Word choice · 11 June 2010
Peony. A flower by any other name…
I said to the Editor: “I don’t know why, but for some reason I feel like peonies are even more sexual than most flowers.”
He blushed. Ohhhh. Ann Arbor, home as it is to Hiscock Street, loves its massive peony gardens. After these weeks’ rain and ungodly winds, the once bulbous, priapic little buds are all sagged down now, returning already to dust. But Wednesday night I tried out my nose on a dozen different varietals, so mindful of the differences between them that I missed the fact that I was getting a head full of pollen. It wasn’t until Thursday practice that I noted the three hours’ extra sleep, puffy eyes and weird nasal voice weren’t moon effects so much as my sinuses begging for a neti pot.
Insert image of spindly man in loincloth discovering cure for snuffing one too many lotus flowers. And for insomnia, ADD and constipation. Kriyas: Ex-Lax of the ancients.
The peony garden hides in a clearing at the top of the Arboretum, not far from one of the few large buildings in town—the hospital. In an otherwise still evening, the building roars, breaking in to the clarity of the olfactory experience. That bellow underlies all city life and yet I’ve never heard it before. Not distinctly.
So the epic preciousness of this place continues. The once-dreaded dinner parties are happening. As is the dumb World Cup. Both converging at my home tomorrow. I dunno, as much as I used to enjoy ridiculing (1) sportsfans and (2) people who eat salads with over ten high end ingredients (I bet you also look down on one or the other of those categories), this is working out.
My therapist and I mused that all the meditation has, for the time being, created an excess of equanimity, depriving me of the “resource” of negative emotion. There is actually a great deal of subtle negative emotion deeper down, but in theory, is full equanimity a problem?
Either way, I know I have an edge in that I’m still offended by Camp Bacon, this week's annual meeting of the Pork Royalty from around the country. It involves a Parade of the Bacons, workshops on the art and science of bacon, and readings of Pork Poetry. Daaaark. Admittedly, most animal violence is not this precious.
…………….
I’ve been turning over two questions this week.
First, I’ve been coming back to my sense of the consciousness, or soul, of a writer. Prose always carries such a strong sense of personality, but so—now—do tweets, status updates, IM and SMS. Even the words of very refined people are charged with intention, character, and more or less unconscious agendas. Because prose has personality, some spiritual books resonate while others, equally deep, do not.
A digital self is the sum of her online behaviors. But there is nothing one-dimensional about it. Blog and email prose are so enormously rich—every single stroke and word have consequence. I’m interested that some everyday writing can be spacious but not spacey, specific but not choppy, loving but not cloying, kind but not clingy, attentive without grasping.
To some degree these are matters of taste and self-regulation. Also, they reveal one’s relationship to information gathering—how much, how good, how often, how memorable.
But what really interests me is tone. Tone is the way that instinct, heart and intelligence coalesce in language. The way selves express and intermingle in the web.
Second, let's say you’re introducing someone to yoga for the first time. Yoga is an impossibly loaded word, thanks largely to the New York Times’s efforts to redefine it popularly as “anything that feels nice” and turn it in to an adjective. But that’s a topic for later.
What about Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga? What is the first descriptive sentence you would give it, to people who don’t particularly share your values, views, battles or agendas? To people who are, for whatever reason, just curious enough to show up and ask?
Some moments, waiting for a few right words to surface, letting it stay spontaneous, I just don't know where to begin.
Posted by (0v0)
Categories: astanga yoga
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Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is a like a one stop shop for your body.
It builds strength, flexibility, posture, patience, focus, determination. And it makes you high, but don’t tell anyone.
Posted by: Gregor · Jun 11, 02:44 PM · #
how about yoga is like a 3d journey through an imagined world of untold obstacles. held together one frame at a time.
Posted by: charusheela · Jun 11, 10:42 PM · #
“anything that feels nice”! i think i just did that : )
Posted by: wobbie · Jun 11, 11:38 PM · #
I like “moving meditation.”
