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Yogic Aphrodite/action
During a conversation with my good friend Kat, who often calls me Aphrodite, she pointed out that the Greek goddess in her original configuration is pretty neurotic and therefore not befitting my intentions for either my art or my life.
Playfully having chosen Aphrodite as my email name and, more importantly, writing about her in my work, I saw that her capriciousness, vanity, and ill temper, her neurotic tendencies, clog the intention of my project, which is to advocate for beauty, especially in the forms of creativity, love, and eros. Also, Aphrodite never grows older, and I do! Lightheartedly, Kat addressed me as “Yogic Aphrodite,” and I thank her for her humor and insight. Yogic Aphrodite is a more complex, useful, and satisfying model than is the sometimes spleenful ancient goddess. Read more
- July 29, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, Bookshelf, art, and media, My work
- Comments 0
Belly
I saddened when I read Eve Ensler’s The Good Body, published in 2004, because it is exemplary of women’s self-hatred. Unlike lots of women, I found The Vagina Monologues, the play by Ensler through which she became famous and which was first performed in 1996, disappointing for the same reason–the clearly stated and unremitting repugnance that women feel for their bodies. Read more
- July 28, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Bookshelf, art, and media
- Comments 3
A jaguar appears on the patio
We walk together down a mountain
We take off our shoes to touch the ground barefoot.
Key in the door, unlocking home
We boil water, fry eggs, drink tea, and share a few words.
A jaguar appears on the patio and asks for meat, milk, and honey,
Not a pound of flesh, not skim, not NutraSweet,
Only the real thing, which is all we have to give.
- July 25, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
- Comments 0
New
“What’s new?” is a common greeting in America. The next time someone asks me, I think I’ll say, “I’m taking a short trip to Antares and I have 4 new lovers.”
Standard alternatives to “What’s new?” are “How are you?” “How’s it going?” and “What’s up?” Why use “What’s new?” What does it communicate? Not that people think about the meaning of their greeting before choosing one, but news and newness are overarching values and tropes within the celebrity and consumerist culture that the world calls American. Read more
Practical fairy tales: Moving swift as Mercury
One morning after she rose as a phoenix, the beautiful princess heard a song in her head, “Nowhere Man.” She knew that the man was Mr. Carrot. She closed her eyes and saw him in his faraway land. He was moving at an earthbound pace and his body had become boxier than when she knew it very personally, and within that box of chest through ribs a hardness had established itself, a hardness with very little sparkle.
“Making all his nowhere plans for nobody,” the Beatles sang inside her head. The beautiful princess cried, and she didn’t analyze why. She was just too tired, of inflating and deflating people, of believing in a fortunate or an adverse condition, a condition contingent to peace of mind.
A someone somewhere, a nobody nowhere. Mr. Carrot, he had been an entrancing place, rather like a magic forest through which she had passed.
Let him be wherever he is, she thought, and I will be here, moving swift as Mercury.”
Note: Mercury was the ancient Roman god of communication, the messenger god.
- July 20, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
- Comments 1
I AM desire
Steady, easy, and passionate–intensely centered–in desire, I let myself relax into it. That relaxation fits with ideas that I’ve read in Yoga Spandakarika: The Sacred Texts at the Origins of Tantra. Desire is at the heart of tantra, and the commentary by Daniel Odier, who both studies and practices tantra, illustrates that being in desire is as simple as soft breathing.
Desire is benign, but people think otherwise. Read more
- July 17, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 3
My lover is the obstacle and the remover of obstacles
My lover is the obstacle and the remover of obstacles.
He gives me a kiss and a scepter.
Understand, his lips do not touch my body. The kiss is given as valentines are.
What sounds like obstacle?
Icicle
Ventricle
Manacle
Miracle
- July 12, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
- Comments 0
Practical fairy tales: Residue, doo do doo
Once upon too many times a beautiful princess noticed that Mr. Carrot reappeared. She felt compelled to contact him. Or he called and emailed. Or in a dream they were making love and in a nightmare he was stuck in her lungs like acrid smoke and she woke up coughing.
The beautiful princess told her princess sisters, who knew her history with Mr. Carrot, about a recent reappearance, and they railed at him. “Asshole.” “Shithead.” “What a fucking jerk!” At another time, perhaps in another life, their anger and cursing would have provoked the beautiful princess’s own anger. Now, as she heard more than one of her princess friends suggest, “Turn that cad into a cadaver,” the beautiful princess felt amused by this ghost of good and bad times past.
Mr. Carrot was busy, overworked, and stressed. He had told that to the beautiful princess, and he was talky talky talky about his own obsessions, ocupado, señoritas, so self-absorbed that the beautiful princess’s words he heard only as worship of himself.
She could have thought that Mr. Carrot was habitually impervious to happiness, but pondering him was pointless for the beautiful princess and it harmed her. His ghost was a disturbance of the peace.
Pondering Mr. Carrot was projection. He was a residue. Residue arises from memory. The beautiful princess benefited from contrasting residue with reality.
