Sharing my journal inspirations after yesterday’s yoga class (my second so far after a long Sabbatical) and some poems

I am sitting on my yoga mat / Soft music transporting me to the centre of the Earth / An umbilical cord of particles of light / Me and Her. We are One / The chatter of people like butterflies touching our yoga mats, our clothes, our skin, our Souls / We are One, Connected / A circle of interwoven intersubjectivities / Someone calls out a name / Someone mentions a colour – neon red / A number, an animal, a food, a film, a car make / Someone’s been to a familiar far off land / Someone’s humming a tune / Disease is whispered / Terminal cancer, trachoma / Dis-ease is talked about / Muscle tension, joint pain, fatigue, flatfeet / Pilates is better than yoga someone says / Maybe cheaper adds another / Baggy pants or leggings / I remain present to all / Within my body, within the room, within the world / The heartbeats in my chest / The discontinued string of words like children’s play / The breeze blowing through the open window / And the Tabitha cat waiting patiently outside the glass door / Gratitude I remind myself / Gratitude for the breath / And for the flow of blood / For the pulsating and the ticking / Gratitude for the flow of life that courses through me right now / I am here, that’s all / I have made it thus far / I have been knocked down and raised / I know I am / I am both light and flesh / Energy and skin / Ego and Soul / Permeable and separate / Same and different / Weak and strong / Constrained and free / United and alone / Here on my yoga mat the Universe

By Cameron, Julia from The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity

I wish I could take language / And fold it like cool, moist rags / I would lay words on your forehead / I would wrap words on your wrists / There, there, my words would say / Or something better / I would ask them to murmur, Hush and Shh, shhh, its all right / I would ask them to hold you all night / I wish I could take language / And daub and soothe and cool / Where fever blisters and burns / Where fever turns yourself against you / I wish I could take language / And heal the words that were the wounds / You have no names for

Desiderata by Max Ehrmann

“You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

The Laughing Heart by Charles Bukowski

“Your life is your life / Don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission / Be on the watch.”

An Ocean, A Fish Bowl by Dave Ursillo, from his book ‘I am We’

The ocean would seem a burdensome place / to a fish whose only home was his bowl.

My bowl has shattered / I’m not sure who nudged it off the table.

But I do know that Two Strange Hands scooped me up
and saved me / They gave me freedom by tossing me into the waves
that nearly caused me to drown……….

Some fish just prefer the bowl.