I must give credit to my daughter for this photograph. She takes pictures of clouds and friends too. Her photographs are an answer to why.
Starting with Why
Starting with Why
I am advised by a millenial who wrote a bestselling
book and has millieniums of followers
to ask Why when embarking on an endeavor.
In his case, why when dumping our dot.com.
excess into an angel investment start up,
in most of ours, why we are looking
at our phones for the umpteenth time.
I’m game, I’m a gamin.
This morning I scraped my tongue
and poured salt water from a neti pot into my nostril
which made me feel both like I was drowning and punched in the nose.
I did something called pranayama
which is to breathe rapidly into your stomach in
rapid succession to stimulate your prana or life force.
Why?
Because I went to an aryuvedic clinic in Seattle,
it was a teaching school and it cost $25
and I was there for three hours.
There were two interns and one instructor/doctor,
they all took my pulses.
How lovely to have caring adults,
seated close to me, taking turns holding my wrists
and listening for my internal rhythms.
I could have died right then.
I was given a sheet of paper with illustrations of poop
and asked to categorize my stool sample.
Why?
You can tell a lot from your stool sample.
Floating? Sinking? Ragged? Oily? Loose? Hard?
My life? or my stool I wanted to ask.
Both I learned.
As I suspected a stool is never just a stool.
I kept offering little symptoms,
such as “all my injuries are on my left,”
postulating each with “if that matters,”
everything matters the trio answered.
The lead teacher looked like humpty dumpty.
When he leaned over while listening for my inner workings,
I wanted to kiss his bald head.
Why?
Because despite his rotund middle,
his blue eyes sparkled, he wore a cranberry colored dress shirt
with a thin blue tie and looked like he belonged in England,
all while sprinkling his diagnosis with sanskrit.
One of the interns was Indian and kept looking at my ankles,
whose girth was suddenly symbolic,
not just an embarrassment.
He said,
“as we get older many of us don’t want to settle into being slower”
I thought “easy for you, punk, with your lustrous dreadlocks
and your perfectly pita-vatta-kapha balanced skin”.
I wanted to be granted the dosha or energetic/body
type pita, slight and airy
or vatta, medium and balanced,
not Kapha, dense and slow.
Why?
Because if you are a woman in the west
we are told to be thin and light,
to be dandelion fluff not oak root,
rose petal, not thorn.
If you are a man you may be dense and solid,
in fact you are told you must be.
Why?
I don’t think anybody knows.
My first why I do anything is often vanity,
my second why is that I want to be beautiful, chosen, special.
Why number three is because I want to be loved.
And others...
I want love for them too.
I won’t do most of what the kind
purposeful sage Aryuvedic practitioners suggest.
Because I love too many foods on their no list.
Like carbonated drinks, salt and sugar.
However, I now blend cooked kale and cilantro
that is brilliant as spring grass and makes basmati rice verdant.
Why if I won’t follow their advice,
to scrape my tongue
and massage with sesame oil,
did I seek such counsel?
Because I needed to have my wrists held,
because I heard everything matters.