AN INVISIBLE WORLD

          In Book 6 of The Prelude, the poet William Wordsworth writes of “a flash that … revealed / The invisible world”, and it occurs to me that it might be the kind of flash that happened occasionally in my English classes. It’s a fact that English teachers and their students, since they work mainly with words and ideas, often concern themselves with the unnoticed, the masked, the invisible. There are times when they’re like explorers in the world of the unseen. In a way, they are part-time clairvoyants, using a human being’s peculiar ability to see beyond normal sensory contact – in their case, beyond the outer shell of words on a page and into the concealed country of their meanings. English teachers, of course, are visible as they sit at their desks in the classroom, and their tools are certainly visible – books, paper, pencils, digital devices -- but they do most of their labor in the kingdom of ideas, those ghostly gift-givers that flit through our lives with spirit and influence.  A visitor to my classroom might have seen a fairly uninspiring sight – a group of teens and a bald guy quietly communicating with each other – but what they wouldn’t have seen is what’s special. Under the surface of the seemingly commonplace conversations, unseen and pristine ideas were always dancing around – not because I was any better than any other English teacher, but because that’s what happens when adults and kids converse about words written in wonderful books. It’s like science fiction, really – a strange, clandestine universe just inside the doors of great books, and behind the doors of almost any English class.

ALWAYS ENOUGH

"Garden Fountain and Flowers",
oil, by Mary Maxam

   Though I’m far from being a wealthy retiree, it’s reassuring to know that, barring an absolute disaster, there will always be enough resources available to supply my basic needs – and I’m not just talking about material resources. Yes, I have set aside enough money to keep myself moderately sheltered and safe, but I also have another supply of trustworthy resources – one that can’t be exhausted. In addition to my IRAs and Social Security and scattered investments, I also have the inexhaustible endowment of inspiring thoughts. When a need arises, there will be sufficient money available, as well as – and just as important – sufficient inspiration. I will be able to access both dollars and encouraging ideas. In fact, while I’m only modestly comfortable financially, I am, like all of us, fabulously wealthy with enriching ideas. They overflow before me, always, and all I have to do is notice them and say “Welcome”. They’re a fountain of invisible resources, these everlasting affirmative thoughts that are always swift to stand me up and show me the way.

BACK TO BOYHOOD

                       Over the last few years, I’ve occasionally listened to old time radio shows on the Internet, and they always take me happily back to my boyhood in the less worrisome times of the 40’s and 50’s. As I listen to “The Challenge of the Yukon”, starring Sergeant Preston and his loyal husky, King, I’m carried back to 1517 Holly Drive, the pleasant house where we stretched out on the floor each night to listen to our favorite shows. Hearing again the kindly voice of Mr. Keen, tracer of lost persons, brings back warm memories of times when things seemed less wearing – days when an unsophisticated fifteen-minute radio show left you ready for another eight hours of easy sleep.

FEARLESS SENIORS

"Salt Pond, Cape Cod"
pastel by Nancy Poucher

 Yesterday morning Delycia and I enjoyed canoeing on Ninigret Pond, a coastal waterway in Rhode Island, and it brought back an old feeling of being bold, maybe even brave, maybe even a bit boisterous and reckless. Of course, we were on the quietest of salt ponds and were never in any danger, but even so, I felt filled with a strange sense of voyaging and adventure. We were, it sometimes seemed, truly out in the wilds, albeit perfectly civilized wilds, considering the stately summer homes along the shore. At times I imagined that we were paddling frantically to find the next portage in an inhospitable wilderness, conveniently ignoring the fact that all the amenities of a high-class community were a shell’s throw away. We wrinkled and worn senior citizens, I said to myself, were valiantly daring to make this dangerous journey, defying colossal odds to make the perilous crossing from Ninigret Park to Fort Ninigret. I thought of us as warrior retirees, fearless seniors, gutsy golden-agers. Nothing could stop us – not winds, not waves, not raspy coughs, not shortness of breath, not old and ramshackle muscles. (Plus, we knew our cell phones were handy, and our car was just a few shell-throws away.)

