Inspirations: Archives

Today’s perfect beauty offers itself as a poem. It touches me in ways I cannot describe, just as the qualities of good poetry defy description or understanding. Great poems touch and remain within as a confluence of feelings; a ‘Splendor In The Grass’ moment of pure intoxication that alters consciousness. Whether the poem holds extraordinary words, or simple ones, the symbolism illuminates something personally sublime that ignites the inner life. Meaning is secondary. This is true of any art. It can actually be true of most things, most Practices. Is it not why we practice? A Yoga Practice can be a bridge to a mystic place I cannot know, or own, though I work it piece by piece, hour by hour. It’s like my garden in this exquisite moment. My hands, practicing beauty, have torn out, torn up, re-worked, and weeded every centimeter, until the mundane of dirt and plant suddenly stand in their own glorious poetic wisdom. What transpires to create this moment as sacred? To travel from the mundane to a time and place where mind and heart transfuse and pinion me against the earth, is no minor event. Moments such as this are a goad for the tedious work. The practice, the mindless repetitions need to remember there is a God. If it’s only a momentary, inexpressible, breath…So be it. We may long to understand and share these feelings, intellectually pull things apart, but they have morphed into something beyond themselves, and are therefore mostly wordless. They are too full of life. Poses, flowers, words, are tools of the craftsman. What creates the transformation? How do we move through the literalness of our craft, the deliberate training, and dissection, the intellectual recycling and repetition of the dry, salty, and dare I say, the pedantic? How do we… Read more »