Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Read.Eat.Listen: Light

photo by Kevin Collins
OK, so we're officially heading through winter and ...toward the light. Wait, hasn't it been storming most of the week? Well, thankfully there are plenty of over-the-top holiday decorations around town. Santa Fe has luminarias, San Francisco has that lovely light-bedecked big tree in Golden Gate Park... Alameda has...bright blue stars, Santa's workshops, giant snowmen and copious light-covered reindeer plus an inflatable Snoopy or two (or four). My tacky side, loves Christmas lights  and greatly appreciated the often crazy lighting displays that speckled the island.  I kept it simple (and safe) and went with a bunch of white lights around the window frames but I'm emboldened for next year. I'll pass on the inflatable characters...but blue lights, pink lights, white lights,.. the possibilities are endless.. Hopefully my fellow Alameda residents will keep theirs up through the New Year so I can take more notes.
photo by Razzu Engen
Read: Speaking of notes, I've been doing some yoga recon along with my usual practice, checking out different teachers once a week and reading outside my usual Ashtanga lines. I'm not so studied in Iyengar but I do love this book, "Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace and Ultimate Freedom," by BKS himself, that elegantly addresses what yoga is and how it helps our lives. "the infinite variety of natural phenomena gives an appearance of chaos, but they [Indian yogis] asked, is it possible that the laws that govern the unending turbulence of nature are orderly and comprehensible? And if we can grasp how they work, would it not be possible for us to emerge from chaos into order?" — BKS Iyengar
Eat: My inner Pavlovian clock thought, 'it's December, I must be in India.' But I'm not. So I've been making up for it, eating lots of Indian food this season, including, yes, dosas, those lovely lentil-rice crepe-like staples of South Indian cuisine. It's easy to find dosa — and pre-made, quality dosa batter — in Indian specialty markets around the Bay Area, but for those who want to roll up their sleeves and make their own from scratch, check out this "Perfect Dosa Recipe" from Veggie Belly.
Listen: Over the Rhine. Heard this Ohio-based (lots of good stuff catching my ear out of Ohio) duo on satellite radio recently and started digging a bit deeper. Good, literate, heartfelt, real stuff.

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