Ever since returning from the U.S. last week, I’ve been happily ensconced in the Yoga Shed each morning around 6:30. My body is remembering the grooves it used to slip into with ease before holidays and even before major surgery through up barriers to progress. I am very blessed by having this studio to play in, Heather to practice with and the amazing green vistas we look out on.
You can hear things growing this time of year. […]
Daniel and I had a beautiful last day in Northern California. Old friend, Melissa, took us into S.F. to lunch at the Legion of Honor Cafe in Golden Gate Park and then to the exhibition of paintings from the Musee D’Orsay – featuring Van Gough, Gaugin, and much more at the De Young Museum. Brilliant!
I kept thinking as I walked around dazzled by paintings like “Starry Night” and “Beach at Heist” how much I was missing the green vistas of our home on Mitchells Island. […]
Our current port of call is our friends’ houseboat on this man-made lake in Northern California.
There’s hardly anyone about because this is the end of the season with cooler temperatures – maybe 10 degrees o’nite. But daytime in the mid-twenties.
So with a dearth of other boaters, it’s absolutely peaceful here and the houseboat’s flat roof is perfect for yoga practice and very conducive for meditating.
We’ve slept under the stars on the roof, bundled in our doona, and searching out northern hemisphere constellations, like the Big Dipper. […]
Nestled among four mountain ranges,
Tucson Arizona is beloved to me as I went to high school and university way back when.
I formed my tastes for the desert, country and western music and mouth-watering Mexican food here.
I misspent part of my younger years drinking pitcher beer and making out under fragrant lemon trees in full bloom.
Happily I have relatives here to visit or I might skip Tucson’s western charms in favor of alluring undiscovered regions.
And happily, the rellies thus far have been congenial.
My yoga mat is a bit dusty after a couple days or non-use. […]
Over the last month of traveling in the U.S.. Eek, it really is a whole month. Yes, I have squeezed in a few poses here and there, but most posing has been done in front of a camera.
Daniel and I have seen some wondrous sights on this trip: the giant granite monoliths of Yosemite, the monstrous and ancient sequoia trees, the iconic monuments of Washington DC, and most recently, the beautiful blue ridge mountains of Shenandoah park.
It’s fascinating being a tourist in one’s own country. This place is so vast and varied. […]
The secret to longevity…. The giant sequoias have got it.
We visited them in their Mariposa, California home today…hundreds of them. The biggest towering up to 300 feet and 20 to 30 feet in diameter at their base.
These whoopers can live to be 3,000 years old. […]
A new experience! My first visit to Yosemite today. What an extraordinary experience being in the land of John Muir and Ansel Adams.
Muir was a sort of Wilderness Yogi, a visionary, who put his passion behind creating Yosemite as a park for us and for posterity.
I was blown away by the scale of the granite mountains and bouldered river beds shaped by glacial movements over ages.
To see the shiny, vertical rock faces with tiny figures climbiyng them was truly breathtaking. […]
It’s been almost 7 months since I had bi-lateral hip replacements and I thought it was time to have a look at how my yoga poses were coming along. Through the eye of a camera.
Daniel was kind enough to take some photos of me posing 😉
Now, you probably know that I would have deleted the not-so-hot images. […]
When I first moved to Australia from the U.S., I was much more of a free spirit than I am now. I was a flight attendant for T.W.A. for three years before landing in Oz and I didn’t even quit the job; I just took a leave of absence in case I wanted to move back “home”.
I would say that I didn’t have a sense of place, not even my birthplace, Chicago. I’d lived in N.Y., several suburbs in L.A., and Tucson, Arizona. […]
We live on a property which has been colonised by pine trees over the years, not a very nice variety of pine either. Even the saw millers don’t want to take them because the wood is so soft.
At one time we were told that the property had been cleared by the previous owners, and then within a couple of years, all the pines had returned. Opportunistic is such an apt word for them.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m as much of a tree hugger as I can be, but this is a complicated problem. […]
…no. If anything my cold is worse (mucous, hard to write that without the “yuk”) and now something else is happening, a sort of southerly movement of scratchiness down into my chest. I found myself apologising to Daniel this morning for my libido suffering from this cold, too. Sigh. Talk about shooting oneself in the foot.