     

OTHER STARS (FB, July 2014)

"Moonlit Cloud", oil,
by Takeyce Walter

Yesterday afternoon I found myself hoping the clouds would move off so stars would show at night, but then I thought of other more useful stars, those that are always shining, it seems. I have friends, for instance, who somehow find a way to share some light just when I need it, and I can sense their lit-up kindness even when they’re far away. Hopeful thoughts, too – even the smallest and slightest – can shimmer like stars, if I stay with them awhile and let their lights illuminate things for me. And then there are spoken words, those most evanescent of all forces, which can create hopeful light in a life faster than almost anything. Happily, I live with someone who sends out words that sparkle like starlit gifts, just when I can most use a little light in my mostly lucky life.  

A GRATEFUL HEART

"After the Rain",
oil, by Jane Hunt

       An old church hymn asks for "a grateful heart that loves and blesses all", and this morning I’m giving some thought to the word "all". The hymn doesn't say "blesses some", or "blesses the good things that happen", or "blesses people who act the way I think they should act". It says "all", as in everything that happens, everything that comes my way – the pleasant and the unpleasant, the advantageous and the seemingly useless, the triumphs and the trouncings. Every aspect of my life, the hymn suggests, should be earnestly set apart and somehow honored. I should, in some way or other, bless everything that happens. As Shakespeare reminds us, blessings (he uses the word “mercy”)  should not be "strained", but should be shared the way "the gentle rain of heaven" falls upon the earth -- indiscriminately, unconditionally, thoroughly. Rain falls on the beautiful and the bad, and the beautiful, and so should my blessings.

LEANING AND SWAYING

     I’ve been sitting under our new suspended patio umbrella for a few minutes this afternoon, minding how it bends as breezes blow by, and I’m thinking I should do more of my own bending as the occurrences of life come past me. The umbrella tilts to take advantage of the flow of the wind, and I should do some tilting, now and then, to make good use of the situations that puff or bluster past me. Instead of resisting certain circumstances, I could merely lean a little this way or that, like the umbrella – sort of rising and falling with the circumstances rather than opposing them. Sitting under the umbrella in a breeze is like sitting under a swaying dancer, a stylish artiste who plays with the winds instead of wrestling with them, and I could learn a lucky lesson from it: leaning and swaying sometimes works better than stiffening and struggling. 

A LINGERING TOUCH

“To see the joy with which these elder kinsfolk and acquaintances had looked in one another’s faces, and the lingering touch of their friendly hands . . .”

      --Sarah Orne Jewett, in The Country of the Pointed Firs

     At our heartwarming family reunion this weekend, we “elder kinsfolk and acquaintances” of the family cheered for each other in charming, cordial ways. The young people played and shouted among themselves, throwing aside any small concerns and easily embracing the happiness of the occasion, but I have a feeling that it was we older friends, Ann and Pete Salsich’s daughters and sons and their spouses, who profited in the fullest measure from the inspiring occasion. Just the touch of so many brother and sister hands was uplifting, letting us know, over and over for three satisfying days, that we are first-class friends, in good times or troubles. As I type this at my seat on our homeward flight, I feel the “lingering touch” of those handshakes and hugs, freely offered symbols of fondness and fidelity that seemed stronger and more solicitous than ever. I see the sky outside the plane’s window, and somehow it doesn’t seem nearly as immeasurable as the friendship of my dearly loved dad and mom’s family.

AN ULTRA-UNION

"Walking the Dog, Forest Park, St. Louis"
oil, by Kay Crain

      Delycia and I are in St. Louis for a Salsich family reunion, but it seems to me that the prefix is not the proper one. Instead of a reunion, perhaps we should see it as something like an ultra-union. The prefix “re” implies that we’re joining in a union again, as though an earlier union was broken and now we are redoing it, but the truth is that our family union has never been broken, and in fact cannot be broken. Actually, all of us on earth – people, plants, animals, even the widespread sky and mountains and oceans – are part of an enduring union, a family of wonders working together without often realizing it. We are all as closely connected as the air we share and the sunlight that lands on each of us. There’s the family of the Salsichs, yes, but then there’s what we might call the family of the universe, which consists of all the miracles ever made – every person, speck of dust, maple tree, and mouse. It’s a family, a union, that can’t come to an end, can’t be de-unioned, and therefore never needs to be re-unioned. We are enjoying our gathering in St. Louis, but we’re thinking of it not so much as a reunion, but more as an ultra-union  – a celebration to heighten and intensify our appreciation of the everlasting union of which all of us across the universe have always been members.    

