“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” — Virginia Woolf
This Bloom Holistic Retreat weekend yoga is splendid. Not only are the Octopus Holistic Yoga teachers superb, but the sumptuous setting and convivial fellow participants are thoroughly welcoming. We create a beautiful nourishing community of fellow travelers in just a few days. The retreat is a luxurious reward to myself after a year of heavy steroid and biologic medication to treat the sudden onset in the summer of 2021 of Giant Cell Arteritis, an auto-immune condition - now in remission.
On mourning and melancholia. On the loss of friends and lovers. And the loss of women’s rights to abortion in the U.S. so courageously gained 50 years ago. Melancholia must give way to action. Change via feminist transformation cannot be counted on to remain. Stay engaged! The struggle continues!
Experience life just as it is… Sweet June. Is she of Summer or of Spring,Of adolescence or of middle-age?A girl first marvelling at touch of loversOr else a woman growing ripely sage?Between the two she delicately hovers,Neither too rakish nor, as yet, mature.She's not a matron yet, not fully sure;Neither too sober nor elaborate;Not come… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 27/6/22 — “Come into my garden” or Asteya, stealing time
What happens during the war to autobiography by those who are neither warmongers nor victims?
Yoga means “to yoke”, to join, to bridge. “Only connect”, wrote novelist E M Forester when I read his famous novel Howard’s End in my first undergraduate English class in 1969. My professor said: Only connect. For me, now more than fifty years later, yoga’s connections expand into a rejuvenation of the body and the mind. Yoga means holding out for more. Not giving up or giving in. It means giving up. Giving in. Yoga means sensual pleasure and the erotic spring. It means contemplative disembodied reflection. Yoga means somewhere between these spaces of opposition - an ease in whatever emerges.
Sheena and I (May Day, 2019) Two years after retirement she finds this five-year-old journal entry —Sept 5, 2015: the serendipity of today Such a beautiful first class day. Two courses began - and I returned home to pass out in a deeply pleasurable nap of sheer exhaustion at how intense these initial encounters can… Continue reading Pandemic Journal 11/1/21: a retiree remembers classrooms students hallways colleagues gardens mentors
No Gate No Lock 