DENVER- Notes from a Yogini

Halla Khouri, Seane Corn, Susanne Sterling

[caption id="attachment_208" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Susanne Sterling & Halla Khouri"][/caption]

During the Yoga Month kick-off in Denver, I attended a chat and part of a yoga practice led by Susanne Sterling, Seane Corn and Halla Khouri. Below are notes taken during their chat. Most of the sentiments expressed below were from Seane. She really inspired me and helped me think of yoga beyond just a physical practice.

Yoga’s Shift into Action

Sustainability in activism is all about collaboration. Transform that which is in ourselves and disconnected from spirituality. We need to pray for our leaders whoever they are because if we don’t, you become part of the problem. Where are you living in your own personal war? Yoga teaches that we are all connected. So individual healing impacts the world: you clean up you and your kids and friends will pick up on that. This will then effect the kind of leaders they become.

To learn compassion, you need to understand the shadow parts within. Empathy with each other is when we are truly connecting and you can move beyond pity or judgement. Shadow and light- if I judge you, then it’s because I’m judging me. You don’t wait until you’re totally healed before reaching out. It’s dangerous to let yourself be known.

Yoga is an act of radicalism. Practice can be isolating (mat, breath, relationship with God). Becoming an activist is about finding your voice. Small circle support of five to 12 people. Service can be the biggest yoga you ever do. In the midst of all the interactions during service, ask yourself, “Can you stay in your heart now?” “Can you serve even now?” You will draw the challenging people that will move you closer to who you need to become.

www.offthematintotheworld. org — if you raise $20,000 you can join them on one of their service trips to Cambodia. This is a fund to help get yoga instructors working with at-risk youth understanding that yoga heals and can transform lives.

DENVER- DNC Day 1 Perspectives & Climate

SPIRIT OF THE DNC
There are people throughout the airport holding signs that say “Questions?” and are working in conjunction with the DNC

the McDonald employees are all wearing obama t-shirts.

There are three secret service workers standing in front of me. they discussed how wearing sunglasses allows them to see where a bullet is coming from if one is shot out. The guy I take to be a senior official is commenting that the convention center is not very good from a security standpoint. If they need to rush in emergency help, it’s in a gridlock and not very easy to get in and out of.

To my right is a huddle of three people, one of whom said he worked on the Dukakis campaign. They said selecting Biden has been a growing evolution. How he responds with sense. Biden is a dog. At one point he was going to be B’s press secretary. They talked about how Kennedy is doing better.

Our luggage is taking an abominably long time and we find out over the loudspeaker that it’s because Nancy Pelosi was on our flight along with secret service. The flight number is erased from the screen but slowly our bags are making their way along the carousel.

In the shuttle I meet Jamie who is a volunteer in the press office and has just flown in from Washington DC where he works on the Senate Budget in the areas of defense and foreign affairs. David is sitting to my right and he works in the press office with the House Foreign Affairs. The other passenger, Gary is a lobbyist from California. We ride downtown as David and I discuss the Georgia / Russian matter of Ossetia.

We pass street corners flanked with cops close to the convention center. There is a heightened sense of energy and alert in the air.

Tonight after we set up our booth and were back in the hotel, we heard booming cracks outside and ran to the window to see fireworks exploding for a good five minutes. The hotel lobby is playing the Star Spangled Banner.

It is all very kinetic, this energy, this possibility afloat in the air. Stay tuned. Tomorrow we may crash a DNC after-hours party.

SOUND: Larissa Szporluk’s “Deliverer”

“Dark Sky Question” as a title of a collection of poems sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? I found the poems inside equally compelling by what they tell and what they leave out. What would be the single question you might ask to a dark sky? What would its’ response be? Szporluks’ poems have an air of mystery in them. The one that caught and held my attention in my reading is “Deliverer” which I am happy to re-post below. If you like what you read, check out DSQ. Enjoy.

Deliverer by Larissa Szporluk

No one can spin forever.
It will all slow down.
The poles will grow sore on the world,
the valve in the heart
will retard, slow down, slow down,
to a speed we can’t see,
can’t feel, slow as a cloud
carting snow through atomic darkness,
to her son, when the magnet
is low, when the blood,
can’t see, can’t feel, how slow…
as the whale pulling out of the sea
can’t see the no-sea,
can’t feel the tide bring it back,
breaking her agony over the beach,
who she was, who she loved,
who God opened up, how still and how slow,
belly no longer with Jonah.

TGA Team Member: Jeremy

Jeremy

Originally uploaded by indieaz

This is Jeremy. He’s from Montreal and is part of Global Voices. If you haven’t heard about GV, you need to hop on that band wagon: blogs read all around the world and then condensed thematically into articles by their blog readers. Pretty sweet. Jeremy was Mr. Good Attitude. Very fun and happy-go-lucky.

