"Beside the sea...."

WHEE!  I am sitting on the third floor of the Harbor Town Yacht Club in a lovely suite with its own balcony looking out over Calibogue Sound.  How fortunate I am to have a brother who lives right across the harbor and provides such wonderful hosting whenever I am here.  This weekend will be especially special since friends Harriet and Ed and their family are here on a winter break vacation from Albany, NY.  The temperature this morning is 69 - a beautiful day is beginning - even shorts weather!  Harriet and I have traveled together several times and our families have been friends for over fifty years.  What a joy!  Last evening Jim and Anne took me and Frank to the Quarter Deck here right beside the lighthouse.  I somehow or another had never eaten there before and, of course, the food was very good.  Like Atlanta, it is difficult to eat in any restaurant that doesn't serve very good food - a real treat for a Ninety Six resident!....but the most important benefit is the atmosphere, the energy of being "beside the sea."....As a child, my favorite poem began, "When I was down beside the sea, a wooden spade they gave to me, to dig the sandy shore."  I've forgotten the rest.

Yoga Benefits

I am beginning a new book: Threads of Yoga.  Thanks to my niece, Kate.  It is a whole new take on Patanjali's sutras.   Here are a few words that caught my attention - particularly the last few words:  "it does not lie."
The legacy of yoga has been resurrected in our time through the innate pleasure of our flesh.  The simplest techniques of breathing, spinal elongation, and joint fluidity have given countless flesh-alienated postmoderns a renewed sense of vitality, purpose, grounding, and connection........Through modern postural yoga we have remembered that our flesh innately wants to rejoice, connect, and serve--and that it does not lie.
In my experience, these words are fact - vitality, purpose, grounding, and connection.  Yes, these are benefits of practicing Hatha yoga, as we teach at The Yogatorium.