The Princess in the Rearview Mirror in Everyday Ramblings

This is a hybridized crape myrtle in my neighborhood. They have been introduced here in Oregon relatively recently and add such a wonderful stroke of color to our late summer landscape. I didn’t know what they were called until yesterday although I have appreciated them for a few years now.

The bumpy green chestnut pods are developing and most of the leaves are starting to look a bit worse for wear. Yesterday as I was walking across the Hawthorne Bridge in the light drizzle (first rain of the fall season, we had a monsoon later in the day) an osprey was circling round and around.

I have an old-fashioned not very efficient noisy agitator washer. Kes wanted to felt a hat that she had knitted and her lovely quiet efficient front load machine wasn’t up for the task. So she and Most Honorable came up and met me for a late brunch after I went to a Weight Watchers meeting across town.

We had a lovely visit. While Kes fiddled with the washer (using a big old pair of jeans she had put in their emergency stores a few years and 50 pounds ago) to complement the hat, Most Honorable and I watched part of my yoga anatomy DVD and talked about bones and how different they are in each of us and on each side of us.

We were able to confirm, without question, that the reason I cannot squat with my heels on the floor, something I thought was some sort of weird yogic shortcoming of mine is because of the bone structure of my oh so European/Western Russian ankles. It is like being able to roll one’s tongue. Some of us can and some of us can’t.

I had finally found a sports bra that I really like that is comfortable to wear all day and Kes wanted to try one so we each ordered one for free shipping and she brought mine up. Hers was too big for her. How cool is that?

It is very interesting intellectually to be studying the original and ancient teaching of yoga and then listen to the history of Western Philosophy. I am enjoying the lectures very much. There are poems in there! He even says in the lecture I was listening to on the track today that poets can be forgiven for a certain kind of philosophizing. Ha!

Plato believed in the transmigration of souls. He got that from Pythagoras, who spent time in India. (Yeah, the theorem guy). Very cool. It is all connected.

I finished The Long Way Home, the new Louise Penny book. I won’t be giving anything away to say that it is about the interior life of artists.

I can see somehow participating in an informal grouping or “school” of artists and would love to find some painters to hang out with but there is no way I am ever going to join a “writer’s group” or pay a bunch of money for a workshop again.

We have a very interesting and smart temp receptionist at the office that I like a lot and we have hit it off because she has practiced yoga and I was able to give her a practice for a particular congenital issue she has that has been helpful. I mentioned to her in some sort of appropriate context that I was a poet the other day and she exclaimed, “Oh, I write poetry too!”

And I immediately in my head went into princess mode…no, you see, I am saying to myself, I am a real poet…

That was a wake-up call. I need to start acting like one. (And writing like one…)

Again.

Last updated August 31, 2014