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Up We Go
“Your plane.” An RV-8 is a sports car of an airplane if there ever was one. And this one was set up for formation aerobatics. At the moment, however, I was in command as my boss was nose deep in the auto pilot computer. Not that I had to do much. In theory, the auto pilot should take us all the way almost to touch down without any effort. All I had to do was keep an eye on things and be able to react if something went wrong. The plane turns a perfect final, lining up with the runway. I watch the manual controls and the outside as we…
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Telling Tall Tales
“A tall tale,” I’m explaining to Skye, “is a tale that is so outsized or exaggerated that it is difficult to believe, and may stretch the truth.” We are discussing Paul Bunyan, who seems to be popular in the area. Of course, she wants an example. “Well, we’re going to go on a vacation, Skye, where we drive from somewhere that is almost always sunny to somewhere it seems to rain all the time. On that trip, we’re going to play in water that bubbles up from the ground at exactly the right temperature for a bath. We’re going to play on a beach covered with tiny tumbled rocks instead…
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Aerial Silks
“I’m here because I need more playtime,” another student in the class said, in response to the teacher’s query about why we were standing there, on a Saturday morning, using stretchy bands to warm up our shoulders and feet. Really, I thought, that sums it up well for all of us. Silks looks gorgeous when seen on the screen and, while the performers certainly make it look easy, you know there’s a lot more going on. We start climbing the silks and I can tell that even the work I’ve been doing on the pull-up bar is not enough, the silks are different. They use different muscles, require more core…
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The Year of Ahisma
Driving home from Christmas in New Orleans in 2019, Skye and I decided that our new years resolution would be a year of ahisma, a concept from one of the yamas of the 8 limbs of yoga translated as non-violence. Our idea was to come up with a new way we could be non violent each week and implement it, making ahisma a true practice and not just a thing to think about occasionally when cued by a yoga teacher. Our idea started well as I removed plastic shopping bags in favor of reusable, we worked on non-combative household communications, and alternate forms of stress relief. We discussed where our…
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Teaching Yoga
Getting a yoga teacher certification had been on my “want to do” list for a long time, probably since I started consistently practicing yoga in graduate school. I knew there was a lot more order and structure to the practice then the intention-setting and series of poses we would flow through in the crowded practices I was able to attend. The cost, however, was far higher than a graduate student could afford and the time commitment, on top of school, made it impractical. Sure, I knew people who did it and then had a side gig teaching yoga, but the cost-benefit never worked out for me. I could always make…
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Teardrop Across America
“Do you think he’s getting anything out of this?” I’m sitting next to a lake in Montana. The water is cold, I’m wearing a jacket, but both kids are in swimwear splashing around in the mountain-enclosed water, completely happy. We’re on our way to Glacier National Park, but when traveling with kids, it’s important to stop about every hour to let them run around. So I’m sitting on the lake shore while the kids play, chatting with another traveling family. Whether it’s worth traveling with a 2 year old is the second-most-common question I get. The first is why in the world it’s just the kids and I. But it…
