I used to write poetry....

...and one of my favorite poets of all time is Leonard Cohen....Avalanche is one of his songs from his Songs of Love and Hate album released in 1971.

Cohen's recurring themes in his poetry were love and sex, religion, and psychological depression...all totally interrelated as far as I'm concerned....funny how I was so attracted to those themes as a young, hippie chick in high school...I wanted to run away and live with Cohen on those Greek isles he wrote about.

...even yoga teachers get the blues....

"Well I stepped into an avalanche,
it covered up my soul;
when I am not this hunchback that you see,
I sleep beneath the golden hill.
You who wish to conquer pain,
you must learn, learn to serve me well.
You strike my side by accident
as you go down for your gold.
The cripple here that you clothe and feed
is neither starved nor cold;
he does not ask for your company,
not at the centre, the centre of the world.

When I am on a pedestal,
you did not raise me there.
Your laws do not compel me
to kneel grotesque and bare.
I myself am the pedestal
for this ugly hump at which you stare.

You who wish to conquer pain,
you must learn what makes me kind;
the crumbs of love that you offer me,
they're the crumbs I've left behind.
Your pain is no credential here,
it's just the shadow, shadow of my wound.

I have begun to long for you,
I who have no greed;
I have begun to ask for you,
I who have no need.
You say you've gone away from me,
but I can feel you when you breathe.

Do not dress in those rags for me,
I know you are not poor;
you don't love me quite so fiercely now
when you know that you are not sure,
it is your turn, beloved,
it is your flesh that I wear."

just because

Before Britney was a Pop Queen, there were singers like Cyndi Lauper -- yes, I mean Cyndi Lauper who sang "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun." I remember being blown away by Cyndi's cover of Joni Mitchell's song "Carey" in a television tribute to Joni. I found the video on YouTube and was blown away again as I watched Cyndi become one with the song...everything comes together in a perfect musical moment. Cyndi has total connection to the music, to her band, to herself, and to the moment. The look on her face when she dances is the way I feel when you hit that sweet spot in vinyasa and you feel like you're the only one in the room and it all comes together, body-mind-spirit.




I also found this video of my man Leonard Cohen singing his classic "Suzanne" in a 1979 German concert. I call Leonard Cohen "my man" because when I was a young hippie chick in high school in the early '70s, I loved Leonard Cohen and his poetry. I wanted to run away and live with him on the Greek island where he lived at the time.

One day we had a substitute English teacher and she asked us to bring in our favorite poem or book, so I read a Cohen poem where he wrote "beneath my hands your small breasts are the upturned bellies of breathing fallen sparrows." I loved the image, but the sub scowled at me and said there were some things that were too "mature" for a high school English class. Yeah, that was me, always contrary to ordinary.

I wrote poetry back then and my boyfriend's best friend gave me Cohen's book The Spice-Box of Earth. I still have this book, the pages yellowed and falling out, dated "Xmas 1970", with his inscription on the inside front cover: "'I'd like to buy you everything, a wooden bird with painted wings, a window filled with painted rings...', but then I'd be playing into the hands of the profit merchants, so I hope this book of beauty will be enough. He's one of my favorite authors. Rich." After all these years I still wonder what happened to him.




I know this post has nothing to do with yoga or India or Buddhism, but since yoga is about life, maybe it does in a way. You look back and think fondly of old lovers and friends and remember the chances you lost, the "next times" that never came -- the opportunities as Rimpoche spoke about -- and it suddenly hits you that YES!, this life IS precious and it is a sin (to use Christian terminology) to waste our present moments with judgments, negative obsessions, worrying about who says what about us, and holding onto that samsaric wheel afraid to let go.

Let go. Detach from the outcome. It's time for me to do some pruning again...

shanti