Hatha - Day 4

The upside to telling my friends and teachers that I am doing something like this month of astanga is that I find out about others who are undertaking similar challenges, and get lots of advice. The downside, if you could really call it that, is that I'm in class doing sun salutations and thinking "okay, now that my teacher knows I'm working on astanga, I hope that everytime I have funky alignment they don't think this is how I do it at home!"

ah the neurosis. There's nowhere to hide, because it will always find you if your mind is open to it. And allowing yourself insecurity leaves your mind vulnerable that way.

Steve's class was great this evening. He was subbing the rare Yoga 2, which is not a common class anyway and even less common for him to teach it. Steve is also doing Astanga stuff right now, and unsurprisingly the class really reflected that. Great for me! It was totally the perfect Astanga/Hatha hybrid class for my in-between day. I could hear others struggling though, with the pace and rhythm. It's an advantage to be in class like that and be familiar with the sequence, because you know how to breathe and can anticipate what might be happening next. Without that familiarity it is easy to get huffing and puffing. The studio was really humid also, which made for a nice astanga-y atmosphere. I felt strong the whole class, and didn't drop out during savasana either. Evening classes really are the best for me.

I also got my books today, which is great timing because it looks like we are in for a massive snowstorm and I will have plenty of exciting reading material! Not that I need to start reading other things..I am still enthusiastically plugging away at Iyengar's Light on the Yoga Sutras - different from Light on Yoga, though I have that too. His work is brilliant, and really offers a lot of clarification and helpful insight to Patanjali's work. I feel, however, like there is no end to the number of texts and writings about yoga that I want to read and learn.

It all started with Alice..

I came to the realization about a week ago that I have never actually read Alice in Wonderland (i.e. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, the actual title). I had begun thinking about books I loved as a child. I was a voracious reader, reading every book I could get my hands on as quickly as I could get my hands on them. I was reading well before I started school, and my first grade teacher would go to the fifth grade classes to get work for me to do because I was bored. My grandfather gave me a copy of Black Beauty for my 8th birthday, and my dad and I read it together (taking turns, each reading a chapter) every night before bed.

I remember The Mouse and the Motorcycle in 2nd grade, Charlotte's Webb in 3rd grade, a huge fuss over A Wrinkle in Time in 4th grade, reading Maniac Magee, Sarah, Plain and Tall, and the Great Brain in 5th grade, and the miraculous story of The Giver in 6th grade. Those were school sanctioned reading. My experience was fortunate in that many of the books we read as curriculum were/are books that are frequently banned. But my recreational reading swiftly became influenced by popular culture, and so books like Alice's Adventures In Wonderland were not even a thought. For a very long time I didn't realize that The Wizard of Oz (and many many others) were actually books, simply because I had never been exposed to the idea (in fact now I was more familiar with the opposite, seeing a book that I was familiar with be turned into a movie, rather than a movie I was familiar and seeking out the book).

So when I realized I hadn't read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, I got thinking about books I want to have in my house for my children. I want a massive library, endless books. Not one essential that isn't there for them. So I started making a list. A lot of them I haven't read (yet):

