on crafting ritual

The other morning, NPR aired a show about a woman who traveled across the Sahara desert to witness a 7-year-long ritual performed by the Dogon people every 53 years. A few hours after listening to the program I read in the book Healing With Whole Foods by Paul Pitchford about the importance of making a ritual out of preparing and consuming one's food, and how by staying carefully interested in the actions of our lives we imbue then with a subtle and special magic. The second son of a Lutheran pastor, my childhood was saturated with ritual, with songs and prayers tailored to religious events, with select colors worn on certain days. During my mother's premature death I rejected these early teachings and delved instead into those of Laozi, forgetting however to craft new rituals for my new modes of thinking. Now is come the time, then, for me to design new rituals of a new phase of life, that of healer and yogi and writer and sage. So as not to overwhelm any part of my being, I shall start small, with the act of bathing in the Pacific Ocean on the first day of the new year. Huzzah.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on freezing cold

A few mornings ago, I made the mistake of stepping off of my yoga mat while squaring it to the wall in preparation for doing Forearm Balance. I do my yoga practice on a concrete floor in an unheated room in the rear of the house, and the floor is so cold that I usually wear sandals when walking on it. For hours after having stepped with my left foot onto the icy surface, the extremity was so cold I could barely feel it. I am used to such conditions – I try to heat my house only when such action is required to keep the pipes from freezing, and I prefer an extra layer of clothes and a second pair of woolen socks to firing up the furnace or wood-stove. My foot was saved that day not by me but by the rump of the neighbor's tan bitch, who sat on it, warming it with the type of love that dogs express when they lick our wounds and sit with us when we are sad. At the time, the act seemed so selflessly compassionate that it nearly me cry, and I have thought of it repeatedly, a bright yellow, comforting memory. The bitch merely did what she considered necessary; she would have done the same for just about anyone else; and it changes not how I treat her – with patience and respect, with long pets and scratches, and by staying vigilant to her needs for fresh water and getting outside to pee. Puppies dearest, how you shine, gone for good your fearful whine. With you bellow, prance, and heal, we your friends whose hearts you steal. Gone your worries, gone your stress, with your presence we are blessed. Huzzah.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on taking breaks

For a handful of days now I have been taking a break from my normal yoga routine. This break is due in part to a patch of swollen and bruised flesh that halfway through last week blossomed just below the knee on the outside of my right leg. I suspect that I sustained the injury a couple of weeks ago when I crashed twice while bicycling down an icy alley on my way to teach yoga, although it could also be old energies bubbling to the surface that were released during one of my periods of meditation. I am loathe to take this break because on some level I am convinced I shall not ever start back up again my standard 5 day-a-week, 2-hour-long yoga practice, even though I really want to do so. On another level, I know that once I can kneel comfortably again I shall dive right back into my regular practice. It is a massive win for me to have developed emotionally to the point of being able and willing to feel and probe at the different urges raging inside of me and being able to take a break from my efforts without giving up on them completely; I credit my development in these matters to the Forrest Yoga Foundation Teacher Training, to the Embodying Enoughness series of yoga classes taught by Turbodog Yoga Chicago, and to the courage I have learned and support I have received from parents and siblings and friends; two years ago I would have at this point backslid into substance abuse and wallowed for 6 months in a state of regret-tinged depression. The curtains are lifting, the demons they flee, they will soon return but that's OK with me. Praise be to the sages who don't live and do, we honor your teachings we walk proud and true. Aho.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

change the self

It is tempting in our time of statistics and trends and tendencies constantly quoted to lament the Standard American Diet of meats and cheeses and food-like products; it is more tempting to engage in such lamentation while not altering one's own life, eating less flesh or more leafy green vegetables, getting more exercise, dining while seated, and chewing one's food into liquid. Choosing to practice proper nutrition has far-reaching consequences, among them a decreased risk of sickness, greater vitality, beneficial weight loss, a hardy disposition, sound bones, firm tissues, and freedom from toxicity. The first step toward healthful eating is to use products organically grown – they tend to contain greater levels of trace minerals and vitamins that our bodies need than their chemically compromised cousins that grow up being sprayed with poisons in artificially fertilized soils. In keeping with Michael Pollan's argument, one does well to eat real food, avoiding anything refined, processed, or enriched (which rules out most items but fruits, vegetables, legumes, grains, and greens). A healthy life you too can choose, there's good to gain and bad to lose. Mahalo.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on seeking cover

For nearly five years now, during some of the most prime years of my life, I have been living in a rural backwater of a town in south-central Pennsylvania. Ostensibly, I relocated to this spot to care for a piece of family property located here, but in reality I came here in hopes of weathering the storm of the World Financial Crises and hiding from the brutish realities of human existence. Of the many things I have learned during my time here the first is that the only place one can hide from life is in death, and the second is that life is best lived in a place where one feels comfortable, welcomed, and at home. Of all the places on this planet California best meets these criteria; I yearn for her vast and sun-drenched soils; I think of her almost daily and fantasize about once again living among her peoples. Therefore, it is time for me to pony up and get the fuck out of dodge, leave this place for good, sell the land, burn the bridges, and ride off toward the sunset with nary a backward glance. Where I currently live, Happiness is a luxury maintained only by persons with extreme wealth or steadfast discipline, and while I do not have the former I am learning the latter, getting better at it one day at a time. The time has come, then, for me to leave the lair I have built for myself here, to bid farewell to a handful of friends, and to venture once more out into the world, joyful as a hero to victory. Wish me luck, please, and mahalo.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on drawing stares

