July 4th weekend, recreational eating

[Image taken from here]

Those of us who live in the United States are having the July 4th Independence Day weekend. I hope you are having fun and taking a little well-deserved break from your daily routine in some way or other. I am not big on celebrating holidays, but I always welcome an excuse to do something different. So this weekend, we have "escaped" to Minneapolis again :-) I just went to Mysore at the Yoga House; more on this in a later post. For now, we are going to go indulge in some recreational eating, i.e. eat more than we probably should (very tamasic, yes), and possibly come very close to passing out :-)

July 4th is traditionally a celebration of the democracy, freedom and independence of spirit that people in this country cherish. Although I am not a citizen of this country, I have lived here for ten years, and I believe these things are very important. But I also think that one cannot have true freedom without internal freedom of spirit; freedom from fear, freedom from one's darker impulses. I also believe that one cannot truly have independence without the spirit to constantly challenge one's comfort zone; in other words, independence from sheer force of habit, independence from being set in one's ways. With all this in mind, I leave you here with one of my favorite poems, by the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;

Where knowledge is free;

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;

Where words come out from the depth of truth;

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;

Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action ...

Into that heaven of freedom, my father, let my country awake.

Have a great July 4th! Or, if you do not live in the United States, enjoy your weekend! Got to go eat now :-)