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there is widespread distribution or not.
    My advice: Write something that exceeds your abilities. Strive to offer the world something that blooms from effort and disposition in a way for which you cannot accept credit. The imagination, not the ego, is worth celebrating.
    I wouldn’t say that writing as yoga practice is a replacement for other forms of yoga. My writing may be the most important thing for me to do, but I benefit from meditation. Hatha yoga practice was designed to be the fast track to experiencing true freedom and enlightenment. I benefit from doing good in the world. I benefit from living sustainably.
    My practice speaks to the importance of bringing the light of consciousness into places of pain and awkwardness. When doing so, parts of me relax that I didn’t even realize were constricted, because it’s habitual to have kinks and hang-ups. Interior work helps me maintain my new habit of being open. I direct my attention toward objects that connect me to gratitude and amazement. I let these thoughts magnify my love and my means of giving form to that love. I don’t let comparisons interfere in a negative way. At this point in time, I don’t think that cynicism is any damn good for anything.
    I had been meaning to watch the movie The Secret Life of Plants for several years, but just never sat down and watched it. I found the film’s concept fascinating, and I enjoyed Stevie Wonder’s far-out soundtrack. So, eventually my wife and I watched it. I was emotionally and spiritually moved by the film, by the beautiful time-lapse photography, by how it celebrated a close look at growing things. I loved to see the various scientific findings (whether they were really scientific or not) because they expressed an intuitive truth. Whether someone actually was able to teach her cactus to speak Japanese (one of the film’s claims) wasn’t as important as the richness of attention given to living, growing plants. If plants were able to communicate with us in our language, we would recognize that they — like us — are not simple quantities of mass. Our own life is something we understand (at least in theory, if not always in practice) to be precious and wonderful and rare. The film was more than a little sad, because it projected such hope for the future, and it was already thirty-five-years old by the time I watched it. I admired the film as a piece of poetry that forgivably clung literally to what is, instead, a figurative truth.
    I put faith in science. I value when science is able to demonstrate something. In many ways, I value science above intuition. But often, I hope that science is able to demonstrate something that may just not fall under a perfectly rational purview. If I like something, I might not want to bother trying to demonstrate scientifically why I like it; I just like it, and that’s how it is — for the time being. Someone might be able to demonstrate relationships between my behavior and the action that I claim to like, or between elevated brain hormones and increased circulation when I am exposed to a given stimulus; perhaps that link would illustrate arousal, though it hasn’t really dealt with the concern of why I like it. At the moment of my death, science won’t save me — nor will science give me comfort.
    Living and dying are more art than science; because something is an art does not make it “soft.” Conformism comes from dependence on what has already been proven. It benefits me to allow room for curiosity and wonder in my actions. Where the practice of poetry takes me is the only place worth going.

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SPEAKING WITH EYES CLOSED
    Not very long ago, an accident damaged my eyesight, and the doctor told me that without surgery, I would go blind in a very short time. He said that in both eyes, my retinas were peeling off. As a result, vitreous fluid would leak into places it wasn’t supposed to, and the retina would