On the Cusp…

Of What?

 

A few nights ago, about 1:45 a.m., I found myself fighting with Siri.

I had slept, awaken, and slept again.  In this new awakening, searching for the doorway back to sleep-blessed-sleep, oddly enough, the word, cusp, kept floating, circling around me.

I wondered, in my dazed half-sleep-half-wake:

Are we standing on a cusp?
Are we at a cusp?
In a cusp?

Surely something cusp-like is happening.

Wait.  What does cusp even effing mean?

Pondering happened.
Foggy sleepy pondering.
I needed help.

Siri!

My phone, on the other side of the room to prevent pandemic early morning doom scrolling for a certain despot president’s next irrational step, refused to yield the definition.

I was dealing with Surly Siri, Snot-Phone-Girl, 1:45 a.m. version.

“I’ve found information on cusp.  Here it is”, she said, sullenly, dropping into deep silence.

GRRRRRRR.

Request repeated.

“I found an answer.  It is displayed on your iPhone,” said Siri.

GRRRRRRR.

Eventually, I did manage to wiggle down, release my technological resentment, snuggle into dog-warmth and sleep.  Finally, at dawn, my favorite moment of all the day’s moments, on my own accord, I found these definitions:

Cusp:

• A point of transition between two different states
• A pointed end where two curves meet

Hum.
Cusp.

~~~
Spring and birds.
Snow melting.
Light shifting.
Daylight-whatever-changing.
So many earth-changes.

The earth awakens
Again.

We are blessed.

We are 
Truly blessed 
To be here.
To be alive
Here
Right here,

That our earth is coming back to us,
That spring emerges.

We are blessed.

Cusp—long endless winter
Melting
Into spring.

~~~
Another 
Cusp.

From lockdown 
To
….????

From sheltering in place
To 
….???

I have so many questions, folks.  

For you–What might be ending?
For you–What might be beginning?
For you–What losses did you outlive this year?
For you–What did you learn?
For you–What do you hope for?

 For me—
This is what I know to be true:

Aruni, 

Go slowly.
Continue to create the circumstances
That bring you safety.
Eat food that is real.
Tell somebody what you are feeling.
Move your body.
Bathe in the delicious season change.

Dear Aruni,
There is 
Absolutely
No rush.
~~~
Dear Community,

I am fascinated
And
Awed
By the opportunities we have
To enter this new world,
This new moment,
With mindful presence,
With choice,
With consideration.

Please consider joining me for a live streaming zoom retreat
April 9-11th

As we individually and collectively move forward, into spring, outliving this year of COVID, let’s together draw upon yogic principles of mindful presence to create choices for ourselves.

Please consider joining me. Click Here

Within this theme of melting and flowing, of winter to spring, of lockdown to doors opening, I’ve been somewhat obsessed with snow and ice morphing into running water.  Here are two home-grown videos, far less than perfect, yet both showing us movement and return.

 

Reality Wins

 

Here I sit, considering my past week.
What inspiration can I share with you, dear people?

Hum.

My thoughts first go to the Arena of the Bitch.

May I bitch?
Of course.
Right?

Bitch-permission granted.

Well, to name a few:

• Freezing cold March “in like a lion” winds almost tore off my flesh, while walking a happy little oblivious puppy.
• Pee and poop were not in the forefront of said puppy’s experience.  Smell, to my dismay, was.
• Every twig, rock, pebble, blade of once-grass was investigated.
• I might have scolded my little-bundle-of-life puppy.
• She outlived that.
• I outlived that, too.  I warmed up.  There was eventual pee/poop.
• Not on my time frame.  Not on my request.