A few days ago, while negotiating some deep slush on my primary bicycle and trying not to crash, I slammed my left knee into the front gear shifter, breaking it. After trying but failing to put the exactly nestling pieces back together I conceded defeat and ordered a replacement part on the Online. Not three hours after entering my credit card information I remembered the two discarded bicycles leaning against the leaky wall in my cellar, broken machines festooned with spare parts. I chided myself for not following my usual practice of asking myself “Do I really fucking need this?” before confirming Online purchases, used Ujjayi breathing to clear my head of negative thoughts, and when next I was home stripped my once-trusty Specialized of its forward shifter. There it was, a working part, except its cable was too short for my current needs. Unperturbed, I rolled out my replacement whip, a woman's Epple Boogie bicycle complete with fenders, cargo carrier, dress catcher, kickstand, and functional DC generator to power the running lights. I am used to people staring at me riding my bicycle in all types of weather; now, though, I really blow their minds. Here I am, a 210 pound heavy, 6 foot tall, grown-ass man mashing pedal on a 10 pound woman's velocipede with his back straight and his head on a swivel, hauling ass through rain and snow and dark alike. The psychic energy I sponge while doing this is a crazy mix of hatred and encouragement, fear and concern and disbelief all blended into one. My favorite is when I am gawked at by rugged-looking, baseball-cap-wearing men driving lifted pickup trucks. “Who's the rugged one now, you warm-bottomed, gas-guzzling, dry-clothes-wearing wannabe?” I ask them silently while pedaling past them on my mother's rusted old bicycle. Instead of confronting their own hypocrisy, they immediately look away. Huzzah.
© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on creature comforts

Heat has been on my mind lately – how to make and store quickly and efficiently. Promptly with the arrival of a frigid winter my furnace stopped working; I now heat using wood. A well-stoked and roaring fire warms well the space in the house I have partitioned off so long as I am there to stoke it and keep it roaring; when, however, I get back after work, the temperature inside is in the mid 40s, so cold that I have trouble typing. My knuckles have cracked from wind and cold; I cover them with hydrogen peroxide and Eucerin lotion at night and with a protective cream during the day, but still they sting and bleed. It would be OK to have the furnace going, but then I would likely become lazy and stop making wood fires and leave it on during the day and burn through all my oil and have to order more and pay an arm and a leg for it. So, for now, I adjust to the realities at hand, haul and load logs, and rejoice in the fact that, although I am cold, I am still alive. Huzzah.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on crashing hard

This morning, bathed in the light of dawn, on my way in to teach yoga, I crashed twice on my bicycle. Although the roads had been largely cleared by the end of last night some of the more dismal alleys and less-frequently-used side roads exhibited broad sheets of ice. With temperatures this morning around 15 degrees Fahrenheit and tons of snow still piled up everywhere I should have known that my path would be slick and that I should slow down while traveling, but this was the first snow-and-freeze of the year and I was rusty. The initial crash occurred in a paved alley a half a block from the town's municipal motor-pool storage shed; I was traveling as fast as I normally do under optimal, ice-free conditions when I lost control of my smog-sled. Although I nearly corrected myself I went down left side first, crashing violently enough that I threw my handlebars out of whack. I hit so hard that I triggered an adrenalin rush that woke up my bowels and gave me the spins for a moment while I used an Allen wrench to move my handlebars back to their proper, perpendicular position. Not a full city block later I fell again, next to an elementary school, while trying to figure out what the rubbing sound was I was hearing, going down on my right side not so hard as to require additional fixing but bruising my right ankle and knee. From then on, for the next three blocks, I took it really, really slowly, creeping along the streets and treating every patch of road as suspect. Upon reaching my destination I found my entry barred because the metal box where the key is stored was frozen shut. There's no rush and much less reason, to be bandaged up this season. Mahalo.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on nightly developments

