Yogi and Yogini Poll

A poll is also the top of the head of a horned kind of livestock. But it was suggested to me by my sister Rachia that the readers might like to vote on their favourite yogi or yogini. It sounds like fun. Here are my favourites - all from Google Images.

The frog that started it all. I saw this fellow in Pier One a year ago. It was tres expensive for plaster and gold paint. I passed on by and have regretted it ever since.

You can either comment back to me with your choice, or you can send me a google image of your choice by email. I'll have to figure out a prize for the most popular yogi/ini.

Did I mention that it needs to be an animal. I suppose you could vote for a flora yogi/ini as well if you can find one.

Dragonfly pose.

Lower back and hip opener.

Good old puppy.

Flora Sidebend.

Legs up. Good for reverse blood flow.

Karma yoga.

Monkey mind.

Legs up for advance yogis.

Reverse walrus.

Tree of Life, three levels of acheivement.

Cat's pose, what else?

Child's pose.
Oom shantai, shantai, shantai - peace, peace, peace. May the divine light shine in each and every one of us. Nameste.

Living in the moment - hah!

I almost always manage to make it to Restorative Yoga on Monday mornings at Halifax Yoga on Purcell Cove Road. In some ways, it is an hour that is better than my infrequent Sundays at Quakers lately. We spend time breathing, letting go, setting intentions, letting go and by and large relaxing the hell out of ourselves. At Quakers, if the Light is on, I should be prompted to an action that reflects my values and nourishes my relationships, but as you will see, I'm not sure I want any promptings to action.
I learned about "sun-culpa" this Monday. It is a theory that instead of stating an intention as "May I be....(loving, relaxed, strong, healthy etc.) the intention is stated as "I am.....(loving, relaxed, strong and so on). It changes the intention from the hopeful potential future to the declarative present.


On Monday, I decided my intention was to be balanced. May I be balanced became I am balance. I have been giving myself a hard time about my schedule, not getting everything done in a week or a day, slapping my own wrists for having too much on my list so I set myself up for disappointment when I don't get it all done. Even at the day's or week's end, when I look at the pile of stuff I did get done, I judge it and feel it is inadequate.

I spent a silly hour ranting at myself. If I were to do everything on my intention list my day would look like....

wake up, aerobic walk, personal hygiene including flossing teeth, sort laundry, make bed, make breakfast, eat breakfast while reading improving pages from an improving source, do dishes, get to studio, do studio work of a writing, sewing, blogging, spinning, weaving, drawing kind of thing, take a tea break, do a quick chore, back to studio, stop for lunch, while eating lunch clean one of the floors of the house including dusting or paying the bills, read some more improving something or other, get back to studio, studio time, go for a fast walk to compensate for the chocolate bar I pretend is part of my intentional practice since it is fair trade chocolate, do two chores, begin dinner, do another chore, serve dinner, practice recorder while Steve does the dishes, find moments to call parents or children or friends who I haven't heard from lately, organize a coffee time with friends, fit in yoga, oh yes, somewhere on the days that I don't have a yoga class, do some yoga moves, remember to shave my legs once in a while, try to fit in baking a desert or muffins once a week, go to my Bee and go to my other Bee, go to recorder lesson, get to the market and grocery store and since it is nearly November, start Christmas shopping, get some charity knitting in, read some of my latest novel, go to bed, read some more improving words, sleep through the night without hot flashes, do not toss cat off bed when it gets too hot, do not scream at Steve for snoring when it was my own snoring that woke me up.

Does this look sane?

And I don't work out of the home. Is this a rational list from which to carve out balance? Nothing on that list seems out of whack with living a normal life, but it looks demented when it is written down or spoken out loud. What if I had to add back in: clean up after kids, clean up kids, listen to kids, listen to teachers complain about kids, supervise homework, do homework. What if I had to add back in: get to work on time, pay attention at work, work, go home from work, buy things to compensate or support work. I haven't even mentioned sex because you don't need to know what that list looks like. Great God almighty, these are the lists that make us a society that is discontent, racing madly in all directions and unable to settle down if a quiet moment presents itself.

But what do we or I cut out of that list? Everything on those lists has an important element about it. It is the sheer quantity of it all that makes it mad.

My conclusion is that the intention "I am balanced" is not about the list, it is about the attitudes I take into the actions. Am I angry, sad, hurt, sleepy, happy, nervous? Can I breathe and let go of the negative energies? Can I breathe and use the positive energies to enjoy the activities? If not, can I find a neutral energy, neither angry or happy but resting? And once the incredulity of the lists has diminished, can I look at them dispassionately and really assess what is needful and what isn't? Or what is timely and what isn't?

Needful and timely are two words used in old-timey Quaker literature. Where a person is in their life's journey, what they are needing or providing leads to the phrase "....speaks to my condition." In other words, the fact that I have reduced obligations to my children right now means I have increased opportunity for studio work. My condition has changed, what is needful and timely today has changed from two years ago. And if I try to approach this 'opening' or new condition with a calm mind, then I can enjoy it and use the positive energy that generates to be ready for the next item on the list or possibly a prompting for further action that I haven't thought of yet.

Spinning retreat - 2011

Old Orchard Inn was the location for this year's spinning retreat. Hosted by the Potluck Spinners, we spun and talked and shopped, ate and spun some more.

Several of us met for dinner before the formal, and that's a relative term, began. It just means the bar was open.
There were vendors, with much to savour and delight. All my pre-planning and budgeting was forgotten 5 feet into the room. That's another story though.

Pia had three beautiful tapestries on display. I might be wrong but I believe the yarn was hand spun and dyed.


There was fun contest for spinning local skeins.

