Heraclitus - Apr 27, Iyengar I
Another fragment, fitting for a day when our fingers and toes are crossed that we will get some rain!
#72
Moisture makes the soul
succumb to joy.
Tu Mu - Apr 27, Iyengar II
8th century Chinese, for the Full Moon. Loved the imagery. Here in Santa Fe we may need to have our ponds in bowls, especially this year.
Pond in a Bowl
Breach cut in green-moss earth,
it steals a distant flake of heaven.
White clouds emerge in mirror;
fallen moon shines below stairs.
Hans Børli - April 25, Fun with Chairs
Yoga philosophy would say that the poem below describes our path. Might be easier with a chair…
One Thing's Necessary
One thing's necessary - here
in this hard world of ours
of homeless and outcast people:
Taking residence in yourself.
Walk into the darkness
and clean the soot from the lamp.
So that people on the roads
can glimpse a light
in your inhabited eyes.
Hans Børli - Iyengar Sunday Fun
A good reminder from a poet familiar with darkness. Appreciating this beautiful sunny day.
Whispers in the Cotton Grass
Life isn't always
a breathless footrace with death.
Life isn't just
ten thousand plodding steps
towards petty goals.
No, life is rich enough
to be just whispers in the cotton grass...
Life is rich enough
to forget the hours and bread
and death.
But all these busy people -
with pay packets and wristwatches
and dining rooms of blond birch...?
They are so stingy with the minutes.
The cry from their hearts is drowned
in the noise of pistons and steel.
But cotton grass whispers in the south wind
the simple song
that their hearts remember on factory floors.
And lonely birds
sail in the sun,
sail in the sun and shriek…
Hans Børli - April 24, Restorative + Pranayama
I loved everything about this piece, the best kind of “report”.
Report from the Grass Roots
I am a little ant.
A quiet falls upon the paths
and the great evening starts to darken in the woods.
All the sensible old wood-ants
must be home long ago
with their pine needles - but I
crawl in the twilight, with my pincers ready,
upwards on a swaying blade of bent-grass.
Would be fine, you know,
to come back home to our anthill
dragging a star...
Arthur Sze - April 22, Iyengar II & I
For Earth Day - a newer to me, much loved local poet, writes about the local landscape. Before my classes I talked abut Earth Day resolutions. The Pandemic has been incredibly hard for many humans. For many other inhabitants of this world, the pandemic has been an easier time. My Earth Day resolution is to choose to drive less, even when I start being able to leave the house more.
flitting to the honeysuckle, a white butterfly—
when she scribbles a few phrases by candlelight, a peony buds—
two does bound up from the apple orchard—
he sprays a paper-wasp nest under the portal—
sunlight touches the highest leaves of the silver poplars—
a buck scrapes his rack on a slender aspen trunk—
you slow but drive steadily through a hailstorm until it clears—
walkingstick on the screen door—
swimming back to shore, they spot a few turtles in the shallows—
we stroll up an arroyo then glance back at the S-curve of trees in the valley—
the steady hum of cars driving men to the lab—
red-winged blackbirds nesting in the cattails—
here a peony buds and fragrances the air—
he kisses the back of her neck and she nestles along his body—
in the sky, not a shred of cloud—
Ursula K. Le Guin - April 20, Iyengar II & I
I’ve loved this storyteller now most of my life. She had a gift for drawing out the stories we tell ourselves, asking us check our assumptions, beliefs and how we are in the world.
The Story
It's just part of a story, actually quite a lot of stories,
the part where the third son or the stepdaughter
sent on the impossible errand through the uncanny forest
comes across a fox with its paw caught in a trap
or little sparrows fallen from the nest
or some ants in trouble in a puddle of water.
He frees the fox, she puts the fledglings in the nest, t
hey get the ants safe to their ant-hill.
The little fox will come back later
and lead him to the castle where the princess is imprisoned,
the sparrow will fly before her to where the golden egg is hidden,
the ants will sort out every poppyseed for them
from the heap of sand before the fatal morning,
and I don't think I can add much to this story.
All my life it's been telling me
if I'll only listen who the hero is
and how to live happily ever after.
Ursula K. Le Guin - April 19, Iyengar III
A sweet ending to my day, both the poem and the class. “Light lies the shadow…”
Song
Untongued I turn to still
forgetting all I will.
Light lies the shadow
on the way I go.
Do as you need!
From Becky Hahs, who reliably finds fun on the internet. Love this dog doing Upward Facing Dog while everyone else is in Downward Facing Dog.
Sara, Cack & Louise - April 18th, Sunday Fun
Two student in this class, Julia and Sonya, have been friends since college. Covid has made it possible for these friends to take class together even though Julia is in Santa Fe and Sonya is in Greece. Julia shared a darling photo of the two of them before class Also in attendance was my best friend since the 8th Grade, Catherine Rogers, aka Cack. I said I should bring a photo of us as “youngsters”. Cack sent me the one below. Me with a perm on the left, Cack in the middle, Cack’s older and wiser sister Louise is on the right. Nothing better than friends forever!
Archibald MacLeish - April 18, Sunday Fun + Chair Class
A friend sent me this piece with the proviso that she didn’t think it was appropriate for a Yoga class. I read it anyway. Love/Yoga not so different. Understanding the nature of the river and the stone and their relationship - there lies the path toward wisdom.
WHAT ANY LOVER LEARNS
Water is heavy silver over stone.
Water is heavy silver over stone's
Refusal. It does not fall. It fills. It flows
Every crevice, every fault of the stone,
Every hollow. River does not run.
