My back is flat these days,
When I go into a pose
I open up my pelvis
I even lift my toes.
My downward dog is dirty
And my knees can touch my nose
But nothing helps you when
You got the chaturanga woes

Those jumpings, pigeons.
cobras, fish and crows,
There’s nothin’ worse than
Comin’ home with
The chaturanga woes.

I just can’t find my chakras
And my lotus won’t unfold
My muscles cry for mercy
When I tuck my butt and hold

My yogi’s understanding
So there’s really no excuse
But that don’t help
When what you got
Is the chaturanga blues.

—Robin Maxwell

Reading at Koloa practice 03/12/2010

We have not come here to take prisoners,
But to surrender ever more deeply
To freedom and joy.
We have not come into this exquisite world
To hold ourselves hostage from love.
Run my dear,
From anything
That may not strengthen
Your precious budding wings.
Run like hell my dear,
From anyone likely
To put a sharp knife
Into the sacred, tender vision
Of your beautiful heart.
We have a duty to befriend
Those aspects of obedience
That stand outside of our house
And shout to our reason
“0 please, 0 please,
Come out and play.”
For we have not come here to take prisoners
Or to confine our wondrous spirits,
But to experience ever and ever more deeply
Our divine courage, freedom, and
Light!

—Hafiz

Reading at Anara SPA 03/08/2010

—-  Yogi Amrit Desai (Gerudev)

As heaven and earth come together, as the dream-time and daytime merge, we register the shockingly exhilarating fact that we are in charge of creating a New Earth. Not in some distant time or faraway place, but right here and right now..

…. overthrowing the living dead is not enough. Protesting the well-dressed monsters is not enough. We can’t afford to be consumed with our anger; can’t be obsessed and possessed by their danger.
Our mysterious bodies crave delight and fertility. Our boisterous imaginations demand fresh tastes of infinity.

In the New Earth we’re creating, we need lusty compassion and ecstatic duty, ingenious love and insurrection-ary beauty.
We need radical curiosity and reverent pranks, voracious listening and ferocious thanks.

So I’m curious, my fellow creators. Since you and I are in charge of making a New Earth and not just breaking down the dying culture–where do we begin? What stories do we want at the heart of our experiments? What questions will be our oracles?

Here’s what I say: In the New Earth we’re creating, we will ridicule the cult of doom and gloom, and embrace the cause of zoom and boom. We will laugh at the stupidity of evil and hate; we will summon the brilliance to praise and create.
No matter how upside down it al may appear, we will have no fear, because we know this big secret: All of creation is conspiring to shower us with blessings. Life is  crazily in love with us –brazenly and innocently in love with us.
The universe always gives us exactly what we need, exactly when we need it.
*
Pronoia is our word of power … the antidote for paranoia … the spell we cast to gleam ourselves awake again and again. It means that even if we can’t see and don’t know, primal benefactors are plotting to emancipate us.

The winds and the tides are on our side, forever and ever, amen. The fire and the rain are scheming to steal our impossible pain. The sun and the moon and the star remember our real names, and our ancestors pray for us while we’re dreaming.
We have guardian angels and thousands of teachers … provocateurs with design! to unleash us … helpers and saviors we can’t even imagine … brothers and sisters who want us to blossom.
Thanks to them
from whom the blissful blessings flow,
we are waking up.

The roads they pave us,
the places they save us,
the tomatoes they grow us,
above and below us.

Their mysterious stories,
their morning glories,
their loaves and fishes,
granting our wishes.

The songs they sing us,
the gifts they bring us,
the secrets they show us,
above and below us.

Thanks to them,
from whom the blissful blessings now,
we are waking up.
*
I’m allergic to dogma. I thrive on riddles. Any idea I believe, I reserve the right to disbelieve as well. But more than any other vision I’ve ever tested, pronoia describes the way the world actually is.
It’s wetter than water, stronger than death, and truer than the news. It smells like cedar smoke in the autumn rain, and if you dose your eyes right now, you can feel it shimmering like the aurora borealis in your organs and muscles. Its song is your blood’s song.
Some people argue that life is strife and suffering is normal. Others swear we’re born sinful and only heaven can provide us with the peace that passes understanding.

