A Merry Christmas to all, and to all a Great Winter Solstice Season. See you after the New Year.
Monthly Archives: December 2010
Warm and Fuzzies
I love my fuzzy hat.
It’s a well-worn, gently pilled crocheted hat that sits atop my head like a round yarn mushroom.
I don’t know if it’s the soft perkiness or spring-like greens and pinks and yellows and purples, but people are so nice to me when I wear it. Shoppers in stores break into conversation about bunnies. Cashiers actually smile at me in checkout lines. Cashiers. In stressed-out checkout lines. In Towson.
Maybe I look a bit cuddly or perhaps ridiculous.
But it doesn’t matter. My daughter game me this hat. And I think it’s magic.
Leisure Suits the Gods
To be entirely at leisure for one day is to be an immortal.
– Chinese proverb
Kosha Mapping
The other day, I led both of my children through kosha mapping, a yogic process that helps yoga students focus on various planes of awareness: physical, emotional, energetic, and spiritual. Pulling out a box of markers, I drew the outline of their bodies as they lay on the backs of grocery bags taped together.
Excited, they seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the process, drawing both the physical sensations of breath (cool blue), and the saturated reds of warmth and energy, as well as a sense of these things—jagged lines for legs restless to move, a pale wash on feet light and ready to leap, and tight circles for pain that started with chapped skin on a hand, but went up through the arm in a squiggly line.
They scribbled whirls of energy in their hearts—my daughter’s a bit sad that day, with a line of happiness, and my son’s full of love. My daughter also drew blockages in airways that interfered with her breath—she has a cough. They both Magic Marked energetic globes for the energy centers in their brains.
(And they especially loved the third eye!)
It was great to see their minds work beyond the physicality of concrete existence, and for them to be able to express what they feel and think by seeing themselves through new filters.
Eureka, Shmeureka
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds a new discovery, is not ‘Eureka’ but ‘That’s funny.’”
– Writer and scientist Isaac Asimov
Left on the Board
What a previous teacher had written on the blackboard: “She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to be in the same room. In the same house. She pushed her/the peas around the plate with her knife.”
Then, what I was already set to write on the board during class that same day: “She stabbed him, and then she ran away.”
