Trying To Recapture the Green.

To remember that I’m intelligent, despite everything. To try to bear in mind Ahniwa’s clarity of thought, about not personalizing everything, about not being responsible for the fact that other people can be and often are, assholes. Oh, how the mind becomes weak and emaciated. I remember what it’s like, to be regarded as an intellectual equal. For thoughts and ideas to not immediately be put asunder. To stop speaking as though walking on eggshells, tread carefully or the span of attention will break. There is something wrong, something that has nothing to do with me. These are the things that aren’t up to me to fix.

I begin by lying on my back, feeling each limb, then the trunk, then the head, gravity pulling me toward the earth, lungs expanding my consciousness upwards. In-breath. Out-breath. My headache alleviates.
Through the poses without as much strain, I feel myself making progress, feel my hamstrings limbering, my muscles lengthening and growing stronger, always conscious of the breath-rhythm. My organs begin to feel cleansed. Everything slows down.

Tich Naht Han says,
"breathing in I calm my body,
breathing out I smile.
Living in the present moment,
I know this is a wonderful moment."

Thoughts of the day quiet down and subside, and I remember a faint thought from yesterday, "there is time for everything." There is, there is. Even if there is no tomorrow. So much stimulus in modern life, buzz-hum-whir, it's constant, sensory overload, so far from what is natural. I think about my trip out west, the simple perfection of nature. Humans have expanded upon it by creating so many bright lights, glitzy-glamour this is what everyone is doing/wearing/saying this season, advertisements that speed past at sixteen frames every second, chop chop chop, our attention turns toward the outer, a labyrinth is constructed between our minds and the calm depths within.

Maharishi Ayur-Veda describes the lack of connection with the body's inner intelligence as the primary source of human suffering. In the ancient Ayurvedic texts, this condition is referred to as "the mistake of the intellect," or pragyaparadh. Pragyaparadh is mistaken perception that the ever-changing display we experience through our senses is all that there is; we do not perceive the underlying wholeness of life, the home of all the laws of nature.

It's as if we sailed out into the sea, looked out over the waves on the surface, and concluded that they comprised the total reality of the ocean – without perceiving that there are unfathomably vast, silent depths beneath from which those waves spring.

In-breath. Out-breath. When you really think about it, this is all that we have, this tiny space between breaths. And it's enough.

I have just finished reading Atlas Shrugged by ayn rand, this is her salute to individualism, the book is like a worm inside my heart, festering and picking away at it. She believes that the "right" path is the one in which individuals make choices based solely on the ego, there is no need to consider the "fellow man," human beings are not made to be concerned about anything or anyone other than themselves. She lauds the ego, her philosophy is accurately described as being entirely self-centered. All choice is based on the question, "what is good for me?" This is so unlike anything that I've ever heard or read, I have no idea how to counter it, but my mind immediately wishes to do so.

The leader of the burmese people, Aung San Suu Kyi says to people in free nations, "you must use your voice to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves." This is something that I have ingrained into my core; Ayn Rand's philosophy is like an univited party guest that comes in drunk and starts loudly gossiping about everyone's families. Sophism. How to even address it?

I flip through a book of some of the buddha's teachings.

"How easily the wind overturns a frail tree.
Seek happiness in the senses,
indulge in food and sleep,
and you too will be uprooted."

I instantly feel kinship with the words, but I have no idea how to explain to myself why. Why this path, and not the path that Ayn Rand espouses? The quantification feels tenuous, but I feel it in my core. The beliefs in my head are so ghost-like at present that it feels that assigning words to them would scatter them, like ash in a down draft.