We have been waiting for you, Spring, with open arms. Welcome. Please stay as long as you’d like. I can’t wait until you’ve decorated Central Park to look like this picture. Ah…..the beauty.
Inspired: Spring, You’re Here!
Category: nature
Beautiful: How Compass Yoga Is Like a River
“We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.” ~ David Brower
After a long day of cleaning my apartment and packing up the last of my boxes, Phin and I took advantage of the late afternoon sunshine to stroll along the banks of the Hudson River. I was reminded of this quote by David Brower as I took in the scene. Rivers welcome everyone to relax and enjoy the view. They offer time for reflection. They give us the opportunity to take a deep breath, and then let it go.
That’s what we’re attempting to do with Compass Yoga. We are an organization that builds space for everyone to just be, a place where people can sit with their joy and their sorrow and recognize the wonder and beauty in all of it. We will hold a space for them to be safe, to let their minds power down for a while so that they can step out into the world fully revived. Like a river that flows and flows, we will be here for our students no matter what life has in store for them.
Beautiful: Spring Helps Us Move On
“Despite the forecast, live like it’s Spring.” ~ Lilly Pulitzer
My apartment is now at the weird point when it feels like a home, but it no longer feels like my home. I packed all my belongings in boxes. I took my art down off the walls. I’m wiping the slate clean and beginning again. It’s so appropriate to make a move in the Spring, when everything in the natural world is blossoming and blooming, stretching its wings and slowly coming back to life after a long winter’s nap.
My friend, Cyndie, also pointed out that this week is a New Moon. In astronomy, the New Moon is the phase of the Moon when it lies closest to the Sun in the sky as seen from the Earth. I feel the light pouring into my own life this week, too. I hope this light, and the feeling of renewal, will continue to follow me from season to season.
Beautiful: The Beauty of Spring
I love this photo. It makes me want to crawl inside this scene and take Phin for a long, winding walk under a canopy of pink petals. Beauty matters. It wakes up our senses. It increases our awareness. It inspires our imagination.
Spring is slowly making its way toward us, bringing with it warmth, color, and new beginnings. Life is about to manifest in a big way in the world around us. And so it goes within us, too. After a long, cold, dark winter, we’re ready to shrug off that blanket in search of the new, untested, and yes, beautiful. Spring is a time of action, movement, and growth. It’s a time to start again, unencumbered by the past.
Wherever your winding road takes you this Spring, I hope it’s a place where you can explore and experiment, a place that is as magnificent as you.
Beautiful: Make Time for Earthy Intelligence
“If we surrendered to earth’s intelligence we could rise up rooted, like trees.” ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
I love to work hard. I enjoy a good solid rest, too, but if I don’t put forward my best effort every day, I lose a little bit of that tingle of being alive. Some people feel rejuvenated after spending a day in their PJs. I never do. I need to move to feel connected. I need to move before I can feel grounded.
I prefer to move outside of the creature comforts of my home. That’s not to say I never exercise at home – I try to do at least a little yoga and meditation every day as soon as I wake up. Then I need to get out there – to breathe fresh air, to experience the wind at my back, to feel the sun on my face. I always find a lot of solace out in the natural world. There’s a lot of truth in it, and a lot of mystery that keeps me constantly curious. It’s a delicate, perfect balance.
After a walk or a run outside, I trust the process of life a little bit more. I feel its wisdom and its support. Life’s a little less scary once we get out there, once we give ourselves over to the rhythm of its cycles. By surrendering to what it has to teach us, we become stronger, more capable of handling whatever it is that it throws our way. It never gives us the work without the lessons to we need to get it done.
In a Spirit of Giving
“You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.” The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture. They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.” ~ Kahlil Gibran
The universe always rises up to support someone with a passion to do something of value for others.
I think about this quote a lot when people ask me about Compass Yoga‘s partnership with the New York Public Library. We offer 9 weekly classes at different library branches in Manhattan, all free of charge to anyone who walks through the door. Over the past two years since we began offering the classes, a number of people have asked me how I make sure the people who are in the class really need it. What they’re really asking is how do I feel about them coming to our classes for free while they have the means to pay for classes elsewhere.
We certainly do have students who could afford to pay something for a class – perhaps not the $20 or so it costs for many classes around the city, but certainly something. A few of our students have given donations to Compass Yoga because they are of means and support our work. I wish others who are of means would do the same. Perhaps in time they will. Other people have given their time and expertise to support our work. Other people don’t have the means at all, but they bring their energy and dedication to class every week.
There’s another New York-based charity that operates under the same circumstances as Compass Yoga: NYC Parks. Consider how often New Yorkers take advantage of the beauty of Central Park, or any of the other public parks in the city, on a sunny day? How many of them have donated money to NYC Parks? Certainly not all of them, maybe not even most of them. I wish more people would donate, though the parks don’t discriminate. They don’t have a giant gate around them demanding payment before entry. Compass Yoga has the same philosophy as Central Park: to be free and open to all who enter.
