20-Minute Monday: Contrasts

Tonight I feel both powerful and fragile.  After work I crossed Copley  to the BPL to return 3 severely overdue books and, crossing back at the corner of Boylston and Dartmouth, strode straight through a minefield of skateboarders (doing their daily swings across the tempting marble slab) as if daring one of them to roll in front of me, then diagonal again across the 3 lanes of Dartmouth and daring the cars turning off St. James.  Then to yoga, successful with its one-legged Chaturanga Dandasanas and warriors 1, 2 & 3 and the 10 minutes of ab crunches while in a supported bridge and the resonant Ujjayi interspersed with Lion's Breath.  Followed by 500 calories burned on the elliptical machine.

Stepping back out of the gym into Copley, then, the day's earlier muggy warmth had dissipated, drizzle falling, the red lights of 3 ambulances and a fire truck on the same sidewalk that had entertained the skater bois hours before, the attendants working on someone, evidently, in a bad way on the benches there.  The energy so rare and different.

The damp seeps in here on the library steps, even as I sit on my coattail to keep my butt dry.  It's better to be out here, leaning against the pedestal of the lion statue, rather than back on the mugger's paradise of the main walls.  Lion's breath earlier, lion protection now. I think I don't necessarily crave protection, not really needing it here in the well-lit public square, and otherwise finding it difficult to accept that sometimes I'm fragile and need to accept help and advice.  MSF's visit reminded me how much I could learn about finding the comfort of that line between self-sufficiency and the relaxing of ego to someone else's care and concern.  He helped with that, sometimes chiding, sometimes letting me chide him.  Neither is a bad way to be....and on a night (and following a week) of the power/fragile struggle, I know it sometimes takes a surfeit of one to appreciate the other.

Monday, October 3, 9:25-9:45 p.m.

Boston Public Library