Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

“In Blackwater Woods” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive. © Back Bay Books, 1983.

The clouds that wander through the sky

Have no roots, no home; nor do the distinctive

Thoughts floating through the mind.

Once this is seen,

Discrimination stops.

Rest at ease your body.

Giving not, nor taking,

Put your mind at rest.

Maha Mudra is like a mind that clings

to nothing.

–Buddhist Tantric master Tilopa (988-1069 CE) in his “Song of Maha Mudra”

I’ll get this part out of the way first—Billy was murdered where he slept behind a gas station near my house in Grant Park. Local media reported the cause of death was believed to be blunt force trauma to the head.

“Neighbors told Channel 2 that customers and workers at the gas station loved Bethune, who they said held the door open for everyone and did favors for people,” the short blurb in the AJC read as if trying to humanize someone whose life was already made meaningless by the headline: “Homeless man found beaten to death in Grant Park.”

Not that I am any better. Billy not only held the door for me but he knew my name and what I did for a living. He knew my son and where he went to school. He had a rough idea how much I gave him the last time I gave him something and when that was.

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Lotus mudra and sunshine amid the fiddleheads at the Atlanta History Center.

Teacher: Sibley Fleming completed her RYT 200-Hour Yoga Teacher Training at Nirvana Yoga in December 2018 and has been a regular student of yoga for the past five years. Her teachers include Leigh Anne Neal, Amanda McGee, Lucy Curtis, and Douglas Johnson.

Location: Nirvana Yoga, 464 Cherokee Ave SE #201, Atlanta, GA 30312 (Grant Park)

Saturday, April 13; 11 am -12:15 pm

Gentle all-levels yoga flow. Suitable for beginners.

Free/voluntary $5 donation to help support “Hotel St. Dunstan’s”

St. Dunstan’s serves as one of 13 host congregations that provide shelter and meals for up to four homeless families for a week at a time, four times a year. Sunday School classrooms become home for the families while they are here. Parishioners provide meals, serve as evening hosts, and spend the night. Hotel St. Dunstan’s is part of Family Promise a national organization that seeks to help homeless and low-income families achieve sustainable independence through a community-based response.

Here’s the playlist! 🙂

For #internationalwomensday, I remember my grandmothers: Mary Lou Robson Fleming (historian and teacher) and Celestine Sibley (reporter and author). Both were independent, brilliant women who lived lives of grace and dignity. I am grateful to have grown up with such strong female role models.

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There was an awesome challenge on LinkedIn this week in honor of #Internationalwomensday called #wishiknewat22, which likely needs no further explanation. It’s so much easier to give advice when it doesn’t require taking stock and courageously-yet-gently turning that advice on your younger self. If I honestly wrote and posted such a thing, I thought, complete strangers would learn that at 22, I was vulnerable, too trusting, naive, uncertain. 

At 22, I was intensely creative, unfiltered, dragged along as if by the invisible strings of constant and passionate inspiration. My brain would wake me at all hours of the night with full poems or paragraphs that had to be scribbled down on paper before it would shut back down and allow me to sleep. My tall Eiffel Tower frame–fine architectural wonder of Amazon flesh I had the potential to be–was left willowy and weak from body image issues and the attendant eating disorders.

Thinking of my sweet and fragile younger self (yes decades of distance helps), I jotted down the things I wished I had not had to learn by trial and error, though life is an effective teacher. It didn’t take long to do, as if the words had clogged up somewhere in my darkest heart and were relieved finally to be directed to their proper home. Indeed, going through the process was a kind of liberation, a sort of kindness from myself to myself that could only be improved upon had I heard the same words from my mother or a grandmother. 

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Last night before class, I asked the teacher, Amanda M., if now that the holidays had passed we had entered yoga “ordinary” time like in the Christian church calendar, those regular days when we go about the business of ordinary living.

The first Monday of 2019.

“No!” Amanda responded emphatically. “It’s January. There’s nothing ordinary about January in yoga studios.”

“Really?” I asked. “Why not?”

“Because it’s when everyone returns to the studio.”

A major ah-ha went off in my head. It was true. I had been in some sparsely populated Monday night classes in December (I was keeping my eyes on my own mat so I wasn’t noticing overtly.) Yet Monday, January 7, the first Monday of the New Year, was full of people.

My youngest son’s girlfriend gave me a Yoga Journal calendar for Christmas that has daily practice tips, from how to get into Parsva Bakasana (side crow pose) to how to meditate. Most people probably view yoga as primarily a form of exercise like CrossFit, which is completely fine. I guess like other exercise routines, you start out great at the beginning of the year with the best of intentions and then life happens.

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New Year’s Eve 2018 I taught my first yoga class.

About a week after Christmas 2018, I was anonymously walking down the potato chip aisle of the convenience store across the interstate from my house, when a familiar voice tapped me on the shoulder. “Hello, yoga teacher,” said my late night friend, one of the store clerks, a young Indian man who often marvels at what I am willing to put in my body and how little impact it seems to have on my well-being.

There are many ways to get to know strangers. One is by having late night conversations about how poor food choices conflict with the idea of yoga teacher training, one of the main focuses being non-violence against yourself and the world around you.

What my friend did not know was that I wasn’t in training any longer–I was a fully certified instructor, so “Yoga Teacher” was less a nickname and more a fact. It was a little ironic given I was secretively buying Ruffles cheese potato chips and Vienna sausages. And it sort of jolted me awake a bit–it’s simply not always easy to walk the walk. For me or anyone else, about anything.

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Mesmerizing live brown bear cam. Check it out at www.explore.org.

This summer, I’ve been watching the brown bears fishing for sockeye salmon at Brooks Falls in Alaska’s Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska via a live cam.  The National Park Service provides this 24-hour live stream free of charge every year between July and August.

I shared the bear link with a girlfriend who subsequently invited me to spend the weekend at her mountain house in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.

On the way in the car, she told me that she’d received calls from her mountain neighbors warning her not to walk alone in the woods because of the plethora of black bear sightings in the area. There was lots of evidence of rummaging through garbage cans, and one man walked into his kitchen to find a bear in his refrigerator.

Knowing I love to walk, my friend said we should walk together, or at the very least I should take her hunting dog, Millie. It’s one of those things you agree to because it’s easier than telling a likelier truth.

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