I started Compass to bring more yoga to more people in more places, no strings attached. I also started it so that yoga teachers who are just starting out could get experience teaching. I wanted to build a bridge between the people who need what yoga has to offer and the people who have the training to teach. I know if we stay true to that goal and work hard at creative fundraising strategies, eventually the funding will flow. The trickle has already begun; now its our job to do our best to carve it into the Mississippi for the sake of all our students.
Beautiful: In New York, We Are Stars to Each Other
I had dinner with my friend, Amanda, on Wednesday night. Though we are people who love and crave time in the natural world, we both made the decision to live in New York City for its cultural diversity and creative opportunities. Still, in these bleak months of winter with its heavy gray skies and meager hours of sunlight, my thoughts often turn to a different kind of life in a different kind of place that involves more trees and less concrete. You can take the girl off the farm, but that doesn’t mean you can make her forget its wonders.
Amanda and I talked about how much we miss the stars. While in New York City, you’ll gaze up at the sky to catch a glimpse of a handful of sparkly specks. Get out of the reach of the city lights and we are reminded that there is a galaxy with an infinite number of stars nestled into the darkness. I miss those stars; I miss the awe that they inspire and the perspective they provide. How can I have all the richness of the New York experience and still gaze at the stars? Is it possible to have both?
I thought a lot about this conversation as I wound my way from New York’s Little India to Times Square to catch the subway home. In a city like New York that has so few stars in the sky by which to navigate, we have to look for the stars among the people around us like my friend, Amanda.
While I miss those twinkling lights that I’ll never reach way up high, there’s something really precious and beautiful about being able to know and love the stars who light our way at ground level. We have to be one another’s True North.
Beautiful: Nature Teaches Us to Be Resourceful
“When you let go of trying to get more of what you don’t really need, it frees up oceans of energy to make a difference with what you have. When you make a difference with what you have it expands.” ~ Lynn Twist
When I feel myself getting a case of the “I need more…” syndrome, I play this little meditation game. I imagine that I’ve miraculously found $100,000 with no strings attached that I can spend any way I like. Would I travel the world, donate it all to charity, put a down payment on a house, pay off all my student loans? A few minutes into the game, I always find myself saying “$100,000 just isn’t enough. What I really need is…” And then I start laughing. $100,000 of discovered money isn’t enough? That’s absurd.
And this is how it goes for so many of us. We focus so much on what we don’t have that we lose sight of all of the resources at our disposal. Our culture feeds us a healthy diet of lack. Nothing is ever, ever enough.
When this happens, it’s up to us to turn off all of our devices, get outside, and go for a walk. Look around. Nature doesn’t think about lack. It adapts without any drama to the resources available at the present time. Nature has a much bigger job than any of us. It has to keep this whole planet and all of life moving forward. We think we’re over-scheduled and tired? Mother Nature takes a look at her to-do list and shakes her head at all of us.
Stop letting a sense of lack deprive you of the wonders that lay at your feet. Pick them up and put them to good use. Everyone can make something beautiful right where they are with exactly what they have.
Leap: Nature’s Lessons Via Hurricane Sandy
“Being inexhaustible, life and nature are a constant stimulus for a creative mind.” ~ Hans Hofmann, German-American abstract expressionist painter
A partially collapsed crane in midtown, a building in Chelsea that lost its facade to the wicked wind, and a flooded Battery Park City. All bridges, tunnels, schools, city parks, and most businesses closed. Public transit completely halted. The city that never sleeps was brought to stillness by a powerful gal named Sandy.
Phin and I spent the day hunkered down. He snoozed for most of it and I got a lot of solid work done. I put together and sent my personal e-newsletter as well as the one for Compass Yoga. I prepped for an interview I have next week for a dream contract role with an innovative and inspiring education-based nonprofit, and applied for some additional contract work. I worked on plans to raise money for my nonprofit clients as well as Compass Yoga. I wrote, read, talked to friends, cooked good food, and got in a home yoga practice. By all accounts it was a good, good day in my little abode.
In all my activity, the roaring winds outside never let me forget that I am just a small piece of a greater pie, that there are forces beyond my control and prediction that can and will impact me in significant ways. The best we can do is roll with nature, respect her strength and heed her warnings. There are things in this world for which we can only prepare, and cannot fight.
Nature keeps us on our toes. It checks our egos. And it lets us know that we are all in this wild experience together, for better or worse, so we might as well give our best and take care of one another.
Leap: The Seeds and Harvests of a Gardener and an Entrepreneur
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
A gardener’s work falls into 3 main buckets: planning, planting and maintenance, and harvesting the crops. To build Chasing Down the Muse into a viable business, I use a 3 X 3 X 3 system to measure my productivity and plan my to-do list for the week. Each week, I focus on 3 tasks that maintain what I’ve built (writing, reaching out to existing business contacts, growing my skill sets), 3 tasks that plant seeds for possible new business (preparing business pitches, interviewing), and 3 tasks that investigate possible new seeds that I may want to plant (research, exploratory conversations).
It’s a blast to secure new clients, read a piece of my writing that’s been published, and see the cash from my work arrive in my bank account, but I don’t base my success on those things in these early days of my business. I judge my current success based upon the possibilities I plant and nurture. Harvest season will roll around when the time is right. It always does in nature, so why should it be any different in our own lives?
Christa Avampato 