cycleyogini

Being with bicycling, yoga, poetry, leisure, and the world.

For most of my life I have worked hard to do, be somewhere and someone, change my body, get somewhere in the world, and change others and the world. It was a grand and glorious trip and yet there is so much I overlooked, missed, dismissed, and judged unimportant. Something dynamic around intersections, lines, people and many varied types of leisures–yoga, computer gaming, urban Aboriginal hip hop, heavy metal music cultures, bicycle tourers, photography, and agility training.

In 2004 a dream came true as I began to travel by bicycle around the islands of Oahu and Hawai’i and some 5000 kilometres in British Columbia well after the age of 50. Kindred spirits like Dervla Murphy, Marg Archibald, and Anne Mustoe had inspired me to see the world slowly, on my own power, and so the world etched itself on my physical body. I took a pocket book about yoga to address sore muscles only to find that both the slow cadences of cycle touring and yoga poses enhanced and deepened a meditative mind about who was the I of me, my place in the cosmos, and the blending of me with the world. Cycling–attentive to the world, living out in the open, caressed and pummelled by weather, natural forces, and beings.

Bicycling and yoga tuned me to the spaces and forces around and within me.

As a professor of leisure it is probably not strange that bicycle touring weaves itself through my life and intersects with my research and teaching, my desire to connect to the world as it is, and

Leisure is an often overlooked aspect of life now riddled with judgments, work practices, achievement, and consumerism. Historically and philosophically leisure has been multi-faceted: Dionysian celebrations, daily socializing and games, intellectual approaches to citizenship, large public events and spectacles, and deviant practices. The classical history of yoga suggests another understanding of leisure–quieting the mind and non-attachment to the ego-self where being with what is nourishes peace and contentment.

Daily cycling rhythms allowed me to taste this contentment as self blended into movement and the world/people along the route and led me to ponder these intersections in my life.