Out Beyond

Today I led an informal yoga class to four of my dearest friends, who have come to the Philippines to help me and my boyfriend say goodbye to our year here. This last week, I struggle to balance the sunning, adventuring and laughing, with my work of client sessions, website maintenance, workshop preparation and tax returns whilst in a foreign country.

This past week, we've gone high, climbing a volcano with a stunning view of the tiny tropical island, resulting in two scrapes and very sore thighs all around. We've gone low, snorkeling through a giant clam sanctuary and a sunken cemetary, resulting in sunburns all around. We've gone fast and furious, renting motor bikes and driving them over gravel dirt roads, resulting in two wipe-outs, three burns (damn exhaust pipes) and wind in the hair all around. We've gone slow, staring at the brilliant blue ocean, drinking pina coladas over rambling conversation, resulting in a deeper understanding of the benefits of doing nothing.

As we all lay in Shivasana (also known as "corpse pose"), sweaty and happy at the end of class (I do give a rather vigorous and fierce class), a luciously-read Rumi poem came on over the Ipod playlist:

Out beyond right-doing and wrong-doing
There is a feild
I'll meet you there

I want to kiss you
But the price of kissing is your life

Now my loving is running toward my life, yelling
What a bargain
Let's buy it


So, this morning, amid my friends, one single and searching, one about to move in with her new love in a new town, one in a polyamorous relationship with a man and two women, the other with two women and one man, I found myself in such a feild. I took a break from the pressure of doing right the guest-hosting and the business-maintaing. I found myself in a sweet spot, in the living room, on beyond any sense of doing it right or doing it wrong.

There's never a better moment than now to love. There's no right way for that love to look.