~~~

• I single-handedly took on the Ma. COVID-Everybody-Gets-a-Vaccine-but-You-Website, for unrelenting hours.
• I believe I might have lost.
• Temporarily.
• I outlived that.  I chilled.  Eventually, calm was restored.
• An appointment was uncovered.  Eventually.
• Not on my time frame.  Not on my request.

~~~
Okay.
There are two examples.
Plenty, I hope, to illustrate my point.

Here is what I know and believe.

Reality is relentless.
It wins.
This is eventually good news,
No matter what happens.

I get to participate in life as it is.
Most importantly, I get to relax into it.

The more I relax, the sooner the dog poops!
(Did I just really say that publicly?  I actually do think there is cosmic truth in that.)

The sooner the appointment emerges.

There just is no pushing-the-river.
There’s playing in the river.
There’s jumping into the river.
There’s enjoying the river.

Changing it?

Good luck, folks.

Softening around what is,
Relaxing into what is happening….

That works

And then, taking action, yes!
Of course,
But to allow the
Moment to be what it is.

My tendency?
I rush in to change it.
I rush in to fix it.
I rush in to make the moment
As I think it should be.

Human behavior?
Yes.

Expected behavior?
Of course.

Effective behavior?
Not always.

Think—yoga mat.
Think—yoga practice.

To relax, to soften,
To melt into what is happening.
To relax around the sensations.

That works off the mat, too, folks!

And from that place,
That energy-inspired place,
To take action.

That’s the combo.
That’s how it works.
I forget all the time.
Of course, I do.

Permission to be human.
OH!

The hardest of all for me—
Permission to be human.
Permission to be annoyed
And scared
And human.

How to be with my inner privileged annoyance,
My inner
I-want-what-I-want-now-ness?

~~~
Here’s what Pema Chodron, the wonderous Buddhist nun, says about our inner bitchiness.  From Awakening Loving Kindness:

“When people start to meditate or do spiritual practice, they often think somehow they’re going to improve, which is a sort of subtle aggression against who they really are.  It’s a bit like saying, “If I had a better job, I would be a better person.  “If I could meditate, I’d be a better person.”  

But loving-kindness toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything.  It means we can still be crazy after all these years.  We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness.  The point is not to try to change ourselves.  Meditation practice isn’t about throwing ourselves away to be better.  It’s about befriending who we already are.  The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are.  That’s the ground, that’s what we study, that’s what we come to know with tremendous curiosity and interest.”

Dear Folks,
Befriending the inner bitchiness!  With a strong commitment to not live there; to notice, to relax, to befriend, and to re-align.

That’s the practice, I do believe.

~~~
For inspiration, a triple-header musical event this week for you.

First, do you know the group, Sweet Honey in the Rock?  OHHHH. Sweet Honey in the Rock is an all-woman, African American a cappella ensemble who offer their experience as black women through song, dance, and sign language, unbelievably beautifully and powerfully, for decades.

Here is a celebration of one of their founders, Ysaye Barnwell, on her 75th birthday:

“A Good Name for God Is…….

Not Me”

Says Anne Lamott.

~~~
About 200 years ago or so, pre-pandemic and pre-several-Kripalu-CEOs, I worked with a magnificently marvelous woman named Jodie.  We together ran a massive department at Kripalu called Ongoing Programs, which included R&R, the Yoga Team, the Dance Team, the Who-Even-Knew-What-Other-Teams.  

It brought new meaning to the concept of “ongoing”.

From early morning yoga classes to evening concerts, the classes never stopped.  That roller coaster ride was the doorway to magic for me.  The teachings, the legacy of Swami Kripalu lived and vibrated in the program rooms constantly.  I saw my job as both stewarding the teachings while making them accessible to all our guests, no matter the medium of transmission, be it yoga on the mat, an evening concert, a workshop, wacky and wild drumming/dancing—whatever.

This moment in time was just the other side of the post-ashram /pre-corporate Kripalu, so Jodie and I had free and wonderful reign to make stuff up for this huge area as we went along.

Make stuff up?  Yes, with a dose of integrity and a tad of thought, yep, we made stuff up.

Let me tell you what I mean.

Chanukah?  No problem.  I’d write up a one-pager about Chanukah from a yogic perspective.  No Marketing department had to approve the fonts and no curriculum director had to sign off on its ideas.

Post the sign.

Put some latkas, potato pancakes, on the food line

Presto:  a yogically inspired Chanukah.

It was ours to create.  

And It was beyond-uber-fun to work with Jodie.  We did a pretty darn good job with what we had and rocked each other’s worlds with laughter.

Jodie was so irreverent, a truth-teller of Class AAAA+.  She would simply call it, whatever It was, as it was.  But it was her humor, which coated the truth with belly-aching, side-splitting, out-of-control laughter.
Her expressions, wide-eyed innocence, amusing language with a strong dose of inner dignity—

She was wonderful.