THE SORROW OF THE WORLD

When I heard today that some good friends have suffered a great sorrow, it came to me that the sorrow belongs not just to them, but to all of us. Their sorrow is, you might say, the sorrow of the world. Sorrow, after all, is not a physical entity that can be in the possession of just one person, the way you might possess clothes or a car. Sorrow is more like a mist that moves through millions of us at the same time, swirling and settling in different ways in each person. Some of us feel the sorrow of disappointment, some the sorrow of loss, others the sorrow of hopelessness, but, in a real sense, it’s the same sorrow, the same numbing mist that’s been evermore making its heartbreaking way across the earth. My friends are feeling the same sorrow that’s being felt, as I write, the world over – the sorrow of Syria, the sorrow of Egypt, the sorrow of widows and orphans and refugees, the sorrow of the lost and lonely, the abandoned and unnoticed. We all share this sorrow. It’s not mine or yours or ours or theirs. My sorrowful friends live far away from me, but we’re together in this sorrow – they and I and all our suffering sisters and brother across the earth.  

FINDING A NEW WAY

"Skagit River",  oil,
by Robin Weiss

     I’ve been battling a problem for the past few days, but I’m slowly starting to see that it’s not actually a problem, and definitely doesn’t require a battle. I’m disappointed in myself, because it occurs to me that I’ve been responding to this so-called problem in pretty much the same way I handled a problem when I was 12 years old – by seeing it as an adversary and forcefully fighting it off. Back then, I saw life as an almost constant contest between me and my multitude of enemies, from sickness to storms to darkness to countless possible catastrophes, and it seems I’m still, at 71, sometimes wrestling with life instead of simply living it. Recently, though, I’ve been seeing this current “problem” of mine as maybe more like a river to be floated on and followed than a battle to be fought and won. Maybe life isn’t so much a fight as a friend -- an unfaltering adventure instead of an endless struggle. The best way to work with a river, I hear, is to tell it to go where it will and you’ll follow, and perhaps I need to say something similar: “Proceed, problem. Take me to a truth I haven’t seen before. Let’s see what we can do together.” When I was 12 (and 30 and 60), I took on my problems like a prizefighter, and almost always lost. Maybe I’m finally finding a new way.  

DEATH AND BIRTH IN THE GARDEN

"Daylilies and Coneflowers", oil,
by Roxanne Steed

I guess I must have already known this, but for some reason I found it somewhat astonishing when Delycia told me yesterday that daylilies actually do bloom for only a single day.  All that work, I thought -- all those frozen February weeks, then all those spring and summer days of patiently pushing up through soil and then air – all that for just a few short hours of splendor! As she was speaking, I was looking at a particularly remarkable yellow lily near us, and found it startling to realize that it had bloomed just that morning and would be colorless and shriveled tomorrow. For a few minutes, as we often do, we strolled among her good-looking lilies, admiring the intense and almost furious colors of some, as if they were softly shouting to us about how handsome they were on this single day of their lives. It seemed strange, as we walked, that these beautiful blossoms would wither and waste away by the morning, but I couldn’t help thinking, too, that that’s also sort of the glory of life – that things are continually leaving us so that others can come and take their places. New lily blossoms are born each day, but only because yesterday’s blossoms bowed down and departed, and, in fact, new lives of all kinds arrive among us because old lives give back the gift of living. You might say we see death each day in Delycia’s garden – the death of dozens of beautiful blossoms – but precisely because of the deaths, we also see, each morning, the delivery of dozens of new blossoms, fresh and mint-condition miracles of color. I guess it’s part of the strange magnificence of our lives on this planet, that death, the most feared of all our foes, is actually what opens the door to life.  

SLOW MOTION

     I sometimes wonder if I could live, at least for a day, a sort of slow-motion life, like so many things I see around me. The flowers in Delycia’s garden, for instance, grow so slowly in a day’s time no one notices it, and clouds cross the sky some days as slowly as dawn goes gradually across to darkness. Maybe I could make the bed in the morning somewhat the way flowers grow, setting out the sheets and straightening the bedspread with purposefulness. Perhaps I could wash the dishes the way clouds carry themselves, sort of floating through the job, unhurriedly and gracefully going from glasses to cups to plates. Maybe I could even do my daily writing in a similar way, setting down the words little by little and lovingly, taking my time, making a paragraph as patiently as birds set sticks in their perfect places for a nest. It would be a way to live luxuriously, at least for a day, letting myself move like the nearby Mystic River, restfully and with perfect ease.