My favourite three were pet based. One spinner had some photos of the cat she had raided for its fur,
while another put a whole new value on dust bunnies. Maybe she had groomed her Tibetian Spanial, Nova Scotian Duck Tolling Retriever and Himalyian cat, but I also suspect she grabbed every dust bunny in sight to get this lovely skein spun.

In addition, in the upper photo, there is a lovely skein made from river grass by 16 year old Mira, who won the scholarship to the retreat.

Lois is not grimacing in pain, she is laughing her head off. Lois figured out a new way to wind a ball of yarn directly off her spinning wheel.

Inge from New Brunswick showed off her fantastical skein winder. It was made for her by a friend. It has a clicker to keep track of how many yards or metres are wound on, some piece of curly cue that none of us figured out and we forgot to ask about.

Jolene, who is an ace, gave me a very good lesson on drop spindle-ling. The stunning shawl on her chair was spun and knit by her. The spinning took place while at work, on her breaks, about 12 metres per break. That is perseverance. Jolene's generosity and story gave me a whole new outlook on the drop spindle and about the nature of achievement.

Richard Ashford from Ashfords (wheels and looms and other bits) was the key note speaker.

He gave us a charming slide show about the history of his family's business. He did this with great grace after a day of giving several short seminars, repairing everyone's wheel, and talking to just about every person any where near him.

Without any come hither look on my part, Richard sat down across from me at the dinner. It helped that we were among the last 5 people to sit down, but I expected that every woman in the room had saved him a place. Richard's business is outside Christ Church, New Zealand. It is still within the zone of tremors that are being experienced, over 8000 to date. We have family in Christ Church and it was good to get an eye witness report of the situation. Not good.

But we did manage to have a fun dinner since both Richard and I are both very entertaining.

Hot Flash Woman's rest is nearly over

To my....Wednesday mornings has been dedicated to Hot Flash Woman, drawing, scanning and posting her. I decided Wednesdays will be the perfect days. I sometimes have spinning on those mornings, so every Wednesday I don't spin, will be just the right enough time for Hot Flash.

But the.... is I have lost the next installment's dialogue.

All summer I have been trying to figure out how to present Hot Flash on the blog, should I get a new blog site, should I continue as I have, do these optional pages make sense. This is sort of like deciding to put wall paper onto walls, having no idea how to hang wall paper. Computer-ly, I've been rolling around in la-la land, unable to answer my questions because I haven't a clue how to go about finding the answers. Remember the first time you asked how to spell something, like 'restaurant' and some brilliant adult said "Look it up in the dictionary." and you thought, "What's a dictionary?" Some other smart ass hands you this big book that has been used to prop up the photo albums and says "Here." and smirks at you. You open it up. Once you figure out things are in some random order, like alphabetical, you then realize you need to know how to spell 'restaurant' to find it....so you can discover how to spell it. Voila - the principle of computer land for old duffers.

After months of agonizing and not really talking about it my son, the computer wizard, I decided to just go ahead as usual. Then I decided I needed a new sketch book to draw Hot Flash in, but I haven't bought one yet. There are a few pages left at the end of the old sketch book, it should tide me over until the end of this sequence of adventures. Except, I have lost the final panel idea.

I looked here,
and here,
and here, where the third and fourth adventure series resides.
Along the way, I remembered I had to photograph some spinning I had finished for the next blog post on spinning.
Feeling discouraged, I decided that some organization is seriously needed. Hot Flash panels happen between sketches of my art pieces on dots, whales, and sine curves (yes you math-heads, I have a great idea about a sine curve, pilfered from a puzzle image). I'm hoping that while I get all the various scraps and notes and sketches into a single location I will find the last panel idea. If not, never fear. Hot Flash has adventures on the way to Ottawa, while in Arizona, sweating in Spain and back again in Halifax. She's a moving and shakin' kinda woman.

Then, I assembled all the bits I need to work on Hot Flash.

I need this,

plus this,

plus those things,
I should be more respectful of the ruddy computer; Hot Flash wouldn't exist if it weren't for the invention of blogs), and of course the lighted thingy represents CBC Radio Two (no voices to distract)
and tea.

This last item is critical. No work gets done unless the Queen of the House has finally settled.

Photo Essay of Pseudo Weaving postscript

All that loom preparation had to lead to some sort of weaving, no? And for a change, it did. I had warped this scarf before I learned about the pseudo warp method. I had originally intended that the scarf would be 100 inches long. I had warped an additional 32 inches for the waste that usually occurs. With the pseudo warp on, I wove and wove. The scarf turned out to be 91 inches long plus fringes. Perhaps a bit long, unless I decide to wrap it around my neck a couple of times. Since there is mohair in it, it will be very warm and snuggly on cold days.

Whenever I prepared a warp, I was always grumpy about the amount of lost threads. I would weave until there was barely a shed to get a shuttle through. That rarely worked well. With this pseudo warp, I was able to easily! weave until the knots came up close to the heddles.
Feeling smug...
I eased the knots through the heddles, and trimmed off the scarf where the pseudo and real warps were tied together.
Fun surprise! The knots didn't careen through the reed, but stayed nicely behind it.
I was then able to easily cut off the knots from the scarf's fringe.

If I had done two things, I would have been set up to tie on a second scarf warp.

What I didn't do was 1) make the pseudo warp long enough to come a good distance through the heddles - and the reed - and up to the breast beam. In other words, those very first threads should have been 32 inches plus another 24 inches or more, if I wanted to keep reusing it. 2) was not supporting the lath with the pseudo warp before trimming the scarf off. It all crashed down in the back, the heddles were un-threaded and now, not ready for a new scarf. Live and learn, as always.
And for those doubters, this is the final amount of waste from the project, the knots of the pseudo and real warp, plus...
the trimming from the set up process. Combine the two photos and we have less than 4 inches of waste from start to finish. I repeat - gloat in the savings.