Inspiration

Oh growing one, Barely here Tender as a new scar Cut by a black scythe Opening the night sky. Rise alone Silent over one Lone tree One lone watchman On the journey Filling the same promise Pushing back darkness.

If you stand and listen, faint rumblings of impatient bodies fill the air. With the first scent of spring we sniff new blood, shifting winter’s lock down  into choatic movement. It’s this shift that creates all manner of imbalances. These imbalances do not occur to such an extreme degree in warmer climes, but for many, March is a month of desperation.  Frustration battles hope. It’s not only difficult emotionally, but there is a spiritual angst at this time. The Astrological year starts March 21 with the vernal equinox. Ancient bones hold this knowledge and ask if we are willing to be re-born. No matter where we live, consciously or unconsciously we question, “Am I willing to re-boot? Am I ready?”  Easter, Passover, and Holi, or Phagwa, did not happen from, “Oh by the way we need more eggs.” Hell hath no fury like another snowstorm in late March.  The polarity of weather is only a piece of the discomfort. How to remain balanced, how not to be impatient, how not to yearn are all answered by being present, or going on a cruise. Those who can’t, grind their teeth….OR undertake an inner cruise.  One of the gifts of a Yoga-life is it offers answers and options for every need. We then have to be willing to step up and practice. The really interesting work is to make March feel like a cruise, not an ordeal, to treasure and make each day holy.    March Practices: 1. Read poetry, listen to joyous music. 2. Practice cleansing-breath/Pranayama: Kalibata and Lion. 3. Take more Vitamin B’s to sooth jangled nerves, and give energy. 4. Coat your skin in oils, rub it through the scalp before washing. 5. Do a fast, long or short, extreme or not.  The very best way to prepare for change is begin……

Repeating something the second or third time around can be maddening.  It can also be gratifying if you note change, and growth.  Repetition also offers moments for choice full response.  This is often not true the first time we go through something. Many of us don’t know what to expect, or can calculate any yardstick of accomplishment.  For those of you who are wizards first time out, stop reading here. Having been frustrated by a slow learning process, having to re-read, re-assess, and being more comfortable backwards than forward, I am a mistress at repetition.  Fortunately, I’m learning not to beat myself on processing life this way. Yes, it is frustrating, yes, it takes more time and energy, yes, one all too easily feels dumb, But on most occasions I’ve learned to elevate my POV from that bruisingly low level of “you idiot!” “to try it again another way.”  Always there are gifts in balancing the negative.  We simply need to stand higher on the mountain and see the other side. Doing and hearing something the second, third, and forth time around allow me to make it truly mine.  Once I have gone through it backwards, I own it.  I become very clear when something is simply an opinion, or whether it has true merit. I am the person you want in your lifeboat when you are in deep trouble. Like many who struggle, if it has not ground us down, it has made us durable. Chaos does not throw me, having lived with it, even created much of it, I know where pigs shit, and I know the waterline that must be bailed.  These are gifts of doing and re-doing, of coming in last, and turning impatience toward patience  Every demerit has nuggets of gold, every fault a talent,……

The line of skeletal trees against a later sunrise suddenly seem vulnerable without their covering of snow, or darkness.  They remind me of an old photograph of women, stripped of their clothing, their small hands desperate to cover naked pain, running between two lines of laughing soldiers, How does the mind layer these terrible and tender disconnected images?  What are we to do with un-accountable polarities? How are we to synthesize being human/inhuman? I was about to write, ‘animal,’ but  animals treat their own that way. With relationships, we have all been privy to the polarity of those painful times when after the first rush of romance, we are faced with cutting bait or being cut. We are forced to look more closely after sweet, intimate years of a partnership grow stale and stagnate. There are painful betrayals in friendships that bring us right up against ourselves, our expectations and behavior. When we are exposed, vulnerable to our flaws, or the flaws of those we thought wonderful, we run naked, unable to be who and what we wish to be, or thought we were.  We are at the mercy of…everything love and friendship are not supposed to be. Humans are not supposed to treat one another with carelessness, brutality, or cold indifference. Are they?  How else are we to learn? If we have chosen earthly lives in order to grow soul-mulch, how are we to grow into greatness if not through pain? It is only those who are able to re-create love out of a broken heart who really understand how to love, It is those who have expanded their compassion from an illness who glory in the gift of each day of health.  It is those who have irretrievably lost a best friend through carelessness who are able to……

A garden inside Rolls from deep sleep A long ago lover, Sacred to the beloved, Reaches out in green longing. Has the stone been rolled away? Is the moment ripe? “Not yet.”   “Soon” Scarcely vibrate The quivering nose, First to sense wet earth, The field of Bluettes… The perfume under supple arms  Lifted in surrender, On the possible “yes,”  Love waits Anxious to be known. The back of winter’s bleakness Broken by memory, The lover, the gardener, The ripeness of the heavens.

There might be 50 ways to leave your lover, but there are a million ways to be a lover, not just lover to another lover, but a passionate life-lover, those who move through their days in light-filled Grace because they are not slaves to fear. The dreariness of mid-winter calls for re-booting fires of passion.  We are hungry for heat, desperate for the growing light, and in older times, fearful we would not survive to see spring. In ancient cultures, from the Iroquois to the Aztecs, mid-winter celebrated the increase in light with rituals of re-starting hearth fires.  The New Year of the ancient Celts was Imbolc, a fire festival that became Christianized into Candelmas.  The New Moon this week signals the Chinese New Year of the Rabbit.  These cycles underlie and promote desires to begin again, to let go of old baggage, and re-boot heartfelt hope.  The great wonder taking place in Egypt is not an accident. It is a convergence of planetary energies for change, memories of ancient cycles, and people whose hearts have grown so full they stand to face fear. Love is rebelliousness for it listens only to the heart. The mind creates boundaries from fear.  There are no boundaries with love.  It moves us out of the past, into the unknown.  Whenever we love, we win, and whenever need is great, we can always find reason to begin again.  The question is, what keeps us from beginning over and over in any moment with everything to gain and nothing to lose?  What darkness keeps us from our love-light?  How do we put conditions on love that cause it to disappear? Why do we manipulate love so it manifests as destruction, not creation?  In becoming passionate lovers, what elixir can we offer Self that we ever so……