DEPENDABLE POWER

      We lost electric power for a few hours yesterday morning, but we didn’t lose the most important power of all – and one that’s absolutely reliable. All of us have learned by now that electric power is completely unreliable, likely to leave us powerless at any time for countless haphazard reasons. A gusty storm sweeping through (like yesterday morning’s), or a lightning strike, or a faulty transformer – all can cause whole towns to turn temporarily powerless. Yesterday, sirens sounded across town as police and utility workers labored to lead us through several hours of feeling lost without our lights and laptops.  Strangely, the outage gave me some time to consider a power that, unlike electricity, is completely dependable. I was thinking of kindness, a power that resists the strongest storms and stays as steady as ever when lightning strikes. Do we ever have to worry about losing the power to be considerate to others? Can the power to be compassionate flicker and fade out like lights? Doesn’t it last as long as we wish it to, as long as we understand its power and are open to it? Isn’t it always flowing through us, this power to offer our affection in limitless ways to others, and isn’t it always able to switch on the lights of unselfishness in our lives? Some of us most likely sat a little stunned in our homes yesterday morning as we wondered what we would do without electric power, but we’ll never need to live without the power to be kind. There always abides the undefeated gift of sharing our sympathy and understanding with others, a gift that never stops producing power, even in the severest storms and the wildest lightning.   

ABOVE

"Morning Star", oil,
by V . . . Vaughan

    I find myself more and more thankful, these days, for the many things that are above me. Trees, for instance, seem like older sisters and brothers standing above me as I type this in the backyard. The sky spreads its ever-present and reassuring sheet above me, and above the sky, I know the concealed stars stretch their trustworthy lights. I think, too, of the countless people whom I consider to be, in some sense, above me – those who slowly and modestly store up wisdom and then share it with others, those who use bravery to beat down hopelessness, and those who love like it’s all they should ever be doing. When I say they’re above me, I don’t mean to disparage myself, but simply to say how much I look up to those who seem so strong in their goodness that no hostile force can defeat them. I look up to them because they do seem, in a way, above me, like sunshine is above the summer grass and the steadfast stars are above us all.

UNDER

"Earth and Sky", oil,
by Robin Weiss

     As I’m writing this, I’m sitting under a ceiling fan set in place years ago by skilled carpenters, under a roof fabricated from good wood and long-lasting shingles, under a sky as strong and endless as it was billions of years ago. It’s a sweltering afternoon, but I’m lucky to be living in a house where I can stand under a shower that flows freely with refreshing water. Outside, I can sit under shade trees that screen me from the sunshine, or under an umbrella that sways in restful ways in breezes. Under me, now and always, is the well-built and reliable earth, and under and around the earth is the universe itself, so sure of its strength and wisdom, so able to stay under and beside us all, assisting, inspiring, raising us up.

SIGNALS?

     I sometimes wonder if I’m missing certain special signals sent to me occasionally from here and there. Yesterday I was watching a tree as it turned and bent and bowed in the wind, its limbs and leaves lifting and falling, and, as silly as it might sound, it seemed like the tree was sending me signals. It was like small messages made just for me: “Are you there, Hamilton? Are you truly alert and listening to the sounds I’m making with this wind?” Then I saw a seagull sailing in circles above the tree, and I wondered if there were signals there also. Perhaps the bird was sending from the sky the news that nothing is better than right now: “Hammy, happiness is inside you, right there where you’re sitting in the shade with a glass of ice water at 3:37 on a sweltering afternoon.” Then, in the next instant, I found myself listening to the sounds of cars on the distant interstate, and they sent – in soft, almost whispery sounds – the message that I’m an amazing mystery. “You’re astounding,” they said, “and so is this afternoon and everyone and everything.” 

     It seems strange, I know, but I’ll be searching for signals 

tomorrow, as well.   

