Doing a headstand, adjusting legs into poses similar to walking, the muscles are connected.  Leg to upper arm, pelvis to tricep.  In wholesomeness we are well-arranged, aligned, a totality.

End of the week of the psychical work, demanding, a cold with a hacking cough developing in the later part of it.  Rest.  Interrupted by the cough.

If the work is wholesome, than the writing that follows should be as well.  And if unwholesome, likewise.  Anyway, there is the muscular connection.

But what links the two kinds of muscles, the footwork of entertaining, both verbally and with the work of stocking and serving, clearing and cleaning, the taking of payment, the reading of customer through different mode, all of that on the one hand, and then, the equally long and often dull and tedious effort of writing something meaningful to life as a way of finding direction and bearing.

The yoga, solitary, along with its meditations, serves as a connection, a center of balance.  There could not be one, the sometimes violent social life, and the quiet time of reflection, without the other. There would  be experience and the credential without the connected presence of the two.  Even if there is hard work to both, imposed upon you, even if there is not always clear meaning in the effort as a whole for providing a decent life. the two exist side by side.  And perhaps they must both belong to a certain realm, like unto the fireman who prevents fires, the baker who bakes bread.

The week was not easy.  I closed each night, and wrote nothing.  Saturday was very busy, Sunday was the long slog of Mother's Day, a special menu, Monday great live jazz, a Safeway run, Tuesday marked by my walking up the avenue to walk through the woods to work as an unprecedented number of Police cars came screaming down the avenue in the left lanes to react to thuggish security marking the visit of Erdogan by attacking, was they wore their dark suits, the Kurdish protestors on Sheridan Circle, as I spoke with my mom over the phone, hoping she was having a better day than the one before in her faraway loneliness.  Perhaps one bright spot besides the friendship of a chef who's old friends with my chef boss, was the report from therapist, not easy to rouse myself for, a hot shower to loosten the phlegm, a bike ride down to downtown, newly hot with the steamy feel of DC summer, that I was doing better, that the medication of Lexapro seemed to be working, along with daylight.  Judging from my demeanor, she proposed that soon a visit every other week would suffice. Along with the good news, a good bit of relief, bouts of diarrhea.

The day off, with nothing but administrative tasks before me, I did yoga, drank various forms of tea, and ordered Chinese, too fatigued to cook and put dishes away.  What a life.


Then the recovery starts to happen, oddly, by itself, a lifting of a veil.  All the things you missed, flash somewhere along the edges of the mind.   A life in the mountains making music unaffected--if that's the word--by the outside world.   The Carter family, driving to Bristol, in a model T, fording streams and muddy roads, one woman pregnant, one nursing a baby boy.

The light comes up from the Venus morning star, I still have not had a date in years, and my social life is chosen by the places I can or must go.  Medicines.  To treat the beast who endures the job of barman at this edge of the South, humid now, just like that lonely day on the train, arriving to the steam about ten o'clock at night.  The air is still now, after fire danced electrically, cloud to cloud in veins, and mockingbirds talked in the trees as I came home from the RiteAid, with cough syrup, toilet paper, and other nostrums.  Does the redwood tree wonder, in mid-life, who am I, where am I going, who is listening friendly?  The tree takes his soothe from the depths below, the Guinness down in the earth, minerals of smoked barley and the DNA of hops.  The tree wishes to play the guitar, to thump on some taught string, taught-ed, I wish to say.

What are we doing, do any of us know?  Who would be a leader now, or is?

The tree might strive for calm, but still wish for that draught of earth by morning light, before the heat comes so that his leaves stay still with a minor droop, attempting to hold what beneficial oils might come in the air from neighbor.  The calming taste of earth, the magic of the living soulful chemistry that is the opposite of dark invisible energy, the talk of the Spanish underforest, living life below, breeding, working away in that layer.  The great tree must stand alone, not many of his species left, but in groves, here and there, and who knows when some new idiot might threaten, as is the lesson of history.

Does old Sequoia have a girlfriend?  Or is time spent trying to hang on, to keep adaption, as warmer and drier winds blow up.

And each word, a little cell, pushing out the old skin of the trunk, and strangely fresh and alive and watery, the pith where the sap runs.

The stress of the week, the deficit of nutrition, the hollow feeble weakness, the headache, the soreness, the sorrow, the tiredness, these are things faced at night, in the great forest lifting above grown in stature.