Posted by: karen · Jun 12, 04:59 AM · #
Peonies are really sexual. I’m always very fascinated with the symbiotic relationship they have with ants. In the spring, I like looking at the ants munching away at buds, and within a week the peonies have transformed into huge, swollen flowers.
Re: First. Not what you are trying to get at – but I think you are a really great writer.
Re: Second: I’ve tried describing it, but I always feel like a hippy freak. David is way better at it. Maybe it comes with authorization. :)
Posted by: Stan · Jun 12, 08:15 AM · #
Well I just had my second intro class, and I’d like to offer a different version today.
AVY = WTF
Posted by: Gregor · Jun 12, 10:16 AM · #
OMG, I LOVE peonies. Love Love Love. Favorite flower by far. I’m so loving that you’re enjoying yourself in your new ‘home’.
Posted by: LI Ashtangini · Jun 12, 01:19 PM · #
yoga: great loops in time in which the organism participates bodily? a nice way to emancipate farts?
i found this about tone: “tone is what comes through a closed door when people are speaking out of earshot”— it’s from a website on robert frost (think what you may)— who may or may not have been a yogi— versification of the breath is known by the practioner and poet alike. unit, unite, unify. or.
or something.
shoving one’s face into the flower or even the idea of a flower: this does something remarkable to your prose, owl. inflects it with stamens and sugar.
Posted by: Sara · Jun 12, 03:34 PM · #
It is a loop, yes.
David calls it, a la Shinzen, a science of enlightenment! I like it. More. Good.
I might need to revive my Pissed Off Blogger tone to write about the relationship of the New York Times to yoga. It’s pure Kali Yuga idiocy.
On a break from call-in meditation retreat, but a few notes.
It was about 75 degrees when I woke up this morning at 5. Practice in the dark with the birds singing outside has been incredibly sweet.
I dreamed that I had a secret benefactor and that I was pursuing her in a narrative that felt very much like Pynchon’s novel V. But I had no idea what she looked like and she kept running away and refusing to receive messages. My brother had started a secret, avant-garde museum underground. The secret benefactor (she had a name in the dream, I think it was Claire James?) had funded it. I went to pay my exit-Visa at the airport in India, and there was a paper saying that Claire had already paid it. Somebody brought me an ancient document from the UM library—it was Claire’s dissertation on particle physics. She had thanked me elaborately in the acknowledgements. Then, someone started to tell me about the years Claire was the buyer at Zingerman’s Deli (up the hill from me here)—how she had introduced all the best oils, spices and teas of the world to Ann Arbor when she used to live here back in the 1980s. Later I chased her to the island of Malta, where she had worked as a medical doctor. This whole time, I was both insanely curious and sort of laughing at the overall situation.
Also, maybe every town has to have its own crazy old mystic living under a bridge talking deep wisdom in the guise of nonsense. We met Ann Arbor’s elf-troll yesterday, down at the river. It feels like I need to talk with him a few more times before I try to describe him. This first time, I walked away feeling hypnotized, suspecting I’d hallucinated the whole encounter.
Ok, back to sitting practice…
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 13, 10:02 AM · #
Are you really looking for words to describe Ashtanga to the uninitiated? I can’t think of one sentence, but I have 4:
Ashtanga is a physical regime that’s supposed to create heat that will cleanse the body. The heat’s there to rid one of the poison and hypnosis of Maya (illusion). Eventually, you get to Moksha (liberation), The beauty is that the practice gives you great muscles, so even if you don’t make it to Moksha, there’s value added.
Posted by: KNL · Jun 13, 04:31 PM · #
Internal heat. People keep mentioning that.
