Nec reditum Diomedis ab interitu Meleagri,
nec gemino bellum Troianum orditur ab ovo;
semper ad eventum festinat et in medias res
non secus ac notas auditorem rapit, et quae
desperat tractata nitescere posse relinquit.
-Horace
December’s almost-predictable roller-coaster ride leads me to a beautiful #abundance of creative ideas and promised into 2021. The quarantining process brings with it a shift of #perspective with learning new tools, such as #mindfulness, through a turbulent 2020. At school, we literally had opportunities to re-invent the teaching wheel (and that’s as close to autonomy as you can get in any content). As with most of 2020, great scarcity and unknowing brought #irresistiblecircumstances to discover the important people in our lives and places of refuge, along with how to receive and return Love. Revisiting and tagging thought categories has been useful in seeing #whatis, essentially the #practice of yoga with all that is available, any time and in any place, with the difficulty and uncomfortableness of 2020 snuggled right up against #pain, #grief, and #catharsis; working through resistance requires hard work. Who is to say whether it is the work of 2020 that makes us weary or 2020, a tag itself in omnipresence.
Today, the proverbial 2020 train creaks and clacks slowly up to its pinnacle, and I sit here, stuck between past and future. Experience dictates caution (just like a teacher). Intuition advises my adrenals to scream and get off the ride, but healthy curiosity reconciles with the dose of knowing or, rather, acceptance. Daily walks in Florida’s #skog in the perfect Season among the miles of sandhills, prickles, and humorless humidity has uncovered Nature’s own inherent wild ride–a message to perhaps slow down the pace and look around in the #irresistiblecircumstances which one has created for oneself.
What is Walk
Whether through the miracle of birth
This body Earth
holds host to the catalog of dismissed #abundances:
the water oak, the cypress, the wild sages and cassia,
the thistles and duckweed, the blooming poison ivy,
the water lettuce, the tickweed and asters of the brush,
the sweetgum and inkberry, the ribwort plantain,
or through the death of 2020;
This body Earth
returns to inner fertility of a Florida mid-winter:
moss carpeting the realms below the roots
home of ant, snakes, spiders, and little birds
(a recurrent theme) while
Spanish moss dangles fat and lazily from canopy
and across the pale dead grass,
a pair of hawks glide to dinner
witnessed
along with vultures and their darker intents
(Not a look of someone doing someone else’s work)
A rotting log from a bird’s eye view.
Blistered feet will write the story of thorny 2020:
Whether it is the instrument
through which Gods play
or words playing Gods
Here I walk with what is
In media res