The long road to simplicity

It used to be and still sometimes is that I take on a very ambitious project. Usually this project is cooking something or perhaps knitting something and perhaps now designing class plans for yoga class. Usually this project is complicated, often more complicated than anticipated, leaving me somewhere in the middle of the project cursing when I decided to begin as it's now 12 am and my feet hurt from standing so long.

Anyway, the point is not that. The point is, lately, I've been fascinated with stripping it all down, the complexity, the planning, the needing of things to be a certain way. Especially with Italian cooking it seems there needn't be too much that makes good food: some good balsamic vinegar, good tomatoes and good herbs and you're set for many things.

I've been so fascinated with cooks who compose things that are simple and strikingly delicious, neither having too many ingredients nor having too few, able to strike some unknowable balance between too little and too much.

There's such an elegance to such things. In some sense, children know this simplicity and it seems somewhere along the line of growing up, we forget this simplicity and if we're really lucky, we spend the rest of our lives trying to get it back, whether that is the ability to just be happy in the moment or being able to feel the wonder in a newly sprouted leaf.

And such a thing is never just once...we rediscover simplicity again and again and again, in cooking, in life, in practice. Sometimes you have to pile it all on and then take it all off again to find the essence of something. Everything can be fresh and new. To come back to this simplicity again as adults, with awareness somehow reawakens appreciation for things as they are and allows us to rediscover the joy in purely being.

Or in any case, it means I'm spending less time in the kitchen. ;)

Pumpkin Wheat Honey Muffins

There was weekend muffinage

I'm glad to report they were quite delicious. Recipe here.

the sacred space

I'm beginning to recognize the value of ritual in creating a space for yoga. I've always had an aversion to routine, thinking it somehow stripped me of spontaneity or individuality to do the same thing, the same way over and over again. Now in the process of trying to carve out a home practice, a very difficult thing for me to do, I'm finding a new purpose to mindful ritual - habitually creating a space to commune with the self in silence.

Something about beginning the OM and end with the OM marks the space and time as apart from all other times of day, as if to say now I make the time to feel life from inside my body not just react to external stimuli. The process of radiating out instead of absorbing in.

Today it feels good to make that space and to bow in reverence to what lies within.

Flash forward a week later...

Teacher Training started a week ago but I feel like I've been doing this forever.

Today just wants me to practice, wants to feel the "juice" flowing in the body, between the shoulder blades, wants to feel the breath in union with movement and the quietness of mind focused single-heartedly at one task - breathing, moving, being.

When does yoga become more than a practice? Perhaps I'm still foolishly in love with it all, waiting for the illusion to melt and experience the reality of what is. I try my best to wait for it with my cup empty.