Every month I feel like The Sun Magazine is written just for me. Each month I open its pages and I swear that the editors knew exactly what I would be wanting to read and the writers knew exactly what I needed to hear. This month has a range of writings that talk about God and Hafiz and one writer even shared a very loved quote of mine in her piece:
You are so young… and I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
I can almost feel Rainer Maria Rilke’s eyes looking hard into mine with her hands resting on my shoulders, eagerly saying these words in a way that is urgent and heartfelt and crafted from her lips just for my ears to comprehend. Just for my heart to comprehend. And so with her words I feel more peaceful than I have yet this weekend.
I enjoy Fall Sunday mornings as an adult probably the same as – if not more than – I enjoyed Christmas mornings as a child. Yesterday I ate my first pumpkin muffin of the season. The past two days were spent joyfully immersed in early morning yoga practices with my teacher, following my home brewed black coffee and a quiet bus ride to the shala. And now I’ve committed myself to a day without outside interference following my practice. Read, Write, Teach, Meditate, Breathe. But do not watch another episode of Orange is The New Black. I swear that show, like a good book, is impossible to put down.
I want to spend some time writing about anything but the fact that change is on the horizon, that we are moving again. That Erik wants to run over our landlord with our scooter. So let me do that because I am overwhelmed by the future and what I want to be overwhelmed by is the present moment in all of its supremity: the cool temperature, the softness of a sweatshirt, cats sleeping on the bed, my fingers striking piano keys.
And pizza. Don’t think for a moment that having a daily yoga practice in addition to a vegetarian diet excludes pizza on Sundays. Especially during Fall Sundays with football games streaming from the television. The television that we all but keep stored except for Sundays when Erik takes it out for football and pizza. It’s 3:40pm and Erik is teaching and I’m waiting for him to come home so I can order the pizza. But my stomach rumbles and I probably can’t wait much longer so he might just have to deal if he comes home and half of the pizza is already gone.
My body crinkles and cracks when I stand up from the chair. I feel like someone opened up the back of my shirt and poured love down my spine. Like syrup drizzled over home-cooked french toast for dinner.
I just ordered the pizza and I’m thinking about the quote by Lillian Smith which was also in The Sun today. The quote about how faith and doubt aren’t antagonists after all – but rather – they work together in rounding the unknown curve.
We round the curve together, me and God in our bumper cars. We keep laughing because he has pizza on his shirt and I have all that love dripping down my back.
Are all miracles born from obstacle? Are we all just really crying in eka pada sirsasana B when we place our head to our leg and look inside our hearts? Or is it just me?
I want to do a better job of noticing my dreams. I want to eat pancakes with God at my shala and tell him about my struggles in second series. And really what I will be telling him about are my struggles with myself. I both want my dreams to have answers and I want the answers to be the ones that I want. Can I have both? Why not?
I want to write something intellectual and important and then have no attachment to it.