Floods and deserts, grips and handles

messy practice thoughts left just as they are

I am always struggling between the need to work (teach yoga and the multiple hats that involves, including the scribbling in words hat which my students love) and my longing to just write.

To just. Write. (auditory pause here. Crickets, maybe. Or a whining guitar. Or maybe something rising symphony like; a choir in full throated harmony).

There is so much that I am working on for this space and the glory of ‘just writing’, but this week I haven’t had the time to attend to it. I’m busy getting courses going in my so-called-real-life. The one that pays the money.

Money itself is a struggling question. I mean I’m fine; I’ve been able to not charge extortionately for what I teach because I’ve got socialist leaning principles and I’ve done a lot of work, put in a lot of years, have had a slow build up of enough students of the right kind to give me a survival wage. Most months. Though I’d love to be a working writer I know how mythical that is. I currently have 25 paying subscribers here, out of just shy of 2000 subscribers total. What does that make? 1 in 80 ? It amounts to 4 cents a day. But that’s okay: my point in being here is to write for the glory of it (I mean personally feeling glorious, not glory as in I get some shine). To write for fuck’s sake, not the dime. And I’m just going to keep doing it.

Time, money, and priorities get to the heart of what I was busy scribbling for students in the last few days. This turbulent and battering difficulty, the ongoing quest for balance, the question which I suggested as a kind of tensioning at the heart of human life:

how to handle it. How to grip. How to hold.

That’s The Question.

How to not drown at the firehose of information and overwhelm that is life. But not die of thirst and lack, either.

The thing is, we need a holder. A gripper. An appropriate gewgaw with which to wrastle this crazy pony (sorry; G and I were vacation roadtripping in South Dakota’s badlands last weekend. The cowgirl came out.)

Personal practice is the answer, I said to them.