Joseph Dunham died on Saturday in Phnom Penh. He was there waiting for a new visa to get back home to Mysore. I’m sure there will be stories about Joseph’s life posted to ashtanga.com in coming weeks, but for now here’s something the erstwhile blog commenter mousebell (hi JCT:) ) posted today, from a long interview she did with him in Hamburg in 2008. Joseph was an incredibly generous, easygoing person with most excellent taste and the sweetest bearing. He called Gokulam Camp Mysore. Others called him its Mayor.
The first day I did this practice with Derek I loathed it with a passion. Couldn’t stand it. Second day I was too tired to think, and the third day I fell in love with it. Grabbed me so completely that I had a feeling this was going to blossom, once people became aware of it. It began happening when we started traveling and Guruji started getting out. Guruji and the practice are similar: if you talk about the Ashtanga practice before you do it, and then you actually do the practice, all the stuff that you heard before makes no sense. It’s experiential. You can’t talk about it or explain it. It’s like talking about strapping on a parachute and jumping out of a perfectly good airplane: you can talk about it all day but you haven’t got a clue until you’ve done it. Pattabhi Jois is the same – he’s experiential, and a beautiful one.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 14, 01:45 PM · #
P.S. The rest of this interview is reposted to my FB profile.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 14, 02:12 PM · #
Beautiful post! It has been too long since I’ve read your amazing words. *
The “problem” of full equanimity is one that my friends and I have been musing about quite a bit these days. And the NYT definition of yoga makes me laugh… as my practice has upturned a whole lot of muck and mud (i.e., stuff that feels decidely “un-good” in the moment) to arrive at my moments of equanimity.
jai!
Posted by: Kelly · Jun 15, 02:10 PM · #
Kelly. I was just thinking of you! Great to see you. Sounds like Seattle is amazing these days.
The NYT is always ultra-shallow when it attempts to put its finger on the pulse of something! Speaking of Seattle, I’m reminded of grunge gate, Megan Jasper’s coup at Sup Pop. Tom Frank’s Baffler article on that is what made him one of my favorite writers….
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 16, 05:57 AM · #
owl & co—-
this is probably irrelevant to the above post, but relevant to just about everything else…so, nevermind, it’s relevant to the above post! i just listened to the most….fur-bristling talk (podcast) on compassion by (the late) john daido loori… unfortunately, it’s not a dharma podcast from the beyond…but it takes you beyond, eventually….it’s not new news either, but his ferocity is worth the gamble.
sit through the first part (may i suggest cutting veggies, etc., unless you are a zen junkie?) on the rigmarole of zen ceremony til he nails it…..owl, i trust you will know how to link it if i give you this: WZEN.org, “entering the fray”—-
forgive me if i’ve rhapsodized beyond what the rest of you may experience if you listen…but that’s how i operate. in the great fray!
Posted by: Sara · Jun 17, 04:46 PM · #
Sara, is there a link?
Speaking of which, comments on psychotherapy but a younger and less refined Shinzen. What he says here resonates enough that I’d have pursued the teachings of this younger Shinzen, but it’s fascinating to note how much (perhaps more easily) I benefit from the more refined version of his teachings.
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 18, 07:14 AM · #
A quote from my favourite poem:
““Please come in, my self,
there’s no place in this house for two.
The doubled end of the thread is not what goes through the eye of the needle.
It’s a single-pointed, fined down, thread end,
not a big ego-beast with baggage.”
But how can a camel be thinned to a thread?
With the shears of practices, with doing things.
And with help from the one who brings
impossibilities to pass, who quiets willfulness,
who gives sight to one blind from birth.
every day that one does something.
Take that as your text.”
Of course, I’d never say that to somebody asking what Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is…
Posted by: Rebecca · Jun 19, 09:31 AM · #
You’re kidding me. This is good. I love that both that old Shinzen interview and the first part of this poem are explicit about the problems that come from cultivating some kind of witness consciousness. Tough to avoid, but ultimately just makes a sort of stunt-double self. If meditation is a stunt, that is. :)
Posted by: (0v0) · Jun 19, 03:11 PM · #