Home and/or Business)
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This anecdote is a powerful incentive for those who could not care less about consequences of fossil fuel consumption.
Total electric bill this late spring/summer by month so far:
May 2011: $6.92 (PEPCO carrying charge); solar output exceeded usage
June 2011: $6.92 (PEPCO carrying charge); solar output exceeded usage
July 2011: $6.92 (PEPCO carrying charge); usage exceeded solar output, but by less than the extra output in May and June
Wow! How much was your monthly electric bill in the Southern and drought states? Do you know any one who would be persuaded only by the money? Tell them what a great investment it is, and they will start thinking seriously about it. Putting a dollar value on social good is the way to get through to those who only look at the numbers and do not see how budget numbers relate to real living beings and honoring the beauty of the web of creation (this would not be a veiled reference to something going on in that big domed building down the street; definitely, not).
It may not always work, but putting what you want in the language of those whose actions and beliefs are not in synch with yours is the beginning of communication and change. These cost savings say, in the language of those who care most about the money, that alternative energies are worth considering.
Living Mindfully in a Heat Wave, Ahimsa, and “Opening to Grace”
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Ahimsa, which is the first of the yamas in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and thus is the first practice or principle of the eight-limbed path, is usually translated as non-violence or non-harming. Over my years of practice and study, I have read and heard many versions–some general, some personal beliefs–as to what it means to practice nonviolence as part of a path of yoga. As I watch the way people around me are behaving and reacting to the heat and drought, I thought about how, for me, the practice ahimsa is as much about seeking to be in alignment with the movements and shifts around us that we cannot change as about refraining from specific acts of violence (though that is obviously a basic element).
In terms of aligning with the world arounds us and the cycles of our own body-mind, when we are sensitive to what will best serve our own self while having the least impact on the environment, we are practicing ahimsa, in other words, “opening to grace.” How does practicing ahimsa by behaving mindfully incorporate many aspects of the Anusara first principle of opening to grace? Opening to grace, as a practice principle, invites us to be open, sensitive, spacious, and radically affirm what is so that we can expand, shift, and serve ourselves and others in the best way possible under the circumstance. To be open in this way, try not to rage at the heat–or whatever is your weather. Soften, listen, and mindfully discover how you can live at your fullest, kindest, and most generous with what you cannot change.
When the temperature soars above 95F for days in a row, it is an act of violence to rage against it or to consume outrageous amounts of fossil fuels to cool our businesses and homes enough to wear warm clothes, sleep under blankets, cook and eat hot foods, or do an athletic asana practice or workout (lest we feel that we are not fulfilling some externally motivated personal notion of fitness–having external notions of how we should look, act govern us without accepting the actual situation is its own form of violence against ourselves) that we would not do if we could not artificially cool our environment.
Perhaps I have no call to speak on this: my central air conditioning is on, though I’ve been keeping it between 78-82F and I have been moving, dressing, and eating in a way that honors the fact that those temperatures are as cool as it is going to be until the heat wave breaks. Some might argue that using any air conditioning or even an electric fan or a refrigerator is doing excessive harm to the environment. That may in fact be true, but asking for more than we can do just makes things seem impossible, and then we are less likely to make any shift at all.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
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