River presses its heavy silver self
Down into stone and stone refuses.
What runs,
Swirling and leaping into sun, is stone's
Refusal of the river, not the river.
Mirabai - April 17, Restorative + Pranayama
This mystic had a passionate, earthy even, relationship with the ineffable.
All I Was Doing Was Breathing
Something has reached out and taken in the beams of
my eyes.
There is a longing, it is for his body, for every hair of
that dark body.
All I was doing was being, and the Dancing Energy
came by my house.
His face looks curiously like the moon, I saw it from
the side, smiling.
My family says: "Don't ever see him again!" And they
imply things in a low voice.
But my eyes have their own life; they laugh at rules,
and know whose they are.
I believe I can bear on my shoulders whatever you
want to say of me.
Mira says: Without the energy that lifts mountains,
how am I to live?
Naomi Shihab Nye - April 13, Iyengar II & I
Advice is not always easy, or useful, or well received. I liked this anyway. Take the long view. Maybe plant a tree too.
Advice
My great-great-aunt says to plant a tree.
Any nut, she says. She says and says again.
She planted her tree in 1936.
Ahead of us the years loom, forests without histories.
Our hands want to plant something that will bloom tomorrow.
This is too vague, this deep root of ten thousand days.
Don't forget, she says, but we are driving away.
Behind us she brushes a leaf from her step,
sinks a little deeper into the soil of sleep
that has been settling beneath her like a pillow since birth.
Naomi Shihab Nye - April 12, Iyengar III
I went looking for something appropriate for the first night of Ramadan. I found this piece about Mohammed, but not the one you think. Instead I found a funny kinship, with this wonderful Palestinian American from Texas. Do you have relatives you know any love but have never really met in real life? “Not in the least bit nuts”!
For Mohammed on the Mountain
Uncle Mohammed, you mystery, you distant faceless face,
lately you travel across the ocean and tap me on my shoulder
and say "See?" And I think I know what you are talking about,
though we have never talked, though you have never traveled anywhere
in twenty-five years, or at least, anywhere anyone knows about.
Since my childhood, you were the one I cared for,
you of all the uncles, the elder brother of the family.
I’d pump my father—"But why did he go to the mountain?
What happened to him?" and my father, in his usual quiet way,
would shrug and say—"Who knows?"
All I knew was you packed up, you moved to the mountain,
you would not come down.
This fascinated me: How does he get food? Who does he talk to?
What does he do all day?
In grade school my friends had uncles who rode motorcycles,
who cooked steaks outdoors or paid for movies.
I preferred you, in all your silence.
In my mind you were like a god, living close to clouds,
fearless and strong, with no one to sing you to sleep.
And I wanted to know you, to touch hands, to have you look at me
and recognize your blood, a small offspring
who did not find you in the least bit
nuts.
Denise Levertov - Apr 11, Sunday Fun & Chair Class
Some people are poets and some are explainers. In Iyengar Yoga more teachers are explainers, a few are poets, some are both. I’m an explainer, but I like poets! What are you?
Artist to Intellectual (Poet to Explainer)
‘The lovely obvious! The feet
supporting the body s tree and its crown
of leafy flames, of fiery
knowledge roaming
into the eyes, that are lakes, wells, open
skies! The lovely
evident, revealing
everything, more mysterious
than any
clueless inscription scraped in stone.
The ever-present, constantly vanishing,
carnal enigma!’
Denise Levertov - Apr 10, Restorative + Pranayama
In Yoga tradition, as words, breath and wind are interchangeable.
Emblem (I)
Dreaming, I rush
thrust from the cave of the winds,
into the midst of a wood of tasks.
The boughs part, I sweep
poems and people with me a little way;
dry twigs, small patches of earth
are cleared and covered.
Then I find myself
out over open heath, a sigh that holds
a single note, heading
far and far to the horizon's bent firtree.
Robert Frost - April 8, Iyengar II
Patricia Wallace sent me this, probably the best Spring poem ever. Who cares if it gets read a lot?!
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
W.S. Merwin - April 6, Iyengar II & I
More than a year ago I went to Portland, OR for a Patricia Walden workshop. I believe I went to the amazing Powell’s Books 4 days in a row. I sent home a crate of books. Still making my way through the pile. This piece attracted my attention because I have lived most of my life in New Mexico. In all that time I have lived on a dirt road. For some bizarre reason that’s a point of pride. Merwin lived on a dirt road too, in Hawaii. The same and different!
To the Dust of the Road
And in the morning you are up again
with the way leading through you for a while
longer if the wind is motionless when
the cars reach where the asphalt ends a mile
or so below the main road and the wave
you rise into is different every time
and you are one with it until you have
made your way up to the top of your climb
and brightened in that moment of that day
and then you turn as when you rose before
in fire or wind from the ends of the earth
to pause here and you seem to drift away
on into nothing to lie down once more
until another breath brings you to birth
W.S. Merwin - Apr 5, Iyengar III
For a group I trust to take this the right way; the blessings of experience.
To the Mistakes
You are the ones who
were not recognized
in time although you
may have been waiting
in full sight in broad
day from the first step
that set out toward you
and although you may
have been prophesied
hung round with warnings
had your big pictures
in all the papers
yet in the flesh you
did not look like that
each of you in turn
seemed like no one else
you are the ones
who are really my own
never will leave me
forever after
or ever belong
to anyone else
you are the ones I
must have needed
the ones who led me
in spite of all
that was said about you
you placed my footsteps
on the only way