After bicycling yesterday for 10 miles through the season's first heavy snowfall I stopped at friend's house to get warm. Cuddling up next to a crackling fire I watch with him and his family the movie Boondock Saints entirely, and partook in a half dozen puffs of dat shweet shweet sticky sherm. Refusing his offer that I stay over on the couch or in a spare bedroom – to avoid bicycling back down into town the next morning on ice-slick roads as I do 3 days a week to teach him yoga – I instead pedaled up to my house, which because of the slush and the freezing rain took about 45 instead of the customary 25 minutes. Arriving back home dehydrated and sheened with ice I made myself a sandwich piled high with lunch-meats which I ate a mere hour before going to bed while stoking a wood fire to warm my house. With hunger sated but thirst uncorrected I brushed and flossed my teeth and then went up to bed knowing well the torment I was about to endure. Oh how I did sweat and thrash throughout the night, waking frequently with an active and queasy stomach and dreams of improbable and disturbing content. Then of a sudden there were great crashing and tearing sounds as something heavy gave way and collapsed either inside or just against the outside of the house, which I from betwixt warm covers could not exactly tell apart. I dozed as I listened but the crashing was brief and I decided my life was not in immediate danger and that therefore I could go back to sleep. Having chugged water whenever I was lucid enough to recognize the thirst burning in my throat by 3:45 am I had finally stabilized my body's fluid balance enough to sleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time; I reset my alarm for 6 am and hurried back under the covers, fell asleep quickly, turned off my alarms in a daze and awoke finally at 7:21. It was not until after apologizing via text message to my student for missing class and getting an hour into my own yoga workout that I happened to glanc out onto the rear patio. There, in a tangled heap, lay the motorized retractable awning that my grandmother had purchased but never used and my father had then bolted to the side of this house. I had forgotten to retract it at the start of Sunday's snowstorm and it had collapsed under the weight of snow and subsequent frozen rains, pulling clean from its moorings and splitting a round plastic table in half on impact. Now I know that the only real sound I heard last night was the shattering of my pride. Bows break, cradles fall, forgetfulness will kill us all.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on fueling rage

For the first time in many weeks today I ate fast food. I was driving around with a growling stomach and stopped at the house of Thomas for a spicy chicken sandwich. It cost in dollars twice what I normally spend on lunch while gainfully employed yet sated only half of my hunger. And instead of recharging my batteries and girding my loins for the tasks at hand this food, this fuel, awoke in me a deep and simmering anger. How I fumed and fussed, loathing and spiteful, as the lukewarm meal churned through my guts – so much so that to vent my seething fury I beat up with a broom an innocent office chair, with each strike freeing from it clouds of dust. After the venting I felt so much better than before that I was able to reflect upon my condition and trace my discontentment back to its source – my bowels. Since taking up a virtuous path and starting to heal myself body and soul through a daily yoga practice I have been blessed with an increased awareness of myself inside and out, which allowed me to see with my inner eye the food being wrung through my intestines, and it contained twisted and dark energies that fascinated and scared me such that I will not soon eat fast food again. In contrast, my evening meal – a half cup of organic corn grits with unsalted butter preceded by a half cup of organic white and brown rice cooked with organic carrot, beet, and paprika topped with organic soy sauce – is nourishing and supporting me as it worms its way through my entrails. As seems often to be the case these days I am relearning a lesson so often repeated that it has lost its color but not its bite: I am what I eat, and fast food turns me into a shitty, angry, spiteful person. Steer clear, chanticleer. Aho.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

getting shit done

America's elected representatives rarely deal with the people these days, preferring instead to interact with middlemen known as lobbyists. Citizens who try to schedule a meeting with their Congressperson, who try to get some face-time with them, must instead acquiesce to the notion that a majority of their supposed go-to-guys in the national legislature spend a larger amount of time raising money for their reelection campaigns than they do handling the affairs of the people they were chosen to represent. This normalized form of corruption is so widespread and endemic that municipalities and towns across the country must now hire lobbyists just to get enough money to replace a broken manhole, among the most basic and standard elements of any liquid waste treatment system. Instead of being beholden to the septuagenarian widow eating government cheese and surviving on the generosity of her neighbors our elected officials beg and scrape for chump change at the feet of bailed-out bankers; instead of looking past their own personal job prospects and focusing instead on the wellbeing and Happiness of their constituents our elected officials kowtow before anyone with pockets deep enough to keep them in office. America's population has grown dramatically since the republic was founded, and we would do well to increase the number of representatives in our houses of parliament proportionately; our systems of government continue to reside in assumptions and circumstances nearly a quarter of a millennium old, and we would do well not only to incorporate into these systems methods for rapid communication but also to demand vociferously and incessantly of our current leaders greater transparency; and the realities of our time compel us to alter our systems of government to meet the changing needs and capacities of our modern age in anything but a light or transient manner, which we can do by abolishing those agencies that infringe generally upon the rights of the people and allow instead the heavy mantel of Liberty to guide us through these stormy seas of largely our own creation. The only clear way out of our current stagnation is loosen the fetters, shed heavy-handedness, mind our own business, and replace ships of war with freighters of trade. Dial back, dig in, and do good things. Mahalo.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥

on simple measures

For a long time I turned to complex and difficult arrangements such as alcoholism and drug abuse and sadness and fear to address the challenges of my life, but now I meet them with yoga. In the discipline and the daily practice of yoga I find the time I need to root through and clear out the troubles that plague my mind; it helps me stay out of the head-space and in the Here and Now, in the moment, which is where I am coming to feel that life is best lived. The heights to which I might climb are great with yoga; the depths to which I would have sunk had I stayed with my old patterns are now beyond reckoning. The virtuous path is straight and easy, but people prefer the side-routes. Curious is this human existence. Praise be as always to the ancient masters, to Spirit, and to the sage Laozi. Aho, huzzah, & mahalo.

© americanifesto / 場黑麥