"The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it."
- R. W. Emerson
Kim went to shop. I cleaned the kitchen and prepped carrots and daikon for pickling. I found a few minutes, just under an hour, of free time and realized that the house would be full of guests most of the day. So, I seized the chance to sneak out back to the meditation room and take in the day's practice alone.
Sunlight streamed through open windows, and I could hear the neighbor and his kids playing in their backyard. I moved through breath and salutations and found myself after about 40 minutes in (sorry for this) an exquisite corpse pose.
Home practice isn't an easy thing. There's freedom to move through poses at your own pace. There's the necessity to choose the next pose, keeping in mind that it should complement the last and introduce the next. I have reached a place where I can (thanks to some brilliant teachers over the past several years) build a practice with intention and relative ease.
Kim returned home and we — she and I — finished prep to feed an afternoon gathering of Grrrls. They arrived right on time, 3:00 pm, all smiles and giggles and gangly legs and awkward and strong and confident - all these things, all at the same time. My pal Vali gathers these young women from across the city. She gives them a safe place to be themselves. They're smart. They're kind. They're self-assured. They're Grrrls.
The ornament of our home is this messy concoction of human beings that pass through the doors and the oft-opened gate into the back yard. Some drop by for a minute, others stay for hours, but they're all interesting and smart and kind and ...