APPLAUSE FOR GREAT AND SMALL THINGS

(after seeing Richard II with Delycia at Shakespeare and Company, Lenox, MA)

     I wonder why I don’t applaud more often for the great and small things in life – the large and little miracles that make up almost every moment of my days. I let so many marvels slip by me with barely a notice, and certainly no applause. I don’t mean I should be constantly clapping my hands, but surely I could send out at least silent praises more frequently for the gifts I get from the world. I’m thinking of this today because yesterday Delycia and I saw an absolutely astonishing performance of Richard II, but at the end, the applause was strangely faint and fleeting. Within a few seconds, the clapping stopped and the audience started for the exits. This amazed me, but perhaps it shouldn’t have, for I sometimes show a similar lack of appreciation for special performances. This morning, for instance, the fountain beside the pool where we’re staying is flowing beautifully, doing a small performance of curious loveliness, but I’ve hardly noticed it. A brightly colored beach ball is floating along the surface of the pool in silent rolls and turns, and the sweet songs of two birds are sailing from two trees, but I’ve been too busy to listen. They’re just more small, unnoticed miracles in my life that’s overflowing with them, like the theater yesterday that spilled over with the wisdom and elegance of Shakespeare done perfectly, but was almost empty of applause and appreciation.  

BEING LIKE THE WORLD

The Shed at Tanglewood

     In a conversation with Jean Sibelius in 1907, Gustav Mahler said that “a symphony must be like the world . . . it must embrace everything,” and it occurs to me that the same could be said of one’s life. Last night, Delycia and I went back to Tanglewood to hear Mahler’s 3^rd Symphony, and the unbound and big-hearted music did, indeed, seem to hold in its arms both the loveliness and disarray of the world. It was as though Mahler wanted to welcome everything into his symphony – the pleasures and triumphs of the world, but also the disappointments and sorrows. There were stretches of pure majesty in the music, but there were also moments when the sounds seemed to collide and explode, as the parts of our lives sometimes do. I was thinking, as I listened, that I could be as accepting in making my life as Mahler was in making his music. Maybe I should think of my days as small and special symphonies, into which all the satisfactions and disasters, all the fun and failures of life, can be welcomed. I could, in a strange way, be another Mahler, making my own magnanimous music each day, greeting the good and the bad and bringing it all somehow into a song – not as majestic, certainly, as Mahler’s symphony, but just one guy’s song about the dearly loved outlandishness of his little but beautiful life.

OLD AND NEW

     Last night, we attended the opening concert at Tanglewood by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and it was surely an evening for the old and the new. Most of the patrons were probably in their 70’s and 80’s, but most of them also had an easily noticeable spirit of newness. With canes and stooped shoulders, and sometimes in wheelchairs and sometimes as straight up as pillars, they showed off the strength of seniority in a stately and handsome way. These were people who had surely seen indescribable sorrows and successes in their long lives, and now, as they listened to the exquisite music of Tchaikovsky, they seemed to sit with the poise and power of their years. These were old people, yes, but they seemed somehow new and unblemished. Perhaps they felt, in some way, fulfilled, and therefore full of youthfulness again. Perhaps, to them, this music of transcendent loveliness was a prize presented especially to them for sharing their strength and understanding with the world for so many years. These young-at-heart seniors essentially made the world we live in today, and last night the world, we might say, made music just for them.    

PAIN, BUT NOT SUFFERING

The Kripalu Center

     One of our instructors this week mentioned the basic Buddhist teaching that pain is inevitable but suffering is optional, and it suddenly summarized, for me, so many of the things I’ve been thinking about over the last twenty years or so. It said, so succinctly, that there will always be problems in my life, but the problems can be useful instead of destructive, friends instead of enemies. Whatever pain I might feel in the future, whether physical or emotional, will surely be pain, but it doesn’t have to be misery. It’s possible to face pain the way sailors face a fierce wind at sea – by accepting its inescapability, and then welcoming its potential as a teacher, maybe even as a friend who can find me new ways to be fully alive. Pain can prepare me to push up to the next level of living, where pain itself becomes a little less frightening and a little more enlightening. If I accept it and ask it to show me the way, pain can make me wiser rather than sadder, a learner instead of a sufferer.

