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“First by mind, then by music / You’ll make this all less confusing”

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Today in yoga class we did a simple partner pose, one we’ve done before. Basically, it involves facing in opposite directions, letting palms and forearms touch (right to right or left to left), and then pushing against each other while turning in opposite directions.

This results in a great stretch through shoulder and chest, but like all partner poses … like all yoga poses … it’s more complicated than that.

Because you’re constantly adjusting, figuring out how much your partner can/wants to push, adjusting how much you can/want to push in turn. Figuring out how strong each of you are that day, and so respecting not only your own edge, as one does in all yoga, but also someone else’s.

Needless to say, this can be tricky.

Outside of yoga class, in human relationships of all sorts, it’s even trickier. Knowing your own boundaries, knowing other people’s boundaries, knowing how to make adjustments both when you’ve pushed too far and when you haven’t pushed enough. It seems on the surface that pushing too hard is the real danger, but pushing too little, or not at all, is just as problematic. One means you topple other people over. The other means they topple you.

Two-person poses require trust. Trust that the other person won’t knock you over, but also trust that they’ll let you know when you’re about to knock them over. Trust that when you push, someone will push back, because otherwise you both just wind up on the floor.

Though in yoga, winding up on the floor, or falling out of a pose in any way, isn’t all that big a deal. More than one teacher has reminded me that wobbling and losing your balance is as much a part of a pose as staying in it.

It’s by falling out of poses that I’ve learned (and forgotten, and learned again), that it all goes better if you can fall down laughing.

Mirrored from Desert Dispatches: WordPress Edition.

Scattered odds and ends

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There’s a stiff cool (by local standards) wind blowing across the valley today. It feels very much like autumn is shouldering its way in to the desert.

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Today I stumbled upon this reminder that arctic foxes are not always the hero the story.

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Or as Freki says in Thief Eyes:

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nWhispers of vengeance and battle gave way to whispers of bad weather and lost grazing, of failing crops and starving livestock.

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I have committed no crime. A charm to keep foxes from lambs, nothing more!

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Freki sniffed disdainfully. “There is no charm that can keep a fox from a lamb.”n

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So they remain the heroes of their own stories, perhaps.

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Addressed a few last-minute page proof questions for Faerie After today. Certain passages still make me cry a little. That is all.

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The raven book still doesn’t have a title (Raven River? Raven Remembering? Ravens and Some Other Things Too?) but, titled or untitled, is due the end of this month. So I’ll be pretty head-down among the shapeshifters the next few weeks.

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None of whom, oddly, seem to be arctic foxes.

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Mirrored from Desert Dispatches: WordPress Edition.

So today …

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… I volunteered for the Arizona Desert Museum’s Raptor Free Flight Program.

I have an interview Tuesday, and no idea whether they’ll accept me for the program or not. But I’m really hoping they do, full-day-a-week time commitment and all.

Working with raptors … getting to know and understand raptors better in general … is just one of those things I’ve wanted to do for a while now. When I see a raptor is out on someone’s glove, I want to keep staring at it until I truly understand it.

And it’s been a while now since I’ve done something new and challenging just because. One way or another, it’s time for a new obsession with which to wake mind and body up a little.