November 2007 After an all-too-brief though as-always-rewarding visit to Esalen, I proceeded to Oregon to do a week of Shadow Yoga with Zhander Remete & Emma Balnaves at Yoga Shala of Portland (www.yogashalapdx.com), to shop at the local gem show, and to take in two hyper-violent but excellent flicks (American Gangster & No Country for Old Men) in between worshipping at the shrine of the local craft breweries (my personal favorite is Bridgeport, especially their ESB and Ebenezer, their seasonal brew, but I like Rogue almost as well, in particular their Dead Guy Ale).

Once in Seattle I lunched as usual more than once at the excellent Thai vegetarian restaurant Araya’s on 45th in the U District, and enjoyed as usual the improvement of my vocabulary in the course of a casual stroll down a quiet residential street not far to the west of Araya’s, where an otherwise nondescript wall offers the Upper Wallingford Word of the Week, which on this particular week was scumble (go look it up).

The New Oxford American Dictionary recently announced its choice for this year’s “word of the year”: locavore, “a person who endeavors to eat only locally produced foods.” (http://blog.oup.com/2007/11/woty/). A competitor for WotY this year is w00t, a coinage which may take some time for many scumblers and locavores to adopt (see http://www.reuters.com/; for “w00tness,” try (http://www.urbandictionary.com/). Need more words, especially sesquipedalian ones? Then consider Anu Garg’s AWAD (A Word A Day) at http://wordsmith.org/awad/.

If you prefer words linked together with sweetness of fervor, go for Krishna Das’s new book Flow of Grace, which comes complete with not one but two CDs to help you learn the Hanuman Chalisa. Our busy lives make it difficult for me to rendezvous regularly with KD, and so the brunch that he & I shared in Berkeley just before month’s end a true occasion for Thanksgiving. Jai Bajrangbali!

Link to News of the Past