"and probably everything is possible."

First Spring Round 3 - Feet on the Ground in MYOGA SEASONS for Subscribers, Northern Hemisphere 2024

In honour of yesterday’s Worm Moon, here is Mary Oliver’s wisdom on this burgeoning time of year in the North.

I.

In March the earth remembers its own name.

Everywhere the plates of snow are cracking.

The rivers begin to sing. In the sky

the winter stars are sliding away; new stars

appear as, later, small blades of grain

will shine in the dark fields.

And the name of every place

is joyful.

II.

The season of curiosity is everlasting

and the hour for adventure never ends,

but tonight

even the men who walked upon the moon

are lying content

by open windows

where the winds are sweeping over the fields,

over water,

over the naked earth,

into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities

III.

because it is spring;

because once more the moon and the earth are eloping -

a love match that will bring forth fantastic children

who will learn to stand, walk, and finally run

over the surface of earth;

who will believe, for years,

that everything is possible.

IV.

Born of clay,

how shall a man be holy;

born of water,

how shall a man visit the stars;

born of the seasons,

how shall a man live forever?

V.

Soon

the child of the red-spotted newt, the eft,

will enter his life from the tiny egg.

On his delicate legs

he will run through the valleys of moss

down to the leaf mold by the streams,

where lately white snow lay upon the earth

like a deep and lustrous blanket

of moon-fire,

VI.

and probably

everything

is possible.

So many of our themes are brought to gorgeous life in her writing—earth and clay, spring, red, legs that stand, walk, run, seasons, and ‘one’s right to exist’, which is the theme of our final round coming up next.

brilliance by the inimitable Michael Leunig

Not only was yesterday a full moon, it was also an eclipse where we feel the alignment of the spheres, arriving hard after the equinox that balances light and dark. This theme is repeated in the signs of this eclipse—Libra full moon, a sign of balancing in relating, opposite the Aries Sun, a sign of being true and brave in oneSelf.

I was meant to be rowing on the river about 5am this morning, in preparation for my first regatta coming up on 6 April—yikes! However, it’s been raining pretty steadily for a few days so I was relieved to hear it was cancelled, even though I had already cycled a portion of the way there. To keep up my training, though, I came home and did this 34 minute First Spring Round 3 practice (at the end of this post beyond the paywall).

For freebie subscribers, here are some good video options that get us into the feet, legs, and spine in Basics, and Warrior poses using the wall to refine them in Restores.

Our ending mantras in this culminating round of MYOGA Seasons’ First Spring are so simple as we explore the bij, or seed, mantras of two chakras. One is the strong eye, Ajna Chakra, whose sound we do at the start of Round 3—Aum—and the other is the sound for the chakra of this Season—Muladhara or base-support Chakra. Here the sound Lam is in-deed base in tone. Aum is breathier, more etheric, while Lam uses the tongue against the pallet and strikes a chord deep in the pelvic bowl. Notice the difference in sensations as you return to Aum after the Lams. Here’s that isolated mantra practice from Sounds: