CL’s traditional sign off to his weekly underground emails which etherally connect this Tribe is succinct to this fact of verve; “Shut Up, Show Up, No Whiners.” In evident, somatic testimony to my anxiety over this cardio-flogging, I realize my subconsciously puckered anal sphincter and attempt to relax. Yet, as one after another 3% bodyfat human whippet in lycra roll up next to me, the puckering returns….
there are two Paths which lead up the steepest of all terrain toward the Highest of all possible summits (and ilg can speak here from direct experience): one is the renunciate/easier Path…
the other?
is the Householder Path…
take today, for instance…
after a morning of chopping wood, cranking Mantra, i had to lower the testosterone inherent to operating such things as chain saws, 8lb Colton Splitting Axes, sledges and a half-cord of wild wood to soften into being a bodyworker…so, into the Zendo i went and the subsequent transformation from Yang to Yin
How about a 5,000′ vertical world-class descent with a 3x World Downhill Champion and two other World-Class descent specialists?
come and watch your feeble near-fifty year-young el coache in a Noble Effort on a Downhiller’s version of a yoga mat…
the magic singletrack of Dutch Creek in all her autumnal splendor…you ain’t gonna find this in any Durango MTB Guidebook…
as i lay prostrate upon Mother Earth in an attempt to photograph the stupa-like, bare-heiny’d figure of Dewa beneath the generous-in-death dying of an apple tree, even feeble ilg began to realize that this Fatherhood Journey of mine connects me ike an eon-old phurba to all my kind Teachers, Deities, and Guides of my past as well as to the Ancient yogis, saints, and compassionate actions-no-matter-what of practitioners. though my ego would have preferred the path of hermit than to the endless ricocheting of schedules and time/energy demands inherent to being the householder yogi ilg now finds himself in…all i can say is that i sense beyond the shadow of a Buddha, that these daze/days are in fact, sacred topography upon the map of my ever-evolving Soul..and that all my outer Pilgrimages give birth again and again to an inner pilgrimage far more sacred, far more subtle, far more exquisite than my feeble incarnation can even imagine to place before thee in word or form or action of any kind…
…to race as hard as you are able across this sparse, high terrain makes you stumble and each step seems to take twice as long as the one before it…and three times as long as all the steps you’ve taken in training to Be Here Now..yet, here you are now…and the drizzle of barometrically-challenged oxygen that you are able to eat disappears as fast as sage smoke in a sweat lodge…there is not – i promise thee – an unaching bone in your body nor does there remain an enthusiastic fiber for more punishment left in the deepest chambers of your will and you feel the little campfire of tapas within you dwindling as fast as evening sunlight in September…
The exhaustion and sacrifice – personally and financially – inherent to Consciously Parenting a chi-ld is astoundingly lopsided on the fatigue and i’m-going-to-start-throwing-furniture-through-the-window exasperation yet even more astoundingly, confound-ably, and Divinely balanced by mere m(om)ents when even the sun and stars fade into a whirling stillness of inner brightening as your chi-ld becomes that Great Mirror of All Teachers, All Gurus, All Lama’s, All Rinpoche’s, all Traditions, all-trees, mists, mountains, flowers, fish, stones, and streams. Within their stream-entry of egoic-free laughters, the cosmos chuckle and such beauty as God is known in thy very cells causing my heart to re-ignite my own stumbling toward Enlightenment…
today’s yogis speak and teach of Mula Bandha,
they speak and teach of “universal alignment”…
they speak and teach so often of lofty, esoteric, ancient principles and techniques of the Ancient Enlightened Ones..yet,
year after year…it seems to feeble ilg…that few yogis do what it takes to simulate a…
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