Parinama

How can we learn about a place we can neither travel to nor see? Carlo Rovelli   It is a common familiar image now, the Earth, a blue marble floating in the middle of space, and our place tiny amidst the infinity of space.   For millennium, people had no conception that this might be the case, no image of Earth from outer space.   Why would they when everything around them seemed solid and flat.   The physicist Carlo Rovelli recently pointed out that someone had to imagine this entirely new perspective for the first time, moving beyond the limits of what was known to conceive of an entirely new image of the Earth and our place in it.     Rovelli writes,     “Anaximander is the ancient Greek thinker who figured out that the sky is not just above us; it also continues under our feet, and the Earth is like a stone floating in the middle of the void. This is the first and maybe the greatest of the cosmological revoluti...

I climbed my first mountain when I was eight years old, Mount Monadnock in southern New Hampshire.   No one in my family hiked but my mother’s hippie friend Barbara Williamson invited me to join her on this trip, along with her young daughter, her long-haired bearded boyfriend and some of their friends. From the way things worked around my house, I wouldn’t have been able to go on that hiking trip unless my father approved.   That he did so was extraordinary and life changing for me.   My father, who was born in 1932, grew up in an Italian American family in Everett Massachusetts.   His father, Louie, had moved back and forth from Italy so many times as a boy that he never learned how to read in either language very well.   Louie worked as a barber at his own shop near the Fenway.   My father’s mother, Amelia was also Italian but American born. She spent most of her later childhood cooking, cleaning, and being pushed around by her father and four broth...

  In yoga philosophy, there are four stages to life each presenting us with a challenge that help us grow and, from that growth, a gift for our families and communities. I am excited and afraid as I enter the third stage of growth which in some translations is delightfully and ominously called the “forest dwellers”. If we have been on a spiritual path or long for one, this is the time of life when we begin the process of living with more and more detachment.   This is detachment from an egoic focused life to one tuned to the innermost divine self or soul.   We are coming to live a bit apart from the “town center” of life, making the transition from “doing” to “being”, letting go of power and certainty, falling into mystery, groundlessness and paradox.       In the first two stages of life, we need to build up the ego so that we might have a sense of ourselves as separate from our parents and community.   We use this egoic will to ...

  Mudita, spontaneous joy, is one of the four special qualities (along with loving-kindness, compassion, and equanimity) that we develop from our yoga and (other contemplative) practices.   These qualities cannot be forced but come through us when our hearts are open and pure.   Spontaneous joy connects me to the feelings of joy I had as a child when simple things gave me so much delight and happiness like the joy in the first snowfall of the season or the warmth of my pajamas after a bath.   At 60, I find myself more and more pierced by a childlike delight in simple things like the first snowfall of the season, the fragrance of spruce on a forest walk, seeing the full moon rising over the mountains. As when I was young, there is a playfulness that intermingles with this joy.   Playfulness and joy thrive when we feel safe and are not weighed down by anxiety, stress, shame. Contemplative practices like yoga help us to find the inner place of sa...