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Why Are You Here?

    I’m subbing and don’t know the clientele. I ask the standard questions: Is anyone new to yoga? Is anyone injured? Are there any requests? They smile at me but nothing else. I ask; why are you here today? To my surprise the first answer is “love”. Love? I’ve never met her before. It does not seem logical that I can provide what she wants. Look up the word love and see that there is no absolute definition. What is love? It can be a multitude of things. As stated on Wikipedia: This diversity of uses and meanings combined with the complexity of the feelings involved makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states. And within this discussion of love, an interesting premise for the yoga class is written: Love may be understood as a function to keep human beings together against menaces and to facilitate the continuation of the species We are empowered by the comfort of community. It’s primal. I used to work on film sets. The experience was not unlike the commonality of the group who spends a couple of days together at a yoga retreat (except for the liquor, x-rated banter and sleepless nights:)). You are an impermanent collective with one purpose.   Yoga studios promote community which requires a consistent group of participants.  In this case there seemed to be a random section of the population who had not met previously, who did not gather before or after class. Could love then be described as a function of community? It did not feel that way to me.   I have taken class with...

Tradition Grows From Fallen Seeds

We Are Our Stories   “Oh the hands of my mother watch and keep over me And the hands of my grandmother are the hands you see on me From the house of great grandfather rivers run down to the sea And my sister’s mother’s husband’s father’s grandchild is me Don’t you see?” Sung by Mark Bailey to my children long ago in California   It’s snowing. It hardly ever snows here. And I’m sick. I’m rarely sick. I’m peaceful in that snowing and not feeling well kind of way and staring out the kitchen window. Leaning on the sill I stare into the frozen garden. Twin two foot tall bare twiggy trees are nestled between shrubs. I’m harvesting seedlings from the front yard of my husband’s next door neighbor from his childhood home.   We had gone back to hold a memorial service for my mother-in-law in the place she and my husband, Rob ,had lived most of her life. Tom’s house and Kitty’s house sat closely together on a dead end street in a seaside village of Long Island. Tom was as close in age to Rob as he was to Kitty and was as close as family got. That’s why I took the seedlings from Tom’s tree that he offered me as I marveled over it’s unusual beauty. Here take some, he said as he plucked handfuls from the ground. He filled a small plastic sandwich bag with seedlings and dirt and I hopefully carried them back to Nashville in my suitcase.   Three years later Tom is dead. And Rob tells me that not a...