Greed

Summer is coasting. The days are hot and humid and work in the garden revolves around keeping the green in check and harvesting.

This quiet time unlike that of winter is a good time for reflection on what worked and didn’t work in the seasons gardening. Winter is a looking ahead time, a planning for the coming warmth… a yearning more like it. Now though,  is the reflection on the absolute failure of my foray into vegetable gardening. What a disaster!! I did learn a few choice things:

• Vegetables need a continuous flow of attention. My style is to work with indigenous plants, nurture them into adult form and then maintain them from a distance. Vegetables need an eye upon them, all of the time. This is not just to feed and water them, it is also to protect them.
• Everything that man eats, everything else loves as well. That means the chickens, the birds, the rats, the insects… What could have possibly encouraged humans to farm with such overwhelming odds against them?
• Growing organic when nature seems to be conspiring against you is a challenge. When you wake up in the morning and find your baby crop devastated by a marauding snail family it takes herculean strength to not run to the shop and get the most lethal dose of whatever will fry those f@*#$% now!!
• Chickens learn how to find your most promising plants and devour them. When after ignoring your baby watermelon you come home to find them preening themselves with satisfaction and all your babies are picked out of their trays and drying in the mid day sun try an internal scream, imagine them stewing in a pot but realise that they did not do this to spite you. it may be hard to imagine that that look on their faces is not laughter or a smirk, this  is just what they do.

Anyway, i have lost my train of thought. I wanted to share the good news that Hope is indeed a *** drum roll *** GIRL!! Yay, I shouted with glee too. It was evident from her behaviour. Female baby chickens, pullets as they are called, do not stray far from Mom. They have a whole other energy to males who tend to be more adventurous and independent. The funniest things is that I kept Hope because I was under the impression that she belonged to Nonyana, the seabright. Now that she has grown her features are most undeniably those of the Crazy Ballerina, a silkie.

Boy this is a round about way of talking about greed. I am getting there. What this is all leading to is that after that bit of success I am trying the same ploy with two other sitting hens. One is the daughter of Blackie the Pekin that died, affectionately named Houdini. The other is the Ballerina who has been sitting on her imaginary eggs as per usual. Houdini true to her name had disappeared and i was getting pretty desperate that she was sitting on a hoard of eggs that would have me fighting with my neighbours yet again. Whe I found her, she was sitting on 14!! Can you imagine how many boys that could be!! I consulted with my friend who feeling for her said i must just leave the eggs. This was not going to be, but we negotiated a compromise. I left one egg with Houdini and gave the other to the Ballerina. Can I possibly be as lucky as with Hope??

 

Sadness and Hope

This weekend I lost my black Pekin, Tsoana. She had been wandering around listlessly and I was really at a loss. Do you save a chicken? Take it to the vet? How much is a pet chicken a pet? Part of me worried that she had something contagious and I should kill her before she contaminated the others. Part of me wanted her to die quickly, I could not stand the way she wouldn’t even run away at my approach. You see my chickens may be friendly, but I have no plans to teach them tricks like eating out of my hand. I like that they see me as an other.

This is a strange way to re-start my blog. Pula, the original voice of Coqtales will likewise be no more. He is definitely here in real-life, prancing around, identifying tasty morsels for his wives and crowing with reckless pleasure and fearlessness. I have heard another crowing in the distance. Maybe this chicken-thing is catching on in the neighbourhood. He will disappear as the protagonist of these musings. No more human-rooster chimera. This may diminish the canny observations of a chicken-point-of-view but maybe it will be less confusing to the casual reader.

This time around we are human all the way. The topics will hover around the same juncture. My exploits in the garden, in the yoga studio and my meanderings in-between.

On a happier note, Nonyana, the seabright of the harem is sitting. I was curious what a coupling of her and Pula would produce. At first I was all terror. I could not find her you see. She is the smallest hen and as much as they have taught me every nook and cranny of my back garden, Nonyana is always a challenge. Her creamy colouring and true bantam size at a time when my garden begins to turn to jungle always leaves me a little apprehensive when she disappears and it’s all too clear that she must be sitting. When I did find her I had a big think about eggs and babies. I left one on her nest. Hope. Hope that the egg is a she.

heat

As autumn makes its presence felt the body also starts to turn within. As a yoga teacher this is a time when the student population starts to wane. This month of April with all the holidays is particularly bad because the breaks add to the rate of loss. After settling into warm and comforting rhythms at home students don’t usually return until the stirring of nature outside- the longer days, the fresh green shoots and the chirping of returned bird-life. The nature of yoga is to bring balance to the inner and outer worlds and in this spirit the yogi aims to maintain a strong inner fire as the outer one recedes to northern climes.

Heat. Sanskrit is one of those dense languages with words that are crystallised concepts viewed from an infinity of facets. The word that translates to heat in simple terms is tapas. It can also figuratively describe the austerity, discipline, inner fire, determination and commitment that is required to persevere on the path of Yoga.

tapas- the inner flame

When applied to an asana class tapas is simply the physical heat generated from your practice. In some schools this heat is applied externally to heat up the room, or is encouraged by breathing practices that heat up the body. In the Iyengar system the heat must be generated from within as the fruit of your practice. In cool times it is easiest to appreciate this heat.

My morning practice requires that heat to begin to loosen my muscles, to  permeate those muscles with awareness. It’s as if I unlock my muscles and by so doing release my mind to wander in the field of my body. I was having such lofty thoughts during my own practice and when I taught class last week I noticed something… My winter classes are more aerobic and I was intrigued to see that same heating happen to the class. It felt like more than people warming up. To a practitioner of a group activity like Tai Chi it might make more sense when I say that it was as if there was a release or expression of a group energy.

On those very cold winters days a morning practice seems to permeate my body with that heat. Like a slow burning coal I carry that warmth throughout the day. I realise that this heat translates to that bubbling happiness at the end of a good practice. Those feelings describe a  further definition of tapas: self-purification. How else could you describe the lightness and clarity? In warmer weather I have never made the association of heat with the expression of my body and the calmness of my mind. Isn’t it interesting how the practice of Yoga seems to have the capacity for endless revelation?