Thanksgiving


Indian Corn 2 by Alessandra Cimatti. You can use this link to see this and her other work.

This is the time of year where no one should go hungry. Though the large majority of us have the means to keep ourselves well fed, we hunger for something more. Whether it’s familial, material, spiritual or just a sense that something’s missing, this “lack of” manifests itself as anything from mild hunger pangs in the form of dissatisfaction or “not feeling right” to an insatiable growling of envy, depression or needless striving. Some of us stuff ourselves with material items believing they can fill that void, others move briskly from quick fix to quick fix never realizing that all this movement is like eating sugar – it may seem sweet going in, but it leaves us over stimulated and ultimately unsatisfied. Paradoxically, through our continued consumption we end up bloated and undernourished.

Through this whole process, this never ending meal called life, we forget how much we already have, how little we truly need and most of all, to be thankful. Gratitude is comfort food; it sticks to our ribs and satiates us. Gratitude certainly won’t solve all of our problems and it does not mean “bad” things won’t happen to us, but it does help us to appreciate what we do have, and it’s usually much more than we thought. When thankfulness enters our consciousness, contentedness can follow. It’s with this in mind that we encourage you to give thanks for the abundance in your life. Pull up to the table for some down-OM cookin’ and dig in!

Love After Love
by Derek Walcott

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 your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Fall Back

It was with a mix of dread and gratitude that we prepared to set our clocks back one hour this past Sunday morning–gratitude for the extra hour of sleep and dread at the prospect of losing an hour of daylight each evening. There is something profound and fascinating about setting our clocks back– we are in essence traveling through time, taking a trip one hour into the past and re-living the hour between 1 and 2 AM. Many of us pass the time in sleep, but even so, you are making the trip back in time. In this manner most of us view our time travel as relegated to two trips per year – we spring ahead and fall back. In actuality, we are all veteran time travelers – consistently reliving our past or playing out the future.

Mental time travel can be a healthy exercise. It may provide us with life lessons and help us to make better choices in our current circumstances. At the same time, we sometimes set the dial to past or future events and get ourselves stuck– attached to the past or the future and as a result we are unable to fully experience the present. Whether it’s regret, anticipation or pain, pain being the absence of something pleasurable previously or yet to be experienced, every moment spent there is time away from here, and here is the only place to Be.

So what to do? We can’t buy being present in a bottle, though someone will certainly try to sell that to you. Being present starts with you and your practice, whatever that practice is- asana, meditation or living your yoga off the mat. Each of these practices offers you a means to move more fully into the moment, to focus and at the same time “go with the flow.” Be mindful, pay attention and be vigilant. It’s never too late to get started, in fact, there’s no time like the present.

Don’t let your soul get lonely child
It’s only time, it will go by
Don’t look for love in faces, places
It’s in you, that’s where you’ll find kindness
Be here now
– Ray LaMontagne