In those days, Jodie had a favorite mantra.  Rolling her eyes to the heavens, confronting the Gods and Monsters that Be, she would make a fist, raise it into the air, and from the depth of her soul, speak it:

“BASTARDS.”

You had to be there.  

The truth of it, yep, there are bastards, and yep, shitty things happen.  Woven into that truth was her expressive, big-eyed, sassily-speaking amusement about it—which nobody else probably would have said aloud, while many were thinking—she just nailed it.

She nailed it.

She stuck the landing.

She nailed the truth in a way that it both landed and opened the door to the next moment.

Being able to laugh at it made it palatable, livable, and out-livable.  

Humor used skillfully is a brilliant tool.

Which brings me to Anne Lamott.

She is a personal hero of mine.

Her writing, her depth, her faith, her capacity, like Jodie, to just call the bullshit, but in a way that moves it forward and frees us of it, is wonderous.  

Humor and depth!

It is educational.
It is spiritual.
It is blessed.
It is healing.

I have loved Anne’s non-fiction, learned from her pain along with her glorious celebration of life.  I would like to share her with you here, from a Ted Talk of hers.  Please give yourself this gift:

~~~
“12 Truths I Learned from Life and Writing”
Anne Lamott

~~~
Friends,

What touched you?
What tickled you?
What opened you to thought?
To heart?
To healing?

~~~
Dear Friends, on your hero’s journey, what do you know to be true?  Or, as Anne says, “that which you are almost positive about”?

I am almost positive that—

• If I don’t drink or drug, I will be given fantastic moment after fantastic moment, no matter what happens.
• If I eat sugar, I will want MORE SUGAR.
• If I look for the beauty in the moment, it meets me many-fold, every single time.
• If I accept myself, I am free.

Please send in your responses—I would love to share them with you.

~~~
Dear Friends—
As we find our way
Into March,
May we
Breathe
Relax
And 
Be

With the 
Softening
Light,

With the 
Warming
Sun,

With the
Longer
Days.

We got this.
One day at a time.

All blessings,
Aruni
~~~

Thursday, March 4th, @ 2:00.  It is a wonderful way to connect to self, to other, to all.

PayPal link is here

Your payment will indicate your registration.

http://coacharuni.com/thursdaycircles/

It started with squeaking.
Like, squeaking.
I tried to record the said-squeak
But was just not fast enough
On the draw
With the phone-thingy.

Squeaking was car-centric.
We drive a lot,
She and I.
Most of the time,
She just hangs,
Looks out the window,
Longs for the front seat silently
(never!)
And
We pass
Our Berkshire miles
Together.

These squeaks were different.
Tell-tale squeaks.
A little more frantic
Of a squeak.

Once I stopped,
Pulled over,
Climbed into the back-seat
(muddy blankie!)

To find she had
Disengaged herself
From her halter-seat-buckle,
Her tiny leg wrapped around it.

A rush of bad mothering terrors
Filled me.

She was right—
It was a tell-tale squeak, indeed.
Worth squeaking about.
Buckled into a seat
Does suck.

Agreed.

Yet other squeaks seemed unfounded.
Undefined.

I find the squeaking
Generally
Unsettling
But not horrible.

My spouse leans
Toward The Horrible.

So we asked the animal communicator.

The conversation went like this—
(disbelievers, just know that I believe:)

Niki, what’s up with the squeaking in the car?

Quote Niki the Dog:

I just get anxious sometimes.
I just want to get to where we are going,
To the next family adventure.

I’m anxious!

This next part was most interesting.

Mom,
It’s not your issue.
I’m fine.
I’ll work it out with myself.

And she ended with a request for front-seat co-piloting.
It was and always will be denied.

A dog that knows her co-dependency boundaries
As well as
Her seating preferences!

Pondering the squeaking,
I realize,
I,
Too,
Want to get
To where
We are going.

Are we there yet?

Where are we going?

I, too, want
The next adventure
To safely unfold.

Are we there yet?
Where are we going?

Niki is squeaking for me.

I am anxious too.

This insight brings a smile,
A breath of relief.

~~~
Pondering her squeaking,
I remembered Rumi,
The wonderous
The remarkable
Ecstatic poet from
13th century Persia.

Here is Coleman Barks, his major translator,
With one of my favorites—

LOVE DOG

Please give a listen: