OGT DAILY Day Two Hundred and Thirty One GRANDMOTHERS

Yesterday was spent writing my course syllabus and procrastinating because of the enormous burden of writing I have ahead of me.   Why not take a break to do a yoga class out of doors?   This was at the home of my new friend and yoga teacher Hasita.   In a beautiful spread of green lawn behind her home, four of us laid out our mats and practiced Yin yoga an inward restorative form, which calls for holding poses to enhance bodily healing.  Perfect!   Hasita then read to us from the Sufi poet Hafez and lead us in a walking meditation in the style of Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh.
We walked slowly, ball of heel to toe, in rhythm with our breath.   More slowly than you can ever imagine.  This allows you to move "mindfully" and synchronize movement to breathing.  Just as in all other forms of meditation the mind is cleared because there is really no room for anything more than the placing of the next foot, the taking of the next breath.

I am grateful for this learning from Hasita who is somewhere in her mid eighties and still limber and joyful despite her own life trials (including s childhood fleeing from the Nazis).   She is to me a new grandmother.   As I now have no grandmothers, mother or even aunts left, I must turn to new sources of strength and comfort; mentors who remind me of the women who have cared for me throughout my life.    Women have such strength and connection to each other and the earth.   Women will ultimately change the course of this country.   I can sense it and will it to be.   

Karen Keys-Grimarra, a black female attorney and child advocate has just won a bid for school board in Fairfax County, VA, against the alt-right endorsed Chris Grisafe who suggested there would be White Supremacist torch marches to protest school board meetings.   That's a small but significant victory as this is in Charlottesville.   The Nation has just published statistics that indicate "16,000 women have contacted Emily's List, which works to elect pro-choice Democratic women, to say they want to run."   By contrast in 2015 only 920 women did.   (The Nation August 28/Sept 4, 2017).

Only 17 seats are needed to flip congress and 10 of those seats are being challenged by Democratic women.