Quote: John Lennon

We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant.  You can't just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it's going to get on by itself.  You've got to keep watering it.  You've got to really look after it and nurture it.

-John Lennon (former Beatle, who would have been 70 today).

Night blooming cyrus, a rare blossom, nurtured by Om Mama all year.  It blooms once annually, at night, for just a few fragrant hours.     

Quote: Meditation

"When we speak of meditation, it is important for you to know that this is not some weird cryptic activity, as our popular culture might have it.  It does not involve becoming some kind of zombie, vegetable, self-absorbed narcissist, navel gazer, 'space cadet,' cultist, mystic, or Eastern philosopher.  Meditation is simply about being yourself and knowing something about who that is.  It is about coming to realize that you are on a path whether you like it or not, namely, the path of your life.  Meditation may help us to see that this path we call our life has direction; that it is always unfolding, moment by moment; and that what happens now, in this moment, influences what happens next."

-Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go There You Are

Quote: Henry David Thoreau

"Only that day dawns to which we are awake."

-Henry David Thoreau, Walden 

Photo: Yogis arriving on Boston Common the morning of Global Mala Boston, September 2009. 

Quote: Vimala Thakar

"When the state of observation is sustained, it changes the quality of your biological structure.  The nerves are steady, the chemical system has an equilibrium, and there is relaxation, equipoise.  You live in the clarity of knowing who you are."

-Vimala Thakar, The Eloquence of Living

Photo by Jonathan Pozniak, for lululemon. 

Quote: Strength

An oak and reed were arguing about their strength.  When a strong wind came up, the reed avoided being uprooted by bending and leaning with the gusts of wind.  But the oak stood firm and was torn up by the roots.

-Aesop

Quote: Problems in Your Life

The problematic situations in your life are not chance or haphazard.  They are specifically yours, designed specifically for you by a part of you that loves you more than anything else.  The part of you that loves you more than anything else has created roadblocks to lead you to yourself . . . it doesn't want you to lose the chance.  It will go to extreme measures to wake you up. 

-A.H. Almaas

Quote: Perfection

"Perfection is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people.  It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life . . . I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die.  The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."

-Anne Lamott

In what areas of your life do you need to give up the cramped, insane search for perfection?  What would happen if you could do this?  

Quote: Writing

They ask me if I were on a desert island and knew nobody would ever see what I wrote, would I go on writing.   My answer is most emphatically yes, I would go on writing for company.

-William Burroughs

With a wake up call at 2:30 a.m. to make tomorrow's 5:00 a.m. flight to the Yoga Rocks the Mountain festival in Snowmass, CO (which should really be called "Snowmasana" for the weekend, don't you think?), it's time for me to retire for the night.  Check back later for posts, photos, and videos of the event.  

Quote: Counting Our Blessings

I thank You God for this most amazing day; for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes."

-e.e. cummings

Bharadvajasana II, above "greenly spirits of trees and a blue dream of sky." 
(Cape Cod, MA)

Quote: Laughing at Yourself

"You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself."

-Ethel Barrymore

Quote: Pray to be Stronger

"Do not pray for easy times,

Pray to be stronger.

Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers,

Pray for powers equal to your task."

-John F. Kennedy

Quote: Uncertainty

"Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next, or how. The moment you know, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark."

-Agnes de Mille

Quote: Material Things vs. Spiritual Development

"Toward material things, which necessarily have a limit, it is best to be satisfied with what you have, but with regard to the limitless development of spiritual qualities, you should never be satisfied with a mere portion, but continually seek higher development."

-His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama

Like a DJ, I Take Requests

Tonight, it came to my attention that there was a strong contingent of teenagers in my class. I'd even guess that they were in the same age vicinity as I was when I first started practicing yoga at 16. Three inspiring gals enjoyed a quote I read to conclude the practice, so here it is, per their request. Rock on, ladies; you have a long and lovely yoga path ahead!

I believe that only one person in a thousand knows the trick to really living in the present. Most of us spend 59 minutes an hour living in the past, with regret for lost joys, or shame for things badly done (both utterly useless and weakening)--or in the future, which we either long for or dread. Yet the past is gone beyond prayer, and every minute you spend in the vain effort to anticipate the future is a moment lost.

There is only one world, the world pressing against you at this minute. There is only one minute in which you are alive, this minute--here and now. The only way to live is by accepting each minute as an unrepeatable miracle. Which is exactly what it is--a miracle and unrepeatable.

-Storm Jameson

Quote: Friends

A friend is one whom you can pour out the contents of your heart, chaff and grain alike. Knowing that the gentlest of hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

-Anonymous

Not-So Relevant to the Kentucky Derby . . .

The following quote is from a book I'm currently reading about our survival skills and instincts, and the intangible factors that influence how we react in life-altering situations. Truthfully, it has little to do with today's Kentucky Derby, but the annual hoopla made me recall this excerpt including an inpsiring metaphor of how the brain and body, reason and emotion, communicate under pressure.

The human organism, then, is like a jockey on a thoroughbred in the gate. He's a small man and it's a big horse, and if it decides to get excited in that small metal cage, the jockey is going to get mangled, possibly killed. So he takes care to be gentle. The jockey is reason and the horse is emotion, a complex of systems bred over eons of evolution and shaped by experience, which exist for your survival. They are so powerful, they can make you do things you'd never think you'd do, and they can allow you to do things you'd never believe yourself capable of doing. The jockey can't win without the horse, and the horse can't race alone. In the gate, they are two, and it's dangerous. But when they run, they are one, and it's positively godly.

-Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why

Quote: Andy Warhol

"They say time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."

-Andy Warhol

Friday, I'm in Love: Definition of Success

"If I have been of service, if I have glimpsed more of the nature and essence of ultimate good, if I am inspired to reach wider horizons of thought and action, if I am at peace with myself, it has been a successful day."

-Alex Noble

"Sometimes" You Find a Great Poem for Spring

"Sometimes"

Sometimes things don't go, after all,

from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel

faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.

Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,

elect an honest man, decide they care

enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.

Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go

amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.

The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow

that seemed frozen; may it happen for you.

-Sheenagh Pugh

*Italics and bold emphasis are my own. Photo: A shot from my mom's garden, spring/early summer 2009.

Quote: Never Imitate

"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakespeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is an unique . . . If any body will tell me whom the great man imitates in the original crisis when he performs a great act, I will tell him who else than himself can teach him. Shakespeare will never be made by the study of Shakespeare. Do that which is assigned thee, and thou canst not hope too much or dare too much."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance*

*The Norton Anthology of Literature, Fifth Edition, Volume 1