Prayer and Invocation: September class

There was a singed maple leaf on the sidewalk this morning: curled, red, so brittle it tottered in the very little breeze.. It’s too soon, I thought. But also, maybe not: there are always a few in August. There is always that first moment of realizing summer is pretty much a wrap, the dark is coming fast. I felt a little flush of joy, and a blanch of sadness, and a shudder for how complicated conversations about the weather have become. I felt all of those things at once, but not in a conflicted way. That capacity of feeling is probably the main thing yoga has done for me, which only starts to sound serious when you realize it’s not just about the flickering conflicted thoughts of a moment on the sidewalk: the capacity holds true around things like depression, politics, god, or one’s self.

Whenever climate dispair enters the conversation, a friend says: Nature is still naturing.

She means: the laws of nature still hold. To say something is ‘broken’ is not quite true. This is what heat, and pressure, and wind patterns do. This is fire. This is ocean. This is sky. This is earth.

The traditional invocation mantras as handed down within the Krishna Yajur Veda lineage, Mysore.

What grieves us isn’t nature or the end of nature. It’s the personal landscapes and lives affected. It’s the sense of loss and of danger. These human things. Once we’re rightly naming our grief, how it feels and how we respond tends to change. Specifically, what happens is what the Dali Lama intended to happen when he chided folks for asking God to bring peace to violence: that’s not god’s fault, he said. Be better humans.

Anyway. Every September I host an Intro to Vedic chant course. One way you could understand the Veda is coming to understand and be in a different relationship with universal laws or truths, including the laws of nature. Yesterday I finished setting the up the course up: registration is open.

I call it ‘intro to Vedic chant’, and it is that. It is a kind of basics, initiation, set you all up ignition series. But in my heart, it’s nothing so pleb. In my heart, it’s ‘invocation and prayer’.

In other words, it starts us in on the important stuff.

As always, please take good care of yourselves and reach out if you need anything. As another friend says: be excellent to one another.

xo,

K