Day 8 - Morning and Evening Rites

We have yoga TWICE daily. Do you think it’s fair to keep a tally and count the extra sessions toward the 40 days?

Morning yoga faces the Taos Pueblo, the Pueblo people's native land.

Afternoons offer gentle restorative yoga. Serious horizontal work.

Our famous writing teacher, whose identify cannot be revealed, brought the group, one evening, on a breathtaking sunset walk to the Morada, a traditional adobe church. We followed a path through sagebrush in sight of Taos Mountain, the Pueblo people’s sacred mountain where white people are not allowed. At the path’s end stands a large, simple cross - the first one Georgia O’Keefe painted. Behind we saw the Pedernal, a flat-topped mountain that was O’Keefe’s perennial favorite. The painter made a pact with God, our teacher tells us. If ever she got the painting right, the mountain would be hers. O’Keefe’s ashes are now a part of it’s soil.

At day's end our classroom serves as zendo, and we sit for a period of silence. Before the final bell, our surrogate priest/famous teacher frightened me with a low, growl of chanting. She dismissed us with the words, "Awake!  Awake!  Deeeath and Life are both the saaaame. This is your oooooonly life. Dooo nooot waste it!"

I ask her for a personal favor.   I want the teacher/surrogate priest to write down the haunting benediction. She refused. She said that she had stolen it.

I have also stolen it.