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland series - Lewis Carroll
Anne of Green Gables series - Lucy Maud Montgomery
The Hobbitt - J.R.R. Tolkein
The Lord of the Rings series - J.R.R. Tolkein
Little House on the Prairie series - Laura Ingalls Wilder
Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
The Chronicles of Narnia series - C.S. Lewis
Black Beauty - Anna Sewell
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
One Thousand And One Nights (Arabian Nights)
Tuck Everlasting - Natalie Babbit
Maniac Magee - Jerry Spinelli
The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton
Bridge to Terabithia - Katherine Patterson
Walk Two Moons - Sharon Creech
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Harriet the Spy - Louise Fitzhugh
The Mouse and the Motorcycle - Beverly Cleary
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Pippi Longstocking series - Astrid Lindgren
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz - L. Frank Baum
The Indian in the Cupboard - Lynn Reid Banks
Are you there God? It's Me Margaret - Judy Blume
The Neverending Story - Michael Ende
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Old Yeller - Fred Gipson
The Velveteen Rabbit - Margery Williams
The Whipping Boy - Sid Fleischman
Summer of My German Soldier - Bette Greene
The Egypt Game - Zilpha Keatley Snyder
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
A Wind in the Door and series - Madeleine L'Engle
Misty of Chincoteague - Marguerite Henry
Gulliver's Travels - Johnathan Swift
The Jungle Book - Rudyard Kipling
The Sword in the Stone - T.H. White
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Howard Pyle
Sarah Plain and Tall - Patricia MacLachlan
The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
Hiawatha - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (yes, I know this is a poem, but it is also illustrated as a delightful children's book)
The Swiss Family Robinson - John David Wyss
Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Anderson
Peter Pan and Wendy - J.M. Barrie
Aesop's Fables
Cheaper By the Dozen - Frank Gilbreth Jr, Ernestine Gilbreth Carey
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Winnie the Pooh Series - A.A. Milne
The Tale of Peter Rabbit - Beatrix Potter
Heidi - Johanna Spyri
Charlotte's Webb - E.B. White
Stuart Little - E.B. White
Mary Poppins series - P.L. Travers
National Velvet - Enid Bagnold
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Farenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Anne Frank - The Diary of a Young Girl
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow - Washington Irving
A Separate Peace - John Knowles
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Prince and the Pauper - Mark Twain
Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett
The Good Earth - Pearl Buck
My Antonia - Willa Cather
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
The Divine Comedy - Dante
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Iliad - Homer
The Odyssey - Homer
Daisy Miller - Henry James
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Dr. Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
All Quiet on the Western Front - Eric Maria Remarq
Night - Elie Weisel
The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
Antigone - Sophocles
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Aeneid - Virgil
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Black Boy - Richard Wright
Native Son - Richard Wright
Ramona series - Beverly Cleary
A Light in the Attic - Shel Silverstein
Where the Sidewalk Ends - Shel Silverstein
James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl
Boy - Roald Dahl
How to Eat Fried Worms - Thomas Rockwell
The Chocolate War - Robert Cormier
The Giver - Lois Lowry
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, and the Fudge series - Judy Blume
Island of the Blue Dolphins - Scott O'Dell
Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry - Mildred D. Taylor
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Forever - Judy Bloom
Heather Has Two Mommies :)
Number the Stars - Lois Lowry
A Day No Pigs Would Die - Robert Newton Peck
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Great Gilly Hopkins - Katherine Patterson
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Wish Giver - Bill Brittain
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neal Hurston
Orlando - Virginia Woolf
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

For the record, I'm aware that 1) Jane Austen isn't on here. Because I can't stand her books, or the Brontes' for that matter. Not that they won't be in the collection, but I won't be promoting them.. 2) Dr. Seuss. there are just too many to list, but I'll have those too..3)this is not a complete list. No list would be complete without Pickle Things, and besides, there will never be a finite number of books that could potentially be added.

That said, please let me know if I've forgotten anything essential, or if you know of something less common that should be included!

I bought myself a copy of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and started reading it. They just don't write books like this anymore.

Those Windows, These Eyes

Well, it's been almost six months and what have I been doing? Visiting this blog everyday and not finding that final push of inspiration to share things with you.

Granted, Fall always brings with it that thing I like to call the "artistic twilight zone." A haze that settles over my conscience, and makes it even more difficult for me to be present and not in my head. Fall also brings emotion and nostalgia and inspiration, and a craving for love much like that of summer only heavier and darker.

I've been painting a lot. Creating a lot. Changing a lot. And I've been focusing on my friends, as we have all hit that point in the cycle of reality where tough things are happening to everyone we care about, and each of us, at the same time. I feel we are in the upswing now, but the last couple of months have been trying.

Some things since I last posted-

1. Rachel Maddow.
This woman has stolen my little intellectual heart. She feeds my daily need for intellectual, witty, political information, and adds a huge side of queer. I cannot emphasize how amazing it is to sit down every night and see a lesbian hosting a prime time show, without protesters banging down the door and blacking out the channel. I know there are a lot of people out there who will say that I shouldn't care that she's gay, and I agree with them to the extent that being gay has nothing to do with her ability to do the job nor does it make her more or less of an incredibly intelligent and admirable woman. However seeing that reflection every night, that representation in the mainstream, is something so meaningful to me that I cannot explain it in words.

