The Essence of Yoga Center

Drinking There

No matter how many conversations I
start, they all end with me kneeling at
the same deep well. And drinking there,
I remember who I am. I rise from that
drinking able to see, again, that we are
at heart the same. And the secret wound
you show me there is my wound which I
have hidden for so long. And the secret
joy you bring into the open is my joy
which I thought I had lost. Experience
has us meet in the most unexpected ways.
Until we’re forced to show the soft center
that never dies. Until our soul appears in
the world like a pearl before it hardens.
Until the gift of life stirs in our hand
like a tuft of feathers that needs to
be loved into a wing.

- Mark Nepo
📸 Fermin Rodriguez Penelas

Tired of Love Poems

But we never tire of them, do we?
We wish to worship more than just each other.
We put a god first, sometimes a tree,
write a sonnet to a bird in the black
of night or offer a light to a stranger
and not call it love. But it is. To pull
out a chair is more than manners.
What we tire of is that we never tire of it.
How it guts us. How it fails, then reappears.
Because what is the bird compared to you?
The bird is replaced each morning.
You approach on a red bike in summer
and the poem takes shape. I entitle it
anything but Love, anything but what it is.

- Megan Fernandes
📸 Miguel Alcantara

How to Build a Tree

Sometimes your next
halting step
is more powerful
than the grandest vision.

All a leaf knows
about building a tree
is to turn towards the light.

- James A. Pearson
📸 Olga Budko

In the Middle

of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather’s
has stopped at 9:20; we haven’t had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don’t ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the ye**ty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We’ll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

- Barbara Crooker
📸 McKayla Crump

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Beside the Lake, A Note to Self

If you watch the heron as it stalks
amongst the tall green reeds, then pauses,
and in its pausing disappears, then you understand
something of the power of stillness.

And if you, yourself, are still long enough
to see the head of the snapping turtle
rise between the lily pads,
then you glean something of the rewards
that come with sitting still.

But if you sit expecting such rewards,
then perhaps sit longer and watch the cattails
as they waver and still, sway and still and still,
and feel how the urge in you to say something rises
and softens and softens until there is nothing to say,

until that kind of stillness becomes
the greatest reward, until you feel
stillness hold you the way the lake
holds the lily pad, the way silence holds a song,
the way gratitude holds everything.

- Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
📸 Olivia Terseck

Praising Spring

The day is taken by each thing and grows complete.
I go out and come in and go out again,
confused by a beauty that knows nothing of delay,
rushing like fire. All things move faster
than time and make a stillness thereby. My mind
leans back and smiles, having nothing to say.
Even at night I go out with a light and look
at the growing. I kneel and look at one thing
at a time. A white spider on a peony bud.
I have nothing to give, and make a poor servant,
but I can praise the spring. Praise this wildness
that does not heed the hour. The doe that does not
stop at dark but continues to grow all night long.
The beauty in every degree of flourishing. Violets
lift to the rain and the brook gets louder than ever.
The old German farmer is asleep and the flowers go on
opening. There are stars. Mint grows high. Leaves
bend in the sunlight as the rain continues to fall.

- Linda Gregg
📸 Mathew Schwartz

Ingat

I want to give you a world
where knives have no place
save for the mincing of ginger and garlic.
A world where those roots, those bulbs
are talismans we eat
in order for our blood to be strong.

Today, I offer you
the scream I gave to my pillow.
The greying of my mother's hair,
which she gave to me through my phone.
The bread that my friend made
and delivered, which smelled like her home.

I offer you the blooming steam
of my rice cooker.
The bath I've drawn and littered
with salt and kernels of lavender.

May the warm water hold you,
the way a hug might
if I could climb across time
to give it to you.

- Michelle Peñaloza
📸 Ellie Ellien

IV

The things I know:
how the living go on living
and how the dead go on living with them

So that in a forest
even a dead tree casts a shadow
and the leaves fall one by one
and the branches break in the wind
and the bark peels off slowly
and the trunk cracks
and the rain seeps in through the cracks
and the trunk falls to the ground
and the moss covers it

and in the spring the rabbits find it
and build their nest inside
and have their young
and their young will live safely
inside the dead tree
So that nothing is wasted in nature
or in love.

- Laura Gilpin
📸 Nicholas Selman

Riveted

It is possible that things will not get better
than they are now, or have been known to be.
It is possible that we are past the middle now.
It is possible that we have crossed the great water
without knowing it, and stand now on the other side.
Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now
we are being given tickets, and they are not
tickets to the show we had been thinking of,
but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope.
The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall
without waiting for the last act: people do.
Some people do. But it is probable
that we will stay seated in our narrow seats
all through the tedious denouement
to the unsurprising end—riveted, as it were;
spellbound by our own imperfect lives
because they are lives,
and because they are ours.

- Robyn Sarah
📸 Joris Visser