Some days it's just good to be alive

Today I felt something I haven't felt for a long time. Maybe it's because I saw the changing colors of the tree leaves, maybe the lack of oppressive humidity in the air and glorious sunshine, but as I tooled around the highways in Columbus listening to my mix CDs I couldn't help but thinking it was great to be young (relatively) and alive in America. My husband and I have been having a love/hate relationship with our country ever since he got back from a recent work trip in France/Switzerland. I've always dreamt of living over seas, or pretty much any place but the midwest. Since he's returned, the sense of urgency to get the heck out of the heartland has become more and more pressing; not only would it seemingly improve our quality of life, but also my health, considering that when I tell doctors that weather fronts trigger my migraine headaches, they always say that I should move from Ohio.

But today that urgency to flee was nowhere in my heart as Cat Stevens sang of lost love and John Lennon crooned to Yoko and I drove my little sports car from the perkily manicured lawns of houses that bordered the country club where I'd given a private yoga lesson to a gratefully jet-lagged student who'd just flown back from German. Normally I might have judged her for being overpriviledged and wondered which gas guzzling SUV out in the parking lot was hers. But she was a student and had come to me to ask me graciously to help her work out her tight hips and hamstrings. I had to tell her to stop apologizing every time I corrected her. "There's no apologizing in yoga." I said.

As I drove home, buoyed by my love for teaching and the brilliant blue sky and the temperate air and mellow music, I wasn't bothered as I normally was by suburban surfaces turning to industrial and post-industrial wasteland through more suburbs toward the northern semi-decrepit not quite suburban neighborhood where I live. It was ok that it wasn't some other place, but this place, with the front step that was crumbling so badly that I kept telling my husband that it was hazardous for older people and the slightly handicapped and old windows and manner of things that needed cleaning and painting and the yard that was mostly weeds. I was happy that I could let the dogs out to lie in a patch of sun in the middle of the yard that was otherwise a shady ravine. I opened all the curtains and windows that I had been keeping shut because my ragweed allergy had kicked in this year and let the breeze waft as pleasantly as the thoughts in my brain through the house.

So this, I realized, is what Tim Miller means when he speak of equanimity. We don't live in a perfect world, I had told a friend of mine just the night before. We don't have to run around like self-important entitled ego-maniacs grasping for pleasure at every moment, nor do we have to ruminate on the failures of our: society, country, government, president, personal situation, mental status either. We can just be in the world, not of it. But it sure doesn't hurt when it's a beautiful early autumn day and life, like the midafternoon breeze is feeling particularly soft and easy.

A Calling

So I had been planning a trip to Mysore, India for at least a year for January through March of 2011. Through a strange series of events my plan, or at least my passion for my plan slowly eroded, at least for that time frame. The timing felt off. What I needed was an American fix: quicker and including my husband. A vacation, that included yoga, America and the ocean. My husband, having just returned from Europe was also in a funk and I was determined that we find our love of our country again - if not the state in which we are currently living. I told him we shall "go West young man" and so my dream of visiting my teacher Tim Miller in Encinitas, CA was born.

It felt like a true calling. A road trip to find the "Great American Dream" a la Jack Kerouac or Hunter S. Thompson minus the drugs and the booze and the craziness. I could hear the Pacific, too cold in which to swim, but so beautiful crashing against the shores. I could hear Tim's distinctive count of "1,..2,...3..4..5, nawa inhale, dasha exhale, ekadasha pick it up...." I had questioned him too much the last time I had seen him, had too many doubts about going to India before I saw him again. In my soul I know that he is my guru.

It's a classic American solution to a classic American problem: the urge to wander, a dissatisfaction with where we are now and a profound sense that out West lies something greater and perhaps as we reach our late thirties and look to our forties we don't remember the simple solution anymore. The road trip west to find our guru. Traveling across the Mississippi, across the Rockies or the Ozarks, across the desert of infinite probabilities and finite possibilities, until we reach the Pacific. Find our peace. Follow the highway of our bliss until the endless miles force our souls to reveal all of our inner truths. And in the desert we wander, until we hear the voice of our inner guru calling us home. Wherever that may be.

Insomnia

You keep me awake
With your lack of love
With promises made years ago
Why didn't I listen then?
I was youthful and had no remorse
But it's winter now, you say,
And my turn to be cruel.
Remember my humor.
This way to the gallows
My dear.

I beg: I'm not begging
But please show some mercy
I remember and regret those
Twisted, tormented memories
I won't forget again
If you'll forgive that unforgivable
Sin. I did not show you
Respect. What does that mean?
That you are free now to torture
Me at will? Make all my efforts
Futile, my womb barren?
I shall not grow old.

Immortality is not a game that
One should chance lightly. High
Stakes that one. Given the time,
Night and the inclination: a
Desire to punish you for your
Cruel nature if not
Intentions. A person just might
Find all of the keys and
All of the pieces
And put the puzzle together
Thus ending the story.

No more recess, no more books
No more faces. Death becomes her.
Still like the night, though not
Her sleep. The craving is more
than one should have to bare.
Such a beautiful flower, it put
me in all tomorrow's parties
Before I even landed in
Today.