TGA Team Member: Liah

Liah

Originally uploaded by indieaz

This is Liah. She’s been living in SF for six months and traveled the world in 10 months. It sounded amazing and less inexpensive than I would have thought. She provided the map of which neighborhoods we should hit up and pretty much rocked at guessing the clues.

TGA Team Member: Chuck

Chuck

Originally uploaded by indieaz

This is Chuck. He flew out from Houston and is best known for his Youtube videos where he is known as the SEO Rapper. Chuck was our resident photographer and has a great laugh.

TGA Team Member: Vache

This is Vache in the checkered shirt, from our team, TGA. He lives in NY and has multiple blogs, but got his start writing about Asian films. He was our technical superstar with everything from surfing the free WIFI when we would stop to calling friends back in NY and asking them questions when we got stumped.

Vache

Originally uploaded by indieaz

WordPress Scavenger Hunt 2008

Sunday afternoon wrapped up the WordPress Scavenger Hunt in the city. It raised money for a great cause (826 Valencia) and allowed us an opportunity to get out, madly careen around the city and get to know other people better. Our team’s name was “Team Good Attitude” and we were from all over the place as you will see below. We raked in 850 points and had fun. I think we collectively would agree rolling down the hill at Dolores Park or hula-hooping was the best moment. And introducing the team:

Drive: “No time to even breathe, not when gold is on the mind”

I am not a sports junkie. Far from it, my idea of TV usually is now and then, more in the direction of Project Runway or Heroes. But somehow, every night at 10:10 p.m. my body has been planted into our red velvet couch, tuned into NBC, watching the Olympics. I have become invested in Michael Phelps’ fight to the finish from the beginning. Some of the races have been amazingly inspirational- 400 relay where Jason Lezak just barely squeezes by Alain Bernard of France. Tonight Phelps beats Serbian swimmer Cavic by the length of a fingernail. A FINGERNAIL. I can hardly believe it and there is so much adrenaline rushing through me, stoked to watch him match Mark Spitz’s record of the most gold medals attained in one Olympics. Later watching Brazilian swimmer Cielo speed his way through the water, he doesn’t take a breath. He wins the gold and they show him from under the water and he looks like he is gritting his teeth. He wants it and is propelling beyond pushing himself forward to win. I salute these athletes, all the work they have put into preparing for a moment like this. A moment where it all comes together or it doesn’t.

I understand this 100 percent. Something inside me propels forward, packs it in, wants it all. The “it” may change, but it’s my it. I have never aspired to do anything half-assed. If you don’t play hard, why play? If you don’t give 100 percent, why give anything at all? At 31 years old, my life is ahead of me and the seconds are sprinting right by me. My life could easily be composed right now of tea, poetry and singing. It sounds great, even typed out. But here’s the thing, getting back into the swing of school has been abominably slow. I have read two uninspiring books of poetry and am pulled to keep reading until the next spark occurs. This semester involves a wild concoction of new work produced, revisions crafted and a compilation of older poems into a chapbook of 48 pages. In five short months, this is a sprint in the water without breathing. This is opening every pore and orifice to what the world is teaching or what it is saying throughout the days. What are the trees discussing? How does a casino in bocce relay a connection to all the women in my life with babies? I want to keep the journey going and yet I know it’s all going to be over before I can even inhale. So inertia battles with the call to action.

This is where singing kicks in. The meter and syllabic counts keep my ears perked and attuned to the natural rhythms of words making love to one another constantly. They derive great joy from internal rhyme, off rhymes revealing all that undercurrent of texture. Lately there is an even stronger exhiliration in singing harmonies. They feel so risky, so dangerously close to being off tune, but the pay-off is a sensation of being more fully alive. There’s nothing that can come close- nothing but writing a line of poetry that on the page is electric.

Then there is tea. I never would have thought my life would be so completely steeped in this world, but it often feels inescapable. I think the passion for tea comes from understanding how the world is in communication and contact, how we are connected through a cup of tea. These hand-picked leaves provide a livelihood for a person in China and brews an exquisitely nuanced infusion in the U.S. Love of flavor and culture culminate in that cup of tea. My nights continue being filled with tea, as if it wants to edge out the poetry and there is this need to find the balance so both are satiated. Recipes in queue edging out my weekend free moments include White Tea Sangria and a Detox Mojito, when I’m not attending the WordPress “WordCamp” tomorrow and their scavenger hunt Sunday. How to find that balance between tea and the word…

I want it all. Is that asking too much? Probably. But life is a choose-your-own-mystery-style-young-adult book anyway. I’m interested in how the Author intends all for good. So, well done Michael Phelps, Cielo and all you people out there with a dream, a drive to catch it and the sacrifice meted out in your life to make it happen.