Nevertheless somethings are under control: my yoga practice, for one, and I even managed to teach a class tonight, for another.
Also, I have an unblunted appreciation for the signs of spring that appearing all around our garden and our neighbourhood…. […]
When I woke up this morning completely blocked and breathing from my mouth, I thought of the only thing that would help – yoga practice.
So here I am in the Shed, writing to you, occasionally lifting my head to look out at the view – dewy, green grass with birds swooping in and out. Given this is Australia, the birds are not ordinary: king parrots, eastern rosellas, and kookaburras, for instance. (The magpies have been having sex this week, right before our eyes.)
I have faith that my practice will pull me together on all levels. […]
Two weeks tomorrow Daniel and I will be in the U.S.A. I have mixed feelings about returning to the land where I was born. Not because I don’t want to be there, but because I don’t want to not be here.
I’ve so appreciated the gentle changes that have occurred in our environment since moving to the country eight months ago. And the bigger changes that we’ve bestowed on house and garden over that time. […]
Happier than a calf on the teat….
Happier than a white horse rolling around in the mud….
Happier than a sun-shiny day after weeks of rain and clouds….
Happier than teaching yoga to my new crop of students….
Happier than the anticipation of 7 weeks holiday….
Happier than harvesting my first crop of tomatoes….
Happier than sitting in the sun, sheltered from the sun and reading a good book….
Happier than a beach walk at high tide….
Happier than a roaring fire and hot bowl of soup on a winter night….
It’s been a good day! […]
Oooh, it’s wet on NSW eastern seaboard. My Canberra friend wrote that even the dessicated capital city had had rain. Ninety-eight percent humidity has become normal and you could squeeze liquid out of the air, even when it doesn’t rain.
We are growing unanticipated things on the wetland portion of our land – the area that dried out completely in our several years’ drought.
I’m not complaining, no sir-ee, not in this wide brown country called Oz. […]
Two all-time great distractions of the time wasting stakes are watching babies and watching baby animals. Sleeping or waking there is something other-worldly about them that fascinates us.
I confess to losing I don’t how much time today in observing Farmer Scott’s new calves out in the next-door pastures. Their mothers seemed rather indifferent to them and that’s when I started anthropomorphising.
My invented story about why they weren’t looking after their babies went like this: The cows had had rough labours. They needed to graze to get their strength back. Their milk hadn’t come in yet. […]
Being as close to and surrounded by Nature as we are, it’s a treat to watch the gradual slide from one season to the next. I don’t mean summer, fall, winter, spring; I mean, for instance, the January/February black cockatoo season. You should see and hear the cacophonous feeding that goes in our pines followed by raucous and drunken swooping from tree to tree.
As the weather becomes colder and even frosty, the local livestock grow wooly coats, much like the way a man grows facial hair on a holiday weekend. […]
Today we were a sightseeing party of four, driving out to the very beautiful attraction ellenborough Falls, out past the hills villages of Bobin and Elands.
Never heard of those places? Neither had we till we became immigres to Mitchells Island. Which may be another area unfamiliar to you.
Located on the Bulga Plateau, about an hours drive north-west of Taree, Ellenborough Falls are a spectacular site. […]
Just after sunrise today, I woke up early and drove down to the beach to see if I could sight some whales voyaging north.
Debbie who owns the General Store at Manning Point said she saw about 15 whales yesterday in the early am.
It really is the luck of the draw. You better plan not to be disappointed if your will power and the virtuous early hour you arose isn’t enough to conjure them. Even though we all know this is whale watching season, we have to surrender to their rhythms.
I’m reminded of a quote from Dr. […]
The other day, writing on this blog, I was trying to explain a yoga concept called vinyamaya kosha – not entirely successfully done, judging by a couple of comments I received.
I always put the responsibility for communications which the readers finds are abstruse back on the communicator. […]