Written at The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health,

with Delycia for R+R

July 5, 2013

EVERYDAY CHANTS

     I listened to some chants this morning – not call-and-response chants like the “kirtan” we participated in last night, but just the usual chants of day-to-day life. A chant is essentially a repetitive rhythmic phrase, and they were everywhere this morning. As Delycia and I walked up and down the grassy lawns for exercise before breakfast, every bird’s song was a chant, the same smooth phrases sung over and over. Then, at the silent breakfast, there was a soothing kind of chant-like rhythm in the sounds in the otherwise silent dining room – shoes shuffling, silverware dinging, glasses clicking, shoes shuffling. It seemed, as I listened, more and more like a chant chosen just for all of us who came to Kripalu for comfort and understanding this week. And even later, as I was writing among groups of people in the downstairs reception area, I heard chants around me, chants of laughter – small volleys of gladness seemingly in rhythmical patterns. There was an almost lyrical quality to the laughter – first some quiet conversation, then soft explosions of laughter, then more conversation, then laughter briefly bursting out again. It was like a chant of good cheer, this graceful flow of laughs, the kind of chant a writer like me can love as he’s letting words loose in sentences.

Written at The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health,

with Delycia for R+R

July 4, 2013

PURE LUCK

PURE LUCK

(with Delycia at Kripalu)

 Sitting by the lake, he looked

like a little boy, or a bright light,

or a bringer of the best news.

He looked like he could call you

a king or a queen,

and you would believe him.

The sunshine said he was the best

they’d seen, and the breezes

sang rather than spoke as they passed him.

But he knew he was just lucky,

knew he somehow got lost in a land of wonders.

He looked at his wife beside him,

she who shined the light that lit his life,

she who seemed like luck itself

to him.

Written at Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health,
with Delycia for R+R

MIRACLE MEALS

     It occurs to me here at Kripalu, where many people make their meals a sort of meditation, that my meals, for the most part, are the opposite – a sort of unseeing sprint through food in order to find the next thing I need to do. It’s more like dashing than eating, more like three-times-a-day madness than mindfulness. Being here in this stillness and repose, and eating among people who patiently take pleasure in their meals, has raised in me the desire to switch to a slower, more mellow kind of eating. I want to relish the look of linguine before I taste it, and take pleasure in the aromas arising from a full bowl of soup. I want to savor the food I eat, even the slim sandwich at lunch, even the small slice of tomato in the salad. I want to chew like the food was chosen just for me, chew like love and long life will come from chewing. Eating, it seems to me, should be like thinking greatly, or singing with a full feeling of freedom, or sitting beside someone you love because you’re in love. A meal done that way could be a miracle.

Written at The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health,

with Delycia for R+R

July 3, 2013

SILENT BREAKFASTS

     At Kripalu, breakfasts in the main dining room are silent, something I haven’t experienced since my seminary days 50-some years ago, and so far the silence has been not only bearable, but thoroughly enjoyable. It’s given me the chance to choose what thoughts to think, to slowly select something to consider as I eat instead of dashing madly among thoughts as they stampede through me. My mind is usually a crazy place in the morning, and the silence here has allowed me to sort my early thoughts out, to set them apart and see them clearly with my coffee, tofu, and toast. It has made the meal more like a trouble-free reflection than a quick gulping down and getting on with the day. It’s also been inspiring to see so many people sitting silently with their food, eating with thoughtfulness and perhaps understanding. In a world widely shaken by the noise of misfortune, here are people taking pleasure in silence, eating and drinking with silent delight. Here is a morning meal made of stillness and appreciation.

Written at The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health,

with Delycia for R+R

July 3, 2013

SECRET RHYTHMS

    Last night, Delycia and participated in a drumming circle at Kripalu, and the rhythms we worked with called to mind some rhythms I almost never notice in my daily, on-the-go life. There’s the rhythm, for instance, of my rising and falling heart as it manages the music of my body. My life moves in a steady, reassuring cadence that I rarely recognize, and most of it is made by my heart. Songs sing inside me every second, the songs of a musical heart and the blood borne along by its steady beat. I would do well to wait, every so often, and listen to this quiet and constant orchestra inside me. I could also listen more alertly to the rhythms of the thoughts that pass through me. They’re always flowing – cheerful thoughts and sad ones, uplifting thoughts and lonely ones – and they do seem to move in a certain pulse and pace. It’s as if my thoughts are parts of a graceful song continuously sung to me by the universe, a song I rarely notice, a song as pulsating and surprising as the sounds of the circle of drums last night.

Written at

The Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health,

R+R with Delycia