“Understanding what this was, I crumbled into a heap, talking through the tears.”
Even the blades of grass exist in dire uniformity at 400 Bizzell Street in College Station, Texas. To walk along Bizzell from its start at George Bush Drive to its end at College Avenue is to walk in synchronicity with 44,000 other students, accidentally in step, never veering off the path. That’s how it is at Texas A&M. You don’t veer off the path into the direly uniform grass, and I know this because I did it, eliciting reprimand from one of the school’s Cadets.
Texas A&M…
Kindness shouldn’t be relative. And life is much simpler when you drink your coffee black.
These are the two rules I try to live by. Sometimes I fail.
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Late last spring, I was waiting in line for an oat milk cappuccino at one of the local coffee shops that also serves as my mobile office outside of pandemic times. Normally, I’d take that time to soak up the environment, soak up the energy; but this was one of my wilder days, which is to say it’s one of my days where every minute needs to be maximized. …
Learn the basics, and then make it your own. ~ Lynell
I don’t have many benign memories of my mother, but one of them was that she liked to get new cars. They were never new to the world, rather just new to her. It was an act of extravagance, a rebellion against a life of poverty reprieved only by a brief marriage to my father. New-to-her cars made her feel like a Jones.
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At ten years old, my mom remarried. At ten years old, my mom bought a used silver Ford Taurus bedazzled with grocery cart dings and…
Music can make or break the experience for your students
The power of music is indisputable. It elicits emotion, hurls us back in time, and moves us forward to a beat. Music has both an ergogenic effect and the ability to calm us as we relax into the serenity of a soft, slow sound. Music is often used to enhance our experiences, and as yoga grows increasingly popular in the Western world, we are seeing a rise of its use in the practice space. Undeniably, there is value in offering a rhythmic backdrop to our movement, but there is an…
The story of a lifelong spiritual crisis and its impending resolution through bourbon.
I stand on the steps between two sisters. I’m the eldest by one and two years, but I’m the smallest. I always was as a child. At 5'1", I often still am. Their names escape me, but the image vividly remains. They, comfortable in their long skirts and smooth, dirty blonde braids sandwich me, fidgeting, donned in an oversized ankle-length dress pulled from the back of the youngest’s closet and a wild ponytail unsuccessfully tamed with mismatched bobby pins. Their mom, whose name has also faded from memory, eyes me sternly and unambiguously to stand still.
I don’t know where…
When I graduated from my first yoga teacher training (YTT) in January 2015, I accepted my certificate comfortable with designing sequences, applying philosophy, and making playlists, but I had little knowledge about the business side of teaching — most specific to this conversation, the importance of choosing the correct insurance. To be fully forthcoming, I didn’t know that yoga teacher insurance was a thing until a studio owner offered me a spot on her sub list later that week.
I was still new to this side of the world — too new to know these things, too new to know…
note: This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed to respect privacy.
Once upon a time, a line was cut through the dense thicket between Bragg and Saratoga, two rural towns nestled deep into East Texas. “Once upon a time” is 118 years ago. “Once upon a time” is 1902, and the line was cut by the Santa Fe railroad, which used the tracks to haul typical east Texas commodities, which is to say oil, cattle, lumber, and such.
For a short time, the railroad junction connecting Saratoga to Bragg had a nearby post…
My experience as a mostly white woman at a Black Lives Matter protest.
It has been said that Mr. Rogers, the archetype of human kindness and neighborly acceptance, spoke most clearly through his example. I believe that to be true of all people. The truest conversation then becomes a matter of how we conduct ourselves.
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There are five of us in the car, moving at a pace so slowly we could have been going backward, which is the most appropriate metaphor for this particular moment, this snapshot in time that so emphatically reminds us that we are barely not…
they’re everywhere
I was asked to write about my hero, recently. I say recently, but really that was so many weeks ago. I just couldn’t do it until now. It’s not that I don’t know any. I do. It’s that I couldn’t only pick one. It’s that I couldn’t only pick one, and I couldn’t write them. I don’t mean write about them, because that’s easy to do. I couldn’t write them. I tried, though. I chose only a few everyday heroes, and I tried to write them
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Maybe my heroes are the couple sitting two tables over, sipping…
and why they give me chills
I get chills every time I hear We Are the World. I never understood it, but this has been a truth since hearing it for the first time as a nine-year-old. Or maybe I was eight or ten. Either way, curious goosebumps have covered my body for well over three decades, now, when Lionel Richie begins his lyrical reflection. I don’t hear it anymore unless I choose to, and often I forget to choose to. I played it yesterday, though, on a whim. There was no reason, no expectation, no ideation attached to it…
Adi McCasland
teacher | storyteller | bourbon drinker | lover of dogs & words
