Optima dies… prima fugit.
In the lives of mortals, the best days are the first to flee. – Virgil, Georgics
Again at 4 am on Monday, with the candlelight and the cat. The full moon glows the snow like it’s radiating from within. Crystalline snow this time, spiky LED particles for a desolate rave where there’s no food left and the deer and foxes and bunnies huddle together for warmth. We’re miles from any streetlight or snowplow out here.
Saturday was two months since Sharathji died in the forest. I taught our radiant group of beginners (the shala does a two-month series of classes to share basic breathwork, meditation and movement principles with the townspeople, with no agenda that they become ashtangis). Then a text from Dhawi reminded me of the anniversary, and that landed heavy. No time has passed since he died, but my world is inside out.
Ashtanga is deep down in an in-between time now. An inter-regnum, or time between regimes. Same as the entire nation-state system, here at the horriffic halftime of this morbid decade.
My lens on Gaza, Ukraine, the Gulf States, Sudan, North Korea and America in 2025 is the old Gramsci line about regime change: “The old world is dying an the new one struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Zizek translated this as “now is the time of morbid symptoms.”
Yeah. Monsters are real and they are flooding the breaches in the nation-state system. But ashtanga, also in regime change, is giving awe and wonderment, moral excellence, reconciliation and repair, compassion and kinship, and the thrilling aspect discipline that frees the mind. Instead of matching the energy of the moment, ashtanga as I’m living it is generating a radiant moral opposite to 2025. I’m between the worlds of the one my teacher created, and the one I’ll inhabit for the rest of my life. I want this liminality to remain unresolved. May it continue filling me with creativity, gentle perception of the good, and childlike verve.
Yoga resolves apparent opposites, teaching our cells the truth of the principle that like increases like. However! Yoga can also generate duality where we need possibility and freedom. Pratipaksha bhavanam. Cultivate the opposite.
For weeks I’ve been remorseful about the comedy emerging from my heart. Every time I’m asked for words on who Sharathji was, what emerges is mischief and dad jokes. It’s trite. It feels disrespectful, as a senior student charged to carry his legacy, to fail to convey the depth and enormity he also kept hidden.
But I’m finally understanding that there was duality he cultivated in me as a deliberate teaching. I arrived in Mysore with a decade of practice in my cells, on the foundation of a rural farm kid’s instinctive lone-wolf discipline. My primary emotion, was reverence for Yoga. My primary thought, was that I could never adequately pay respects for this sacred methodology. Good intentions. What these looked like, though, was SELF-seriousness. Humorlessness. Refusal to bring my whole playful carefree self to the mat.
Now I see that Sharath summoned the dork in me. The dork in him recognized it. Saw it under my seriousness, silence and restraint. Physical humor, mischief and dad jokes were a step toward our true nature. Tada drashtuh svarupe avasthanam.
The first conference I gave at the shala, on the 7th day after his death, was unbearably light hearted. Listening back to the recording, I speak of toe socks, of the Jedi mischief in the way he chose to die. Next I recorded with Scott Johnson, and what came forth was the memory of him putting his new tiger-telephoto lens in my face in Durvasana, a physical joke on the grip of my driste. Same energy with Harmony too. The silly morsels. Leaving a record absent the ache of human suffering and the horror of loss.
I want to examine my time with him and see the answers to the universe, and the heart of devotion that serious student-teacher relationships express so beautifully in this world. Those are not absent, but mostly my grief is a comic strip. That was how he worked with me: serious to the point of absurdity. That is what it took to make me know the part I was missing.
So I go forward with a chronicle of slapstick ashtanga. This is the transmission he gave to the hyper-serious student. A little workaholic, tasked with something that isn’t work at all.
The first book I loved as a teen was My Antonia by Willa Cather. In 2020 I drove to Red Cloud, Nebraska, and stayed in her childhood home with the ghosts. So many ghosts out there alone in the covid cornfields. Cather’s book is about a kid from Virginia who’s haunted by nostalgia, who encounters Virgil’s insight about how “the best days are the first to flee.” About how we idealize the past, turn it into set pieces, and vacate the present of sweetness.
The best days are the first to flee has been a mantra for me ever since. A check on the way my mind idealizes the past and makes the present unspecial.
But that’s not how the situation of Sharath’s death works at all! What’s present to me is the hilarity. His death has moved into me as lightness and ease. A death certificate that acts, in my cells, like the biggest possible permission slip for the secret dork to take form. For the cosmic joke to glimmer through even in this era of monsters, moral horror, morbid symptoms.
He gave me a lot. A LOT of funny stuff, painfully funny, against a background of discipline and devotion. It took me SUCH a long time to get it. Years. God, it was all so much.
And it’s not like I don’t recoil now from this comic book phase of my grief. I do recoil. It’s not like I don’t judge the way that I’m being changed by seeing him die with these same eyes. Judgement is there. But I do see that this is what he asked of me, to hold and share the transformative intensity of this yoga while also expressing the truth of the light heart.
If I am understanding him correctly, what appears as dad jokes is no less than the comedy of the cosmos.
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