Reflection

Reflection

More than once recently  I have had a real and deep need to write my blog  I  have been thinking of writing at least once or twice every day for the past couple of weeks . Somehow I did not want to write just  because I felt obliged to post. I wanted to write when I  had something to say. Now this evening it's like I cannot stop my fingers from dancing across the keys, relieved at last that they have been untethered and do what they have been itching to do for the last few months.

Why did I stop writing ? I search  inwardly, to discover that its probably around energy levels.   Having spent much of the last eighteen months throwing myself into developing myself has a human being, my yoga practise, my teaching skills, writing a weekly yoga column for the local newspaper, building  an imaginative renovation of  the yoga studio leaves precious little creative energy to keep my writing up to date. I dislike this, as I have always been a scribbler right from when I was a child . When I was about twelve years old  I used to keep a diary written in code so that my younger sister could not read it. I still have the diary . Now I cannot read it either as I have no idea how to crack the code!

I took this photo about a month ago, on one of my lone perambulations in the mountains where I live. I saw the image on my walk, as I see other images every day . I want to say something about the capture of the moment, but before I do, know that  I resent taking my phone with me on my walk, feeling it almost sacrilegious, disconnecting me from the moment.Yet there are photos that I want to record  either as a useful resource for a for  future Facebook update or as simple photographic record.

The image is a simple one, the man made trainer somewhat worn with a small hole in the top of , as my upturned toe has worked its way through in a futile bid for freedom.  The artificial object in all of this , the rest is ....well....organic. The stones and  gravel, billions of years here before anything, mute witness to itself, no eye to appreciate its strength, its place in the landscape then, human vision  giving witness to its now . The water inoculated by asteroids from eons, mutely reflecting a cosmic past, currently mirroring light captured in the shades  and contours of grey stone upon grey stone. As the shadow of life looks back at the Universe. I ask whats important now?

Yogic Magic.

It was when she said in a quiet calm way "space your toes apart", that did it . I contemplated my toes seriously for the first time in my life, smiling inwardly, wondering how do you space your toes? Like it was no problem between the first and second toe, and you could just see a kind of daylight between the second and third toe, but from there on, it wasn't going to happen! They might as well have been glued together. I remember once meeting a man with webbed toes and thinking he must have been an excellent swimmer. My toes were not webbed they were just stuck, together that is.

 This stream of consciousness was occurring within the first few minutes of above mentioned feet arriving firmly on mat. I looked at my neighbour's toes they, belonging to a beautiful poised and elegant Palestinian woman, with slim attractive feet, a subtle contrast to my own strong broad peasant feet, with beef to the heel like a Mullingar heifer. I was quietly pleased to see, that she too was having toe issues. Hers were even "stucker" than mine!

The practise in yoga that first day continued to be firmly feet focussed. Now we had to press our toe mounds down and lift the pinkies up, all of them! No problem there I thought proudly, my toes always kind of waved around up in the air of their own accord, sort of perpendicular to the floor rather than horizontal, in fact so much so, that the top of my shoes often wore out before the soles, but that does not concern us here. Keeping said toes aloft and fluttering in the breeze, we then had to press down the little pinky toe mound, then the inner heel mound and finally the  outer heel mound. There I was stuck, with the four corners of me feet to the ground, toes at 90 degrees, when she issues the next instruction. "Close your eyes and turn your attention inwards", how in utter of GOD did she seriously expect me to do this when I was in danger of falling over because me feet were super glued to the floor? I bet you nobody else is closing their eyes I thought, I'll just open my eyes a little bit and see if everyone else has theirs shut. Ha! caught the tall skinny guy on the mat to my right with his eyes open, why is he looking at me like that ? He is staring fixedly at my sticky up toes! which I kind of now want to hide away, them having become a  source of mortification as opposed to a kind of yogic magic.