But pronoia says that being alive on this rough green and brown planet is the highest honor and privilege. It’s an invitation to work wonders and perform miracles that aren’t possible in any nirvana, promised land, or afterlife.

I’m not exaggerating or indulging in poetic metaphor when I tell you that we are already living in paradise. Visualize it if you dare. The sweet stuff that quenches all of our longing is not far away in some other time and place. It’s right here and right
now.

Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning knew the truth: “Earth’s crammed with heaven.”

—Robert Brezsny

Breathe by Linaji

The time will come

When,

With elation,

You will greet yourself arriving

At your own door, in your own mirror,

And each will smile at the other’s welcome,

And say, sit here, Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was yourself.

Give wine, Give bread, Give back your heart

To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All you life, whom you ignored for another

Who knows you by heart.

Take down the letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes,

Peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit feast on your life.

— Derek Walcott

As light reveals, so also shadows are spawned.

With this I must learn to rock my ignorance to sleep to await its hungry cry.

I must feed my insincerity its milky gruel.

I must give my meanness rapt attention.

I must dine with my shallowness and play chess with my incompetence.

I must massage my cruelty’s neck and let my coldness share my bed.

I must serve tea to my gloom and warm my fear’s cold feet, while tucking in my weakness for the night.

I must play cards with my animal passions and wrap my ugliness in my favorite silken robe.

I must sing to my conceit and pick up my naivete and hold it close in my arms.

All these folk live in my house, as they must.

I must honor their darkness for in it they help make the light shine.

With this, all at once and in balance, the wholeness of soul can be truly found.

Happy is the house where all sleep warm.

Where no one must lie in the basement, damp alone and afraid-
and enraged at the one who locked the cellar door

All those many years before.

— Unknown

I'll be your shelter - by Lee Wilde

I look forward to the moment beauty is my own
conceived easily like yellow dipped trees,
a lazy dog the afternoon pillow of a lover’s chest
when beauty is memorized and not a plea
taken at the face value of Hollywood

What is beauty anyway, but a shoulder to count on
when others can’t see me in visual context
it is perfect complexity, me entirely rather than
in pieces of cheekbone, lip, eyelash, and flesh
me without the ebb and flow of mirrors

I want beauty that can’t be consumed
by a box of cookies nor moon shadowed eyes
beauty that doesn’t care what beauty says or does
no matter who’s watching, beauty that is but
blood in my veins, my breath, my forgiveness

When I remember beauty, I hold the balance

between heaven and earth, woman and man
I become a sky full of constellations
and the space where light
looks into the window of each day.

When I accept myself, I become as I am.

Beautiful.

— Blake More

I Want Both of Us

Desert Moon for 2 by Linaj

To start talking about this great love

As if you, I and the Sun were all married
And living in a tiny room,
Helping each other to cook,
Do the wash,
Weave and sew
Care for our beautiful
Animals.

We all leave each morning
To labor on the earth’s field.
No one does not lift a great pack.

I want both of us to start singing like two
Traveling minstrels
About this extraordinary existence
We share,

As if
You, I, and God were all married

And living in
A tiny
Room.

— Hafiz

Dreaming Bear

Reading at the Waimea practice – 02/23/2010

Love wants to reach out and manhandle us,
Break all our teacup talk of God.

If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,

He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip
all those toys in the world
That bring you no joy.

Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth

That make you fight within yourself, dear one,
And with others,

Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.

God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice His dropkick.

The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:

Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.

But when we hear
He is in such a
“playful drunken mood”

Most everyone I know
Quickly packs their bags
and hightails it
Out of town

—Hafiz