Fri-Sun., Aug. 22-24 Journey as Destination Earth-You-Sky (B3B)  Bring yoga and awareness practices out of the studio and into the woods for a third-eye-opening weekend in the Whites. Crawford Notch car-camp promises great food, good company, and intermediate hikes to surrounding peaks; higher altitudes mean good phys. cond. is important. Cost of $55 includes 2 nights, dinn & bfst. Info about JAD series or to reg. contact L Mark Schultz.

You needn't go anywhere to find your center; you might travel around the world — that's 24,900 miles — and arrive at the same You who left, some 53 million footsteps later, a tad weathered perhaps, certainly wearing your second or third or fourth generation of shoes.

Ramana Maharshi, the "silent saint", spent most of the years of his life within the physical confines of Arunachala, the Red Mountain, while exploring the limitless space of his Self, connected to all selves and all things. Sometimes, diminishing the number and complexity of the world's external expression, makes it easier to cultivate the stillness and peace required to go in and in. We can use a stillness practice to examine our physical self, moving into the body, that we might release it; as well as to examine and tame our mental self, moving into the workings of the mind, that we might distinguish our Self from it, and release it .

Yet sometimes the path doesn't lead in, but out. The tantrikas know there is value in Shakti, the manifested world. If we learn to polish its mirror, if we are not fixed in our perception of Tree, Rock, Other, but instead see in the interplay of energies reflections of ourselves, see facets of the universal, then the world becomes a beautiful classroom whose lessons, simple and difficult, teach us what it means to be alive. When the complexities of interpersonal relationships become overwhelming, the empty fullness of the forest is a colorful and lively balm. The pure physical experience of the trail, with its hours of simple decision and consistent direction, clears the body of its knots and tensions, and eases the mind through its singular focus.

(But isn't that monotonous? Monotony can never last: boredom is the product of a dulled mind, not of a dull exterior. To one practicing awareness, an hour of Nothing can be a life-changing swirl of Everything!)

So I take to the fields and the trails to be with all that is not Men and Women. The world is so large! When I leave the small-minded politics of human settlements, I remember — thank goodness! — how unlimited all of creation actually is. Me, this miraculous confluence of blood and breath, organic electric wiring, unlikely channel for thoughts larger than myself… this six-foot, moving cage of bones and organs, with a definite if undeclared date of expiration… will climb a mountain with my companion creatures, and in so doing, take some rest, and open wide.

Me, one more living channel connecting the tangible earth to the unbounded sky.