2. Obama.
Never have I been so elated and so heartbroken at the same time. I watched with two of my favorite people in the world, and for a couple of hours, watching the coverage after the election was called for Obama, we forgot about the negativity and fear and stress that we all carry with us everyday. Living in DC, there are a thousand things that ran through my mind when Obama won. How the city will change. How can we make it change? I never imagined that in my twenty-something years I would be witness to a transformational period in American History. If we don't think this is as huge as JFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the hippy 60s, we are fooling ourselves. This is huge, and I am so excited to be alive for it!

3. New Music.
Not surprisingly, it's been a great year for music. In July I was fortunate to see Brandi Carlile and the Indigo Girls at Wolf Trap. Wolf Trap is a concert ampitheatre in a national park. It is green and beautiful, and the Filene Center where IG played is made of beautiful wood and has phenomenal sound and amazing views of the stars after dark. I sat alone, because the girl who was supposed to come with me backed out only a couple of hours before. I had great seats, and a great view, and I have no doubt that being alone made my first experience seeing Amy and Emily all the more monumental. That concert was an incredible feeling of solidarity, and of imparting wisdom, even though I listen to those songs all the time. It was a rite of passage to be sure.
In addition, I've been listening to plenty of new bands, bands new to me:
The Organ
Rachael Yamagata
Ben Lee
Kings of Leon
Ellis
CSS
Peaches
11 different version of Wonderwall by Oasis
and some new Tegan and Sara (I am in love with Give Chase)





3. Books.
I've been reading, and that's a very good thing.
Right now I'm halfway through No One Belongs Here More Than You, by Miranda July. Jury is still out on it, for now.
I've already finished:
Baby Remember My Name: An Anthology of New Queer Girl Writing, Edited by Michelle Tea
I Was Told There'd Be Cake, by Sloane Crosley - A+ and one of my new favorites
Come to Me, by Amy Bloom
The Well of Loneliness, by Radclyffe Hall - brilliant. I don't care what anyone else says.
Margaret Mead Made Me Gay, by Esther Newton
The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, by Sogyal Rinpoche - this book changed my life.

Still to read:
The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins - I've been wanting to read this for a long time, and I've started, but haven't finished it. It is brilliant so far though.
The Omnivore's Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Cesar's Way, Cesar Millan
and a slew of other books I've started and haven't finished.




that's your update. I'll be back tomorrow.

bookgasm

The Rules:
1. Pick up the nearest book of 123 (or more) pages.
2. Open the book to page 123 and find the 5th sentence.
3. Post the next 3 sentences.



Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
Page 23, fifth sentence and three following:

"Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart and orange tree. This fruit had tripped up athletes while others have healed their wounds. All true quests end in this garden, where the split fruit pours forth blood and the halved fruit is a full bowl for travellers and pilgrims. To eat of the fruit means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings."



go.

the tortoise of recreational activities

"..I'm secretly a very slow reader. I was once a fast reader, what happened? Words got bigger."



inspired by one of my new blog-obsessions, Automatic Win, my reading list:*

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson
Full Frontal Feminism - Jessica Valenti
Backlash - Susan Faludi
Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
The Bostonians - Henry James


Sometimes I wonder why I can't plow through piles of books like I used to; I blame high school, and further, college. For forcing my brain to become and automated machine skimming and seeking out only the absolutely crucial information to comprehend and forgoing the rest in order to make time for things like sleep and food. And for subjecting me to such ridiculous things as "what do you think the climax of the book is? oh really, well you're wrong."

I used to love reading. I'm trying to teach myself to love reading again.
I mean hey, I taught myself to knit, surely I can teach myself to do something I already used to know how to do. Right?







*caveat - said reading list does not guarantee the completion of the reading of these books by any specific date herein this calendar year. thank you. :)