Yoga

So, If yoga means union, why has it become a way for people to congratulate themselves on how fabulous they are?  Not everyone, of course, put down the pitchforks and torches, but way too much promo on the topic is focused on results impacting attractiveness.  Why is the heart of the practice in fine print?  Oh, and by the way, you will feel more connected to your life?
Today I did sanding the furniture yoga, cleaning the kitchen yoga, picking burrs out of the cat's fur yoga and having popcorn and a movie yoga.  As soon as I finish posting, I'll be having bicycle yoga, but right now, I'm wondering about why all the things we can do and are doing with our lives do not rise to the level of yoga so that we are forced to go to a yoga class or training.  Seems to me that unity is always available, and it's free.
A little act of attention to where I am,  how I am moving through this molecular cloud I have specialized organs to decipher [a bit…] remembering to breathe, noticing how I get triggered to fly away, and then, coming in for a landing once more.
Why is this not yoga?

Gyno Sapiens on Wheels

In lieu of riding bikes with other people [scheduling and route issues....] I ride alone, happily, slowly, lots of stops to enjoy the non-human wildlife and the occasional snack.  To talk about bike riding, to get information on tools, procedures, etc, I turn to a Facebook Page called The Slow Bicycle Movement.  It is a closed group, I guess they were getting too many ads, and it changes over time from talking about afternoon rides of a meditative nature to people doing long term touring in fabulous places, which they are gracious enough to share stories and pictures of, advise for newcomers, some deeply nerdy conversations for those who are capable and general cheering on and bonhomie.
Every now and then, however, the topic of Babes on Bikes comes up, photos of scantily clad young women, all impossibly pretty, advertising something that doesn't remind me of bike riding, or recreation that I care about.  For every 50 of these posts, there's a photo of a guy on a bike dressed strangely, but no beef cookie shots that I remember.  [ I think I'd remember..... ]
I know I have always been a fully clothed type person, being a Yankee and wanting to not freeze to death or give pints of blood to the flies, but I'm sure I could come up with a few names of guys who would attest that I am not a "prude".  [And some who wouldn't]  I start with this defense, because it seems to be the first place some men want to go with this.  The next place is that they defend it as an aesthetic image.  The third dodge is that they are misunderstood, that they are the nice ones, and that we Gyno-Americans [Or Gyno-Euros] are too sensitive, don't consider cat calls, whistles, pinches or threats a compliment or we are humorless and exaggerating.
In the time of political correctness, it is still ok to mask your intolerance with a bit of snark, superiority and denial.
If we don't start waking up, like, yesterday, as a species, we are done.
As to this particular topic, I am using the rest of my conscious existence to stand up for the obvious.  Women, we need to insist on our right to live safely, to make choices about who gets to stay in our lives, and who has to stay out, to be paid the same wage for the same work, to be entitled to equal protection under the law, and ffs to be able to ride a bicycle without it being an invitation to assault.

The G word.

A couple of years ago a friend of mine was murdered by a stranger for no apparent reason.  She was sitting in her car with a friend whom she was on helping find a place to make a new home in the Southwest.  They were just south of Sedona.
I was too furious to attend her memorial.
She was a happy person, a positive and loving person, and most of her friends were very much glass 1/2 full types, always looking on the bright side, and I knew it would be a celebration I couldn't participate in, bring anything to or derive any comfort from.
That may not have been true, but it felt true.
All I needed to trigger my resistance was hearing of a comment a dear friend and music partner of hers said about her probably being happy to be free of her body and to dance in the light.
I thought of her children and her grandchildren losing a one-of-a-kind grandmother and the community losing a voice and a witness.  I could not square the two ideas, though I really felt, later, remembering her, that wherever she was she didn't harbor regret or rancor.
It is rare to know someone  who is interested in seeing through the hazy smear of the masks people wear, and I miss that about her.
By now I see how little I have noticed of the essence of anything, that life moves too fast to understand more than a surface, a representation or symbol of a narcissistic construct.
I regret this.
I regret that once someone has died, the chance to follow a thread any further is snipped.  I regret how much protection I still seek from feeling.

