Gunnar and I just came back from a week in Alaska. I've got a few un-teaching but full weeks of zoom calls, details, and last minute edits before September rushes in with 3 new cohorts (the anti-200 hour, the Yoga Sutras book one, and the new group studying the Bhagavad Gita).
Summer is always ‘different’. Our lives boom open. This summer, ‘back’ to ‘normal’ has made the difference of summer more pronounced…we were all gasping to travel and get out doors. We were sick to death of the zoom screen and doom scroll.
But none of this is very normal. The skies smolder and whole regions burn. Literally. Figuratively. G and I chose Alaska precisely because we wouldn't have to be around crowds and we wanted to travel before things shutter to a close again (that may not happen. But I am not optimistic about campuses, cold and flu season, fall after major summer gatherings across the country). We wanted to do it while we could, in other words.
The fact is, 2020 was not so much aberration so much as it was a threshold. We've breached it. The longing for it to end already can tell us something about our own needs and nervous systems, but can also pull us into numbing, disconnect, and ignorance.
I am not a jyotishi, but I sometimes pay attention to what the Vedic astrologers are saying. According to them, 2020 was utterly predictable. And 2021 is not going to be much better. First there was revelation. Now comes reckoning. The stars and planets (heavy Saturn, for those of you who wonder) are going to be reckoning this shit for about 200 more years.
When I head that I first crumpled, then knew. 200 years? 200 years feels unacceptable. But anything less would be unrealistic. I have to accept it. Reckoning can go wrong, and it is important that we get this right. If I know and accept how real, how deep, how much bigger than myself the problems are, I actually have some grace and skill within the questions.
How do we go on, when things continue to be so hard?
Interestingly, I think this is where a yoga practice can really help us. Not that yoga will solve the systemic issues. But that it will help us so that we can deal with the systemic issues.
I think yoga can help us to see clearly: the problems we are facing right now as a culture, as humans on a planet, took generations to get to this point and will, therefore, take GENERATIONS to change. The work will not be done in our lifetimes. Yet, our work is crucial to The Work. Our yoga practice can help us see that our nervous system squealing for it to ‘get better’ is a question of nervous system, not of the problems we're facing. Our feelings are symptom. Once we know that, we have some options and questions about our own mental, physical, and relational health. We can know how important it is to take care of our own minds even as we know that caring for our own minds does not address systemic issues. It only keeps us sane. We have to be sane as we can be.
A yoga practice can help us cope with the reality of life now. We're going to need such things.
A yoga practice can help us hold the honesty of paradox. The suffering of the world is deep. It's so deep we cannot escape it. Nor can we change it on our own. And, in the very same moment, this being alive is sometimes wondrous. A human mind can compose shockingly gorgeous things. Human collaboration can change the course of history. This life is precious. And you. And me.
Summer starts lush and gorging: berries, flashing skin, silken nights. But right about now, we start to feel burnt. Parched. Exhausted. A new notebook looks sexy. All that white space! They smell good. The bare windy concept of autumn - even if we have no academic routine and haven't for years - starts to sound like a relief. Some part of us longs to get serious. A return to our studies, our work, fits into the rhythms of the season and the needs of our psyches. Harvest and reckoning are the same process. It's how we'll survive. We have to do something with our berry stained mouths. We have to soothe our skin. We've got to save our souls. And care about refugees, and Black lives, and native sovereignty, and children in cages. They are still in there, you know.
I'm suggesting that this year is going to be hard. Life is hard. And having a practice come September will help.
Alaska was stunning but I wouldn't want to live there. It was a once in a lifetime thing. Alaska has a hulking, dumbfounding beauty and a perplexing culture. One night at dinner, the man at the table next to us said to the waiter: “I was at a bar for breakfast years ago at a place that had a bear. A stuffed grizzly bear right in the middle of the room. But I can't remember the name of the place. Do you know where that is?” The waiter shifted the dirty plates to his other hand and leaned on the back of a bar stool. “Well, there's a few, actually….” he said. In a Tennessee accent. I'm telling you. Alaskan culture is perplexing. (My mama brought me up when I was young, he said).
90% of Alaska is wilderness, which is gorgeous and raises immediate questions. ¾ of the people there at any given time are tourists, which raises even more questions about how that wilderness is governed, seen, visited. The culture is terribly young, on the one hand (Alaska only became a state in 1959, and Anchorage wasn't a city yet), and that makes the visibility of white supremacy a bit easier to see. It made native culture easier to see, which makes Alaska not young at all. Again, questions. Also: a little uncomfortable making. What is going to happen, I mean. This could be an amazing opportunity, I mean. Of course it could also go very, very poorly.
I flew in a tiny plane around craggy mountains. It was beautiful. The mountains struck me as being alive, which is only a weird thing to think on first glimpse. Rocks above the biosphere, after all. But I kept thinking it: these mountains are alive; moving, breathing, creative in a way that feels intelligent. An intelligence beyond my own. The kind of intelligence that provokes my own. Mountains like that can speak to you, even if it is insulting, challenging, pressing and revelatory stuff. Even if it feels like a call. Even if it feels quiet.
You've been called, I said to the last cohort on their last day.
We've been called (out) (sic).
The first word of the first line of the first book of Patanjali's sutras is Atha. It's usually translated to “now”. I think that's a call to reckoning if there ever was one.