The ghost combusted and the beautiful phoenix princess ascended, sporting the gold leather evening bag, an extra lift, that she inherited from her mother.
The ghost evaporated and the princess in her comfy tennis shoes pressed the pulse at her wrist then kissed it.
Residue dissolved when she sang “doo do doo,” like Lou Reed in “Take a Walk on the Wild Side.”
The beautiful princess heard herself singing, solo and in harmonies with myriad princesses. A new Hallelujah Chorus.
The beautiful princess’s friends gave up their railing and she and they took to wild-side walking, known to the wise as crystal-clear desiring. Limitless desire fed them love, and now they listened to handsome princes who bore its fruit, not from any labor but from love itself.
- July 8, 2010
- Filed under: Love, Men and women
- Comments 1
A time defined by honey
I return home from visiting friends and family who I love and who love me. I am sated from conversation and food. Travel has sapped my energy.
For close to 20 years I’ve traveled a lot, for work and pleasure, in the United States and internationally. I travel easily and come home full. Now, for a while, home is the only place to be.
At home it is hotter than 7 suns.
I entertain my cool head.
A tow truck driver verbally displays to me, who sits in the passenger seat of his vehicle, a passion for guns. He mentions his high IQ. Then karma. I say, at the end of our short trip to a tire shop, “It was fun talking with you.”
In a waiting room 2 workers in residences for the old and the infirm talk of low income, comparative shopping for an axle fluid change, and administrators who they like and dislike.
A fat woman with the energy and skin tone of health teases herself about her love of food.
Unwanted immigrants and other citizens wait for rain as the clouds build every afternoon.
I soften like the girl I was, I am, in my mother’s arms.
I am quiet like the sky as the rains get ready to test the strength of rooftops.
Sacred tantric texts reveal what every yogi knows: mind rules the world, mind bends it, mind in its ordinary state is clear, and empty of concoctions, intellectual or fantastical (which can partake of each other). Yogis may read tantric texts. They may be scholars of Buddhism, Taoism, or embodiment. They may theorize and philosophize, they may write books about the history of yoga. None of that matters. Practice does.
People try to hold their world in place, to keep it from changing so that it can stay what it is, which nothing can. The rain does not hold back–a drop over there on the patio, a torrent for miles with bolts of lightning.
I eat Greek yogurt, densely rich like sour cream, a little less tangy, with local honey from a 12-ounce jar. The label reads “Sonoran Desert Honey.” Beneath the words an illustration of saguaros and prickly pears and a tree, ironwood perhaps, conveys the expanse of the land in which I live. I like knowing, from the information to the side of the picture, that Sonoran Desert Honey “is a pure natural blend of mesquite, catclaw, ironwood, saguaro and other springtime honeys.” The reddish gold liquid is the infinitely sexy complement to the thick dairy. The honey is startlingly sweet, even after my eating it days in a row, a most desirable partner for the mildly tart yogurt. (Before buying the Sonoran Desert brand a couple weeks ago, I hadn’t eaten honey for years.)
An attractive man helps me choose a gunpowder green tea, the smokier of 2 choices.
I water the plants until the rain comes.
In New York in March I met a man who’s a delight. I don’t think that I’ve called any man but him a delight. Our romantic interlude at his home in April was delightfully satisfying. I feel no desire or need to spend more time with him. I tell my friends about it all. “I feel like I’ve just heard a novel,” one says, and they and I accept the mysterious goings-on of a happy heart.
I’m listening to a clock and birds.
I’m drinking that smoky tea.
I’m living in a time defined by honey.
- July 7, 2010
- Filed under: Beauty, Body and mind, Men and women, Pleasure
- Comments 1
Mystic/realist
No one lives more in reality than the mystic. Forget asceticism, altered states of consciousness, transfiguration, or idealistic foolishness. The mystic enjoys the everyday world because its marvels fulfill her.
Marvels–the voice of a cashier, the color of brewed tea; a man sleeping in an outdoor alcove of a church, the sheen of a polished wooden chair; the scowl of a woman who looks at you when you board the bus, ice cream and butter at the temperature of their perfect softness. No dark night of the soul, à la St. John of the Cross. No flash-in-the-pan epiphanies.
Experiencing everyday anything as a marvel, the mystic doesn’t linger in an experience in order to prolong its pleasures or discomforts or to agitate, vilify, or congratulate herself. When feeling moves along at its own pace, everyday anything is new, instantly and continuously, and the body and senses freshen themselves. When disappointment, dread, anger, sorrow, anxiety, delusion, projection, envy, stupefaction, cowardice, yearning, or frustration arise, they pass quickly, as does any perception or feeling, because she does not oppose them.
The mystic practices ordinariness–the mind untrammeled, unraveled from discursive embellishments. She lives in a palpable, sensuous world which includes her body. You may call the mystic’s ordinariness extraordinary if not impossible. For her, gliding and loving are synonyms, as are smoothness and peace.
- July 1, 2010
- Filed under: Body and mind, Pleasure
- Comments 1