A friend of my daughter's was found in a pool recently, there's not much being said about it in the news.  First it was being treated as a suspicious death, then the paper announced it was being called a suicide.  I'm not alone in the opinion that it was a suspicious suicide.
Here it is again, though - the idea of a Deity [or not] and why a young woman who has been working hard to straighten out her life, and had made great strides against huge odds is a footnote in the tsunami of global and local bad news.
A friend of mine said " I guarantee you that if it was [insert name of person of income and influence here...] daughter who was found, the cops would be all over it and it would be on the news."
I wish I did not believe this, but I do.
When Carol was murdered, I lost whatever shreds of religion I might have still had hanging around, and I realized how much the white noise of mainstream Christianity had seeped into my belief system, even though I knew it was bullshit. [All Christians freak out here.]
I see that there are some rules that some men concocted to sooth the people they wanted to control, to get their money and their cooperation.  Nice touch to call it the word of God.  Hard to argue with an invisible being, [invisible and non-existent, looking rather a lot alike].  
The Christian Scientists speak of Father-Mother-God, and frame it as a principle of Divine Love, and that is about as close as it gets for me, though I have felt a gag response whenever I have tried to read Mrs. Eddy's work.   Maybe there's some set of dynamics, laws of physics - rules we will never be able to apprehend with our brains which are so clearly designed for things that are simpler, like getting needs met according to Maslow's order of importance.
These days, not too many people seem to get much further than forming communities of friends, and I'm barely up to that myself.
The ideas of intervention, intercession, substitution, or sacrifice make less sense to me than ever.  The questions are the same, the answers are the same, and both are itchy and unsatisfying.  One doesn't have to go very far to see how bad things are for people in huge numbers, everywhere in the world.  But there has to be some real good news, and I don't mean Jesus.
Grief is a wound that changes people. Grief is the Stygian sisters dancing through our lives until the thread is broken.  Whatever is left is a story we tell ourselves.

Sheena

Well,  my neighbor was found, unharmed in the woods near the lake, sometime before midnight, a happy end to a scary drama.
While this was going on a young woman, a mother of a toddler was drowning in a pool in another part of the state.  She was in our house frequently in middle school and high school, a sweet and talented girl, dear friend of my daughter's.
I received a bit of misspelled hate mail for my last post,  and wonder what  is wrong with people as I see the amount of evil minded remarks made on the news website about the unfortunate death of valuable young woman.
It goes beyond schadenfreude, this desire to make things worse, it doesn't really matter that these trogs don't know what happened, it matters that the world is so full of the readiness to be entertained by tragedy.
May all Beings find Peace, May all Beings attain Liberation, May all Beings know truth.

Horse Fly

After a good rest up, and general regaining of vitality, I decided to take a nap today, which lasted until mid afternoon and only stopped because the temperature in the ma'am cave had risen to close to 90.  Sluggishly I crawled to the car where my bike was waiting and drove to my favorite local path to get at least some blood moving and I found that moving blood is just what horseflies like best.
I have said at other times that one cannot outrun a chicken, and on a bike, at least the pace I go at, a horsefly does a good job at keeping up.  All the same, I was treated to the sight of a snapping turtle [who I'm pretty sure is older than I am] dozing in the sun on a big rock in the middle of the river.  It was worth stopping and imagining what it might be like to be a turtle who has seen that river go from pretty clean to flammable, colorful and nearly dead to swimmable, and possibly, drinkable in a pinch.  Shortly after that a young beaver went by a few feet away, conscientiousness etched on his features.  He had the focus of many cyclists who pass me dressed in lycra, unsmiling, intent.
It wasn't a long ride, only an hour, but virtue, even in small doses is of value.
I came home to helicopters, guys in helmets on ATV's riding up and down the road, fire & rescue trucks, Fish & Game and a few police cruisers.  Eventually, they stopped at my house and it seems that one of my neighbors had wandered off.
In the 1700's King George III gave a big chunk of rocky, non-arable useless swamp land with a small mountain and a couple of hills surrounding a nice lake to the Weston family.  I could probably go and look up in Hancock History who the first Weston was to come here and try to make a life out of this difficult patch of NH, but that will have to wait for another time.  The Weston we know of was Ephraim, and there are numerous local stories about him, he was a hard working sheep farmer and a character.  His descendants still have sheep, still have land, though quite a lot less of it, and you can spot them in a crowd.  I went to school with and grew up with some and they are distinctive.  Some of the women beauties, the men all interesting.  Bill Weston, the remaining patriarch has dementia, but lives at home and wandered off today.  Told his daughter he was going for a walk.  He was seen by a member of my household around 11 AM and now there is a task force out hunting for him.
I hope he is found in good condition, I hope he is still able to live as he has lived, this is a selfish hope, I know, because I put myself in his place and imagine an old man, wandering out into woods he knows as well as his own home, I hope he finds his way to a place that is safe and that the guardians of this place are with him, and the horse flies are not.

