march madness

No, not the basketball kind, if that is still going on. Some sports fan I would be.


Finally starting to feel like spring here. no more snow, though there was a little patch holding on, on my block, as of monday..somehow the snow sticks around longer in my neighborhood. sometimes i think it is some sort of chemically engineered snow with  a higher melting point. Hmm, maybe I don't want to think too much about that.
I finished reading Sputtnik Sweetheart by Murakami. Definitely my favorite of his books, thus far. The very palpable feeling of longing in this story was quite moving, an emotion I normally don't associate with Murakami. I always wonder if the translations really don't do his writing much justice. Debating whether to start IQ84 next, or stick with something shorter.
Happy moon day. 



I haven't felt much like blogging lately. Too much to do at work, and another feldenkrais training session last week, as well as not wanting to blog about practice. Ironic, since I am back at full primary since I last wrote. I think it has been a couple weeks since I got setu again (it is much much less scary this time), and I can now do urdhva mukha paschimattanasana on my own. I think I discovered today how to bind my feet more easily in supta K - scoot my right shoulder under my leg rather than try to force my leg past my shoulder..I did this today, and my feet bound right away. For a while, I have been making a huge effort to bind..and tiring my legs out in the process. It's much easier to move the shoulder out of the way of the leg than to lift the leg over the shoulder when I am transitioning from kurmasana to supta K. Seems so obvious now. I feel like it is all the feldenkrais I did this past week that made me try it the other way, as doing feldenkrais lessons tends to make me more attentive and creative in how I try to move. It reminds me that forcing my body to do something won't work well, but that a more indirect route might work really well. 

A day at the beach

beach at the hamptons.

Last week, I rode out to the hamptons to field measure a house for a new client. We stopped for a few minutes to look at the water on the way back. The smell of the salt air is the best best thing ever. I prefer the beach in the off season.

Practice this week has felt like a day at the beach..easier mentally, though never easy, per se. I feel like I have passed the brunt of my mercury retrograde work/living space/future planning crisis, for now. That stuff took up so much energy all the time. I am trying to pare down a few things..like less time online at home, to make up for having less time off.

A few firsts this week - made it up from bhuja without pushing off the ground with my feet! I did it by accident yesterday (as most of my firsts happen this way..), made it back up, feet only grazing the floor and burst into a big smile. The trick for me seemed to be to not let the feet touch the ground-as in giving my weight to the ground. Brushing the ground with my feet seemed ok. And the next one is pretty obvious...at the end of 5 breaths..inhale UP. My best shot is to come up right away (well, it still takes a breath or two..but I am trying to get this to happen faster). I did it again today, and with less feet brushing of the ground.

My other first- I rolled up into urdhva mukha paschimattanasa.- on my own. Complete shock, as I have felt completely stuck at 90% of the way up for a while now. I held my feet nearer to my toes, and this gave me the extra room to roll up. So it seems. Or perhaps, it was just that I didn't have any expectations about what was going to happen, when I started. My first attempt was very close, and I realized I could do it..and on the second attempt, I made it all the way up. I may miss the flopping around. Who knows. If I can repeat it tomorrow..that will be interesting, since today I was nursing a sore shoulder and going at half force on the vinyasas (trying to anyway)..doing less is always my hardest practice of all.

The Gleaners and I

I recently watched Agnes Varda's The Gleaners and I. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. She documents people who still glean in the fields after the harvest, as well as those who glean in other ways...and the film is her way of gleaning as well. Likewise, this blog is my attempt at gleaning knowledge, wisdom, or perhaps just a sense of humor, from my yoga practice. In the movie, I loved the heart shaped potatoes that she finds at one point, rejected and left for the 'gleaners' to take.

        at the farmers' market today

At the end of this clip, you can see the filmmaker playfully posing as a gleaner, next to a famous painting of a gleaner. Oh, how I would like to be like her when I am old.





agnes varda as a gleaner....