This is it. 2009 is the year that I am going to finally start to live in the present, the let the past fall away like a scale from the back of a serpent. To not obsess over the future. This is the year I will stop sweeping things under the rug or creating piles of clutter--literal and figurative--in my life. The year that I wake up and feel grateful instead of wishing I could change this or tweak that or not do this or just do that. Oh, I know there are day to day frustrations. I am the mother of a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old, so they come with the territory. I write about my life with them at http://deadlinemom.blogspot.com.

But here, at Gaia is where I want to really write about my soul's journey, the path from where I have been to where I am today. At the interior of my heart.

Three months ago, I took my yoga practice out of the living room, where I had been doing yoga for 10 years in front of the television set, and into the sphere of living beings. This is a big leap for me. I have been an athlete for many years and raced bikes competitively for a decade before stopping for a number of reasons, reasons I will no doubt explore here. For so long, I have allowed my physical journey to be in the eye of the beholder. I worried and wondered about how I looked, how I performed, and, most destructively, who I was beating. I didn't realize I was just beating myself up.

I like yoga because it is all about me and my interior capital S Self. It is the closest thing I have found to the bliss of natural childbirth. But I can return to it over and over again. I am finding that in being flexible with my body, my mind follows. So that I don't take the world so much at face value, because I know things look different if your head is on the floor.

Thank you for reading, and Namaste!

Grandmother,
you planted these seeds.
Two generations ago,
and now,
the fruit is a pucker that moves
mouth to soles of feet,
and I miss you.
In the videotape from Uncle,
your voice is different,
my memory always distorts,
hinges like a rusty mirror
on all of the things
I am working out in my self.
But tonight,
none of that matters, Grandma.
It is only you and me,
tasting this sunlight in our bones,
the dusky light of the fruit.
I smile and tilt my face to the sky with its stars
that haven't moved to make room for morning,
and I say
thank you

And what if the saddest lines echo on?
Live, for example,
down the radius
Or up the femur?
Called up in a cellular back and forth,
like a conversation
over a long-ago phone line?
I have a feeling
the right side of my body
recalls you,
while the left side
pretends you never existed.
How is that for self betrayal?
I am standing like a stork,
first this leg,
then that leg.
I am letting the two halves of me
bleed together
and then,
like a miracle,
it's as if you never existed.

I hear about the monkey mind, but what is concerning me most lately is the blaming mind. It seems to jump as furiously as the monkey mind. Pointing fingers. Searching for blame. Making people pay. Withholding grace and affection until...what? Why do it? I am working on this within myself. I try to be conscious of it happening. Like when I think I can't go to work because of the kids. Or I would have been on time if it hadn't been for the traffic. Ugh. I am so tired of this in myself. It doesn't seem to help me become a better person. It certainly doesn't change the situation, but only distills within my soul a sense of despondence and sloth. If it someone else's fault or the fault of some condition that is beyond my responsibility than I don't have to change myself. Just watching the way my mind can trick me into blame is frightening, and it's one of the first tasks meditation and yoga is helping me with.