A friend, cognizant that I was leaving town in a few days, asked if “I’d checked out.”
“I hope not!” I didn’t want my ‘last’ week in Mysore to be any different than the other weeks. That is, I didn’t want to cram in everything I hadn’t done yet, go on a last-minute shopping spree or put too much pressure on achieving something more in practice. My intent was to be in the moment.
In truth, it’s been impossible to not feel the clock ticking down as I go about arranging a car to the airport, assessing what and how much of my things I’ll pack and carry home and deciding if I’ll leave a trunk of household items in storage here that will be useful for any future trip(s). The question of when and if hangs in the air. All I know is that even as I’m looking forward to being home with loved ones and playing when I get back, this place, my lifestyle here — sleeping specific times for specific practice times, practicing in the shala, eating South Indian food, the sounds, being surrounded by the community of other semi-migratory students for a period of time— has become a bit ingrained. It’s so different than my life in the States, but here it is, equal and different in its own way.
So, today, not so surprisingly, I worked through a variety of feelings in practice (“Too much emotion,” Sharath would say), the irony after two months here being not feeling so yogic! But then that’s why they call it practice! Every day it’s a new day with its own unique rasa.
After I walked down to Gokul Chats to have my tea and dosa outside in relative quiet and wrote a bit before turning on my Kindle (can I reiterate how GREAT a Kindle is for this kind of travel?) and the day really got going. Truth be told, I haven’t been studying up on The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (recommended though!) or the Gita but instead have been loving reading the Keith Richards book Life. It’s hilarious. A tale of adventure, the Blues, rock and roll, perseverance …and ultimately following one’s one unique and often irrational bliss. Yeah.
Deborah Crooks (www.DeborahCrooks.com) is a writer, performing songwriter and recording artist based in San Francisco whose lyric driven and soul-wise music has drawn comparison to Lucinda Williams, Chrissie Hynde and Natalie Merchant.
Singing about faith, love and loss, her lyrics are honed by a lifetime of writing and world travel while her music draws on folk, rock, Americana and the blues. She released her first EP “5 Acres” in 2003 produced by Roberta Donnay, which caught the attention of Rocker Girl Magazine, selecting it for the RockerGirl Discoveries Cd. In 2007, she teamed up with local producer Ben Bernstein to complete “Turn It All Red” Ep, followed by 2008’s “Adding Water to the Ashes” CD, and a second full-length CD “2010. She’s currently working on a third CD to be released in 2013.
Deborah’s many performance credits include an appearance at the 2006 Millennium Music Conference, the RockerGirl Magazine Music Convention, IndieGrrl, at several of the Annual Invasion of the GoGirls at SXSW in Austin, TX, the Harmony Festival and 2009’s California Music Fest, MacWorld 2010, Far West Fest and many other venues and events. She toured the Northwest as part “Indie Abundance Music, Money & Mindfulness” (2009) with two other Bay Area artists, and followed up with “The Great Idea Tour of the Southwest in March 2010 with Jean Mazzei.
