2.28.2005

i took a long long break from yoga when i started training for the AIDS ride. I have been going back lately and doing some on my own too, because once your body gets a taste of freedom within itself and its own joints, etc. once your spine and sacrum are unlocked and your chest unbound by tight muscles, your body she knows what you're depriving it of. When you have walked with loose hips slung low and felt the deep calm, you can't leave it forever. It's amazing to sit back and watch as my body does the postures that it once did daily. And after a few classes my strength was nearly back to where i left off. Except again, after all of the forward motion, all of the hiking and riding and especially the backpacking, after **using*** my body primally, in elemental form using it to do the things it was created to do, I am at even more of a space from which I can flow in yoga. I have attained grace in my movements. I walk through the woods in silence, wearing brown, and startle other hikers as they pass me. I blend in to the woods, and now in yoga, on my mat, my body bends and folds and opens and I sit back and watch, and it moves beautifully. I pay attention to form and style, and I move into a deeper inhabitation of my body than ever. Is this what it is to grow near 30? This settling in, this knowing of my physical form better?

I walked home, slowly, happy in the pouring down rain last night. I didn't scuttle. I didn't run and grip my chest and hunch over and screw up my eyes and curse the water coming down from the sky. I looked up at it. A drop or two landed in my eyeball, communication from the heavens. It felt good and I felt alive as I walked the city streets luxuriously. My body moved slowly, for the state of one's body, the look on one's face often becomes what one feels inside. And I felt grateful that I can feel the cool rain and smell the clean air and walk, stretching out my legs and opening my chest to the night rain.

I am getting close to my thirtieth birthday, and after almost thirty years in this body I am learning how it works and how to get it to work for me. I am leaving my awkward phase. Something has shifted. clicked and locked into place, and I am alive and an organic part of the earth, not struggling against its forces.

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2.19.2005

Mat has a great post up that says exactly how I feel. The internet, the perfect way to keep in touch, makes me feel guilty because I don't keep in touch.

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2.7.2005

I was going to make spaghetti and tofu meatballs for dinner, and I started to make the kitchen into the space where I wanted to be:

1. I adjusted the lighting. Overhead lights crush my spirit, and not enough light makes me want to lay down, and too much light overstimulates me. I have become nearly a pro at manipulating available lighting to make you notice how relaxing it is to your eyes and head and soul.

2. I cleaned off all of the counters so that I can have room to spread out and dance a little as I chop carrots and onions, and so that the smells of earth and vegetables can fill the air unadulterated.

3. I wanted to play my cooking music, music deeply pondered before playing it. Is this the mood that I am in? What kind of music am I feeling tonight?

Looking at my I-tunes library, I was dismayed. I have been listening to a lot of the same thing for a while now. In fact, I realized this night that I had become so despondent towards my music collection that I had even begun putting it on Party Shuffle all the time, never listening to an album all the way through in the order that the artist or artists meant for them to be heard, never immersing myself in it and rolling around in it.

I downloaded one of the the two new Bright Eyes albums, I'm Wide Awake It's Morning. I listened to it while I cooked, and it tore my heart in two.

Because I have heard a woman shrieking primordially as she fell to her knees, pulling at her clothes when we told her that there is no more medicine that we can give her son. I have walked places in Thailand that were the most peaceful I have ever been on this planet that are now scenes from an Armageddon dream of nuclear bombs or meteor strikes. I have played with children there who may no longer live. I have trod upon holy ground here in this country that is everyday more and more threatened by developers' wallets and the president's friends. Trees that have held me have fallen down.

When I heard the album I knew that someone has turned that scream of the mother whose arms hold a dead nine year old into music. And that now when I am haunted by that sound as I often am in dark and quiet spaces of the night or while being elbowed on a bus full of defeated people, dead to life and trudging through their days, I hear Conor Oberst making the sounds that I want to make. The only type of sounds that I think will someday exorcise me of the demons of despair that I breathed in that day in the hospital as I touched the back of the mother, animal in her desperation to not hear our words as we whispered "I'm sorry". Because after hearing that sound, how can those demons not implant themselves in your very soul? Conor's voice shakes with raw anger and sadness, and he seems to lose control of it frequently as it becomes more and more intense and hits a peak of screaming where he sounds as though he has probably lost any idea of where he is. He cries and shrieks into the microphone, speaking volumes without using any words.

Emmylou Harris joins him in some of the songs, an older soul, her voice holding him in her arms, understanding him, helping him make the beautiful songs that make it easier him deal with living in this world. Her voice, sounding like the Yellow Bird that is a recurring theme in the album, and his join to make me lift my arms as I walk down the street in the sun, headphones on and turned up loud. Emmylou, full of wisdom and calm, balances Conor's songs out to perfection, genius.

I have never listened to any album this intensely. I have never been able to play an album on repeat. But now I can listen to nothing else. And every time I hear it, the scream of the newly childless woman crumpled in a pile at my feet floats up a little from deep in the pit of my stomach where it lives, and tiny pieces of it lighten and separate from the rest of it and float out of my body and into the air.

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2.4.2005

This is what I'm doing this summer :

"The John Muir Trail passes through what many backpackers say is the finest mountain scenery in the United States. This is a land of 13,000-foot and 14,000-foot peaks, of lakes in the thousands, and of canyons and granite cliffs. It's also a land blessed with the mildest, sunniest climate of any major mountain range in the world.

The John Muir Trail is 211 miles long and runs (mostly in conjunction with the PCT) from Yosemite Valley to Mt Whitney, in California.


Because the John Muir Trail (JMT) trail ends (assuming you're doing a north to south thru-hike) at the top of the highest point in the lower 48, even after "completing" the trail you still have to hike another 11 miles and 6000 ft. down to Whitney Portal, the southern trail head.



The JMT runs through 3 National Parks: Yosemite (Official NPS Page), Kings Canyon and Sequoia (Official NPS Page). When not within a National Park, it runs through Forest Service (Official Inyo National Forest Page) land, including the John Muir and Ansel Adams Wilderness areas. The trail also passes through the Devils Postpile National Monument near Red's meadow."

--from Pacific Crest Trail Association's website


 

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a Salon quote of the day:

"I'm disappointed that Iraq hasn't turned out better. And that we weren't able to move forward more meaningfully in the Middle East peace process... The biggest regret is that we didn't stop 9/11. And then in the wake of 9/11, instead of redoubling what is our traditional export of hope and optimism we exported our fear and our anger. And presented a very intense and angry face to the world. I regret that a lot."

-- Departing Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage on the disappointments of the first Bush term.

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