motivation

"When you're doing yoga," my teacher once told a student, "don't watch T.V."











But what about when you're watching T.V.? Is it okay to do yoga?

shadow

mouse gaze

Mouse head left in garden by cat.

Christians talk about a curse on things, something coming from long ago. Makes sense.

Stick this in your transcendence pipe and smoke it.

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Well?

the way

My father-in-law in Oxford, England.

queer eye of an environmental guy

Poison being sprayed at Lourdes, France. Picture taken from the other side of the river, where the spring of holy water is.

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Thinking today of those who die young, and of those who have set out on journies without us...

Lourdes wheelchair path

In Lourdes, France, the giant Catholic shrine and tourism destination dedicated to healing, there are wheelchair paths instead of bicycle paths.

parsvottanasana

You can see here what I'm up against. On a supple person, the hands in parsvottanasana would be up between the shoulder blades. The closeup detail gives evidence of stiffness so severe it's practically, well, poignant. This looks like a twisted version of a religious icon from my childhood: Praying Hands. I've said it before: at this site the raw material of transcendence will be a recalcitrant body. The Apostle Paul writes of "the body of this death." I hear you, bro.

life in England

Sebastian and Liam and Eva-Lynn: soccer on England's east coast, Liam in Leominster, Liam checking out storm damage in the Lake District...What do pictures of the family have to do with yoga?

doctors

Whatever a doctor might have been for earlier centuries—butcher, specialist in Latin verb declension, barber—he is now a bureaucrat. His only freely marketable skill, mnemonic prowess, has long since been superceded by computers. His function is symbolic.

With nothing to contribute, and a great deal of time on his hands, the modern doctor and his handlers have lobbied successfully for the position of gatekeeper for various corporate entities, particularly vendors of diagnostic machinery and the pharmaceutical industry. Antibiotics and the polio vaccine possibly marked some sort of peak in allopathic medicine, and public health has been in decline since the mid-twentieth century, probably from environmental factors caused, ironically, by the bloat of corporate excrescence.

If there was ever a time when veneration of doctors might have been justified, and this seems unlikely, that time passed nearly three generations ago. The American war on cancer, successful as every American war in my lifetime, provides a good living to a significant sector of the population. Cancer is stronger than ever. My friend here in England recently hurt her leg. Anyone could see that she needed an MRI. The doctor refused. Anyone, in other words, could see better than a doctor. Yet blindness does nothing to detract from the reputation of the doctor. In fact, a blind doctor denying access to (of all things) an imaging machine, is a sign that, in the new world order, everything is working just fine.

Looks like we're on our own.