I understood better when I got out on the little bluff a little after six o'clock in the evening.  The sun was out, a clear sky, and everything just a little bit greener and more full.  There were stretches of time where there were no airplanes in the sky overhead, and I did my yoga on the grass on the soft flat, looking over the river, the setting sun back up stream, soon sinking down behind the woods of Virginia.

Later on, after I'd finished, the sun having set, I watched a bat fly, wheeling and turning, rolling even, and I thought to myself, yes, this is the first day I've seen insects.

I understood things better now, after my head stand, the warrior poses, the sun salutations, the easy poses and the harder ones, the holding of tree pose after finally balancing in the wind.

I thought of Kerouac writing his poems, pomes of all sizes, listening to the whoosh and sounds of the sea crashing in at Big Sur.  Of course, that's what you do when the known modern world shuts down and leaves you with the birds and the nature, the winds, the arrival of the crows and the little flittering bugs that the bat was filling her hunger with after the length of winter.  Like him, I didn't have anyone around, and so it came to that, for me anyway, with my fool's little life away from any credentials one might strive for and better themselves by.  An out of work bartender, at fifty five, Jesus Christ.

Waking earlier with the kind of hangover from the wine that makes you not want to move, the yoga gave me something to tell myself good things and to feel healthy about.  I'd gotten down to the CVS even, earlier, for a mission to get the requisite passport photos taken.

Yes, on the one hand, where had the good years of my life gone, but for foolish unproductive spaces and things, else I wouldn't be just barely getting by with nothing saved up for any sort of future but more of the same.  How much can you change by being spiritual and thinking even the sweetest deepest thoughts you barely can understand yourself, out of your very human nature?  How much of the world can you change or understand?


There was silence in the sky, and I almost began to miss the airplanes as I worked out my poses, after finally getting through to mom as I walked down Elliot Place to my little grove of pines and the bluff, the wind rushing in from the west, speaking to her through my earbuds, iPhone in my SUNY Oswego sweatshirt pouch, as I reached my outstretched arms up to the sky, then bent over, asking each chakra and each vertebrae and muscle and tendon to release and open, impatient to get started with my yoga this late in the day (having squandered everything before one PM...)

I do tend to be emotional, which leads me then on to things like yoga, like reading up on Buddhist thoughts and D.T. Suzuki, the things of the Judeo-Christian...  reading up on the thoughts and lifestyles and techniques of the great poets and artists and musicians and deeper thinkers..  all that sort of a thing.  Is there a school for that?

But where will we go, any of us, after all this?  What will it be like when we come out of this?  Surely the air will have cleared, the water and sky cleaner and pure, at least were it not for the evil man in The White House Trump fighting any form of environmental protection there is, and who do I have for friends showing up right now, but the bald eagle, the heron, the cormorant, the mockingbird at dusk, the bat of wheeling twilight airs, the crows in the budding elms and along the reservoir....

In any neighborhood, of respectable hard-working driven homeowners, family people, what am I, my kryptonite thoughts run and go, what am I but a creepy loner, out there doing yoga, obviously honest about it, but isolated, not taking up any large space, but off in his own little world when lights are turned on in houses and people go into the kitchen for happy hour and to work on dinner and do what they do for their careers and professions, and everyone in need of the constant flow of information news.  One has the strange feeling this current time is ripe for isolating further those who were isolated enough already to begin with...

And those who are safe and entrenched will remain so.

And those of us who are lonely and poor, they will make due with the company of their wine...