Lizkdc Dislocation

Toast and Yoga

This yoga instructor at Mike's Fitness in JP gave the following lecture.  

Happy New Year! Some of you, he said, have been complaining to the front desk. You complain that there are too many people and the mats are too close together. You complain that some people come late and their entry disrupts the class. You complain that I, HERALDO, talk too much!

* Heraldo says his name in capital letters. Even his Facebook name is in CAPS.

Well. Listen. Yoga is not only the pose, you see. Yoga is the practice. Yoga is the mindfulness, it is the what is in your heart. If you are thinking how mad you are at the person who comes in late, you are losing whatever it is you could be getting from the pose, from the right now.

In Japan, in Zen, they have a saying: If you are so upset when your toast burns, what will happen when your house catches fire?

Open your heart! Love the person next to you! If you step on their mat, that is so wonderful, because it is an an opportunity to look them in the eyes and connect to this person. If you touch them, you share the energy and have twice as much!

If you do not like these things, if you want me to shut up and stop talking, if your practice stops with the pose, this maybe is not the class for you! 

I definitely decided that this was the class for me.

And all week I drove around thinking about my life's burnt toast.

 

Spies and Sense Memory

On New Year's Eve,  mom and I went out to Regal Beagle in Brookline and had salt cod cakes and some sort of warm whiskey and lemon concoction called  a "Wisecracker" and then went to see Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy at the Coolidge Corner Cinema.

 This is the film version of the John Le Carre novel, filmed long ago as a famous miniseries starring Alec Guinness as a depressed and unwillingly retired British intelligence agent named George Smiley. The old version aired on the BBC in 1979 and in the US on Masterpiece Theater, and my father and I watched it together on Sunday nights on our aged TV set with the bent rabbit ears. 

 I was about fourteen and Dad was about fifty, when we watched together. I went by day to a big, shabby city school to be smart and miserable, and he went by day in his crumpled raincoat and wide '70s tie to a job in state government in a faceless downtown Boston office block. A job that left him tired, I think, and represented a disappointment of his younger-day dreams, but he stuck to it for his family's sake, and he cheerfully attended all us kids' band concerts, art shows, football games, Scout dinners and such, and went to Mass and supported the doings of his and my mom's vast and complex families.

 But when he needed to get away, he read voraciously, histories of Renaissance Europe or the American Civil War or the great World Wars that had shaped his own family's lives, and in fiction, Saul Bellow's sad-sack, wise-cracking antiheroes, and Mario Puzo's salty Mafioso revenge cycles and George V. Higgins' tragi-comic Boston noir, and John Le Carre, too.

New Year's Resolutions I Will Definitely Keep

I will practice insight meditations in which I wish lovingkindness to the world and even my most dire opponents and long-standing foes, or if I cannot get the dial up to lovingkindness, I will strive to send out vibes of lessenedanimosity.

This will be the year I stop over-thinking things. Unless...!!!

I will stop indulging in futile wishes, like unrealistic dreams of wealth, or for a new Joss Whedon series that succeeds on television.

I will take more bold and empathetic photos of the vivid human beings and complex urban spaces around me, and fewer pictures of things in my yard.

I am going to make peace with having bought an Android phone.

When I hang up the bird feeder in the yard, I will stop worrying that I am making the squirrels fat.

I will awaken early for sunrise meditation more.  I will not spend my dawn meditation time thinking about dinner which is twelve hours away.

I will consume more kale and less beer, although if someone wants to create a Kale Beer, I am okay with that.

I will spend more time on crafting insightful blog posts, and less time with my laptop balanced on my tummy laughing at the Honey Badger and guys dancing on YouTube and stuff (BTW, I did definitely not watch either of those again just now).

I promise to be extremely authentic and truthful in what I report about myself on social media, unless it makes me look bad.

Stay tuned.