how much is too much

A series of events, beginning with an uncooperative immune system.
 If I had health insurance, I could pin it down, but let's just say that stress, lack of sleep [like, none] anxiety and getting called out on things about myself that are annoying, but let's face it, at this point in life aren't going to change and being way out of my element brought on a cluster of health reactions that needed to be brought back to NH, so here I am.  Being gone for a week, I learned a few things.  I am not a traveler.  I will never attempt another lengthy road trip, and I won't stay away from my house for longer than 3 days.  The drive back was hard, but the only thing outside me that fought the process was rain, my car was great, nobody I met on the road was weird, the traffic was light and my angels were with me.
Well, this blog isn't called Dharma Queen, it's called Dharma Bitch, and that's no accident.
I am home, bathed and in bed, there is one less chicken in my yard, and I suspect it is the friendly one, being friends with the interior of some predator, I guess.  There are still a few peonies, and I will enjoy them.
At 20 you believe there will always be another opportunity to catch something you missed, but at 60 you face up to the limitations presented by time, by energy, by health and by income.  Somehow, I didn't mind sleeping curled up in the front seat of a tiny car then as I do now.  Of course, the times I rode across the country [many] when I was young, I was usually stoned out of my tree.  Barreling across Texas with a buzz on was more like tripping than traveling.  I come to think that life isn't meant to be only firsts strung out endlessly to the horizon.  There are lasts.  It might be good to notice things that are and file them under both definitions.

Sleepless in Chicago

In spite of the title, this is not a post about romance, missed or encountered, I really haven't been able to sleep.  I figure sooner or later I will, probably about 2 hours after I have gotten on the road again, I'll have to pull over and sleep in a rest area, why that would feel restful to me, I have never quite understood.
There are thunderstorms here and warnings of  tornadoes across the route I had planned to take, so I'm waiting until Monday to head out.
In the meantime, In the 'now",  Chicago continues to be a pleasant place to be.  I'm not sure how pleasant it would be if I weren't in benevolent and entertaining company, and when people say "Stay as long as you like" it's a temptation  to settle in.
There are moments when I am in touch with the dreamlike quality of life; how it is possible to be anchored to some idea and stepping away from it loosens its grip.  This is probably only true when things are going well.  I can see how this tenuous experience of floatiness could easily turn back into homesickness or panic, but I really want to unravel the garments I have been wearing for so long before I go back.  I have always got the fantasy running of tripping over some other life, the life I missed, the life I was supposed to live and didn't know about it.  My home in NH is embedded in me, I have spent so much time there, so much time alone, so much time on the property, not even going out except for supplies, my main contact with the outside world being Facebook, that being away from it has a naked quality.  I know the place is being lived in and that is good, I worry about my cat, and that's probably needless.  Lack of sleep bring up all the weaknesses in my thinking from the basement where I try to ignore them most of the time.  As an astrologer, I know that Mars going through the 12th house stirs up the unconscious in a ruthless and energetic way;  I am feeling it.
The simplicity of what one can carry on a trip puts me in touch with getting things done that I would not be getting around to at home.  I brought with me an old jacket and some bits of silk that I have been meaning to combine, and being here for a week, I got it done, using borrowed needle & thread.  Here's how it came out.

I had forgotten that I enjoyed this kind of project in my quest for order, more technology [sergers] and either less practical things [painting] or more routine [doing the dump runs & vacuuming].

A Day as a Tourist

The nice part about bringing my bike with me is that I don't feel like a tourist.  It also helps that I have been here before and am staying with friends.  I am grateful for that, I would never had gotten to know Chicago even a little without that connection.
I've been hearing about Liz working with clay for a few years now, but she never has shared pictures.  Being here, I'm getting to see what she's been doing, and like too many women who have some real stuff coming out of them, she doesn't see how good it is.  Here's a photo of the bowl I wheedled out of her.

Still not getting enough sleep to recover, so I'm going to stick around Chicago for another day or so, I need to get a full night's sleep.  I'm hoping that a 14 mile bike ride today along the lake will help with that.  It's not a ride you can dream away on,  there are too many people standing around on the bike path, unattended children ( who appear to possibly be in the early stages of being put up for adoption ) hookers looking for trade, tourists and people on bikes who are clearly training for something all vie for space with pedestrian traffic and more runners than I would have guessed.
I know I have been living in NH, and many people are glued to their personal screens there, but there was something unsettling about seeing how many were plugged in to something, or were staring at their iPhones, oblivious to anything going on around them.  Why be outside at all?  Why not have a video of the lake going while working out at a gym?  Certainly not everyone was checked out and those who were not seemed particularly alive.  Is not living in the present like drowning in an inch of water?

It was worth it to visit the Bean, and see what other imaginative projects are going on downtown.  We were trying to figure out what all these people were doing at what looked like a spin class, music blaring, people sitting on spin cycles, not moving, or moving occasionally.  Crowds taking pictures of their reflections in the Cloud Gate [The Bean…] were a sharp contrast to the first time I saw this place the week Obama was elected.  The weather was not so cooperative, and it was easy to get close to the sculpture.  It also was not coated with fingerprints from the ground to as far up as people could reach standing on each other's shoulders.  Public sculpture with the power to excite.  What a concept.




Chicago is huge, and yet manages to feel like a town.  People are relaxed and unguarded, milling around as though they have plenty of time, helpful and free of suspicion when asked questions which one might expect to be ignored in Boston.  This photo is of a pavilion that has chess boards embedded in the concrete.  Most of them were in use.

A view of the city from the bike path.  

CST

The night before I have to do anything, I wake up a lot.  This was followed by fine tuning the astrological auspices of a trip.  Yes, I know that Mercury is Retrograde, but this is a trip I have been trying to take for years, and have gotten part way out several times, so I figure it falls within the area of repeating something, doing something over and returning to an unfinished idea.  Anyhow, I wanted to put happy Leo on the Ascendant instead of mopey Cancer, so I asked my friend from Chicago to put off leaving first thing to mid morning.
I left my house at 10:13 am, but by the time I had picked her up, done a few last minute errands, we got going out of the area entirely at noon.  Including stopping for picnics, road construction, sleeping sitting up for a couple of hours before dawn and touring every highway rest area along the way, we made it to Chicago in well under 24 hours.  I only did about 5 hours of the driving, but I did about 4 hours of the sleeping, and 8 or so of the talking.
Coming up to Buffalo we encountered a dramatic storm, the sky changing her mind every few minutes.  From the West, we were treated to a peach and golden layering that made me wish I had packed desert instead of entirely sensible food, and to the East an angry, boiling bubble bath in Payne's grey and viridian.
I think I have burned through the adrenaline, and am grateful to have a peaceful place to sleep for a couple of nights among friends.
Today after long naps, We rode down to the Lakeshore and enjoyed the sight of happy people fishing, ambitious people hustling, children oblivious to the kind of world this can be and some glorious turquoise water.  I noticed a feeling.  What was that.  Oh.  I felt cheerful.
It seems good to notice the feelings of peace and contentment when they arise precious amid change and uncertainty, they leave an aftertaste of appreciation that helps with the occasional anxieties that share space with them.  Probably less watching the news helps, too.
The convergence of events, people needing a place to be, and me needing a nudge to get moving have gotten me this far.  I'm leaving the door ajar for what keeps me going, not certain what that is yet, but maybe I'll get a clue along the way.

Sundowning Practice

As I settle in for the night in a bed I constructed out of fir 4x4's and a discarded snowboard, the perfume of the roses floating up to my room in the trees, an owl calling, the stars twinkling and the bills paid, it gets harder to go and do what I plan to do.
I have been pining for the sight of the West since I was there last.  It has been a long time.  Decades.  I keep trying to carve out a moment between thinking other people need me, or that I don't dare leave, or I can't drive because my knee hurts, or I don't have any money or my arms are too heavy.  Time does what it does, and the mirror lets you know that it has and now I really have to either go do this or stop fantasizing about it.
In a few hours, I will be meeting up with a friend and driving with her to Chicago where we will eat Chicago-ey things and have a bike ride on the lake, I will see her family who have all become people by now and rest up for the next thing.  Getting to the Mississippi is nothing short of a pain in the ass.  Starting out is ok, Vermont is pretty, but eventually you are spending eternity on the New York Thruway.
By Utica, one begins to question motives.  By Canandaigua, sanity is in doubt.  Knowing my friend has often made the drive in 17 hours is encouraging.  I have never been able to make it in less than 24.
It's helpful to bear in mind that Niagara Falls is on the way, or could be if we decide to go through  Canada.  I have been advised not to sing the Canadian national anthem at the border unless I want to be searched.  Any inside information on this would be gratefully received.
There really are no more excuses.  Last winter, I think many will agree with me was the limit.  I know there are a few of you who were as excited about the snow as a Lab with a stick, but I feel safe stating that you were the exception.
My daughter & her family have had to flee a mold and lead infested rental, so I have house sitters.  They aren't in a particular hurry to do anything beyond catching their breath and making a new plan, so I have some time.
Going to pretend to sleep now so that I can get an early start.
I would like to make the promise of a collection of amusing vignettes when rolling, but you will be the judge of that, I just need to hear myself talk.