Now What?

Whenever I do yoga, which is maybe twice a year, I overstretch my hips. Interlocked somewhere between pelvic bone and the iliofemoral ligament is where I bury all my stress and all the disease that my students and my child try to inculcate me with. Yoga stretches and therefore releases all those toxins into my blood stream. Yoga, though healthy-seeming, makes me sick for about a week.

It's been 8 long years. 8 years that I've been hunkered down, writing useless letters against delisting Gray wolves from the endangered species list and hunting cougars with dogs. I flip off people who drive Hummers and buy organic milk and pretend this has an effect. I feel embattled and yet I go about my business like everyone else, keeping my headdown, my politics publicly diffuse, my apocaplyptic visions quiet. Then, Tuesday happens and unleashes all that pent up stress. Now I'm sick and bored and freaked out.

The internet has nothing for me. My inbox? Empty without MoveOn and mybarack.obama emailing me every 7 minutes.

It might take a long time to recover. And, like yoga, a mere one day change isn't going to effect a lifestyle change. But I feeling stretched, if sore, and like there's something new to do. Something to help begin to make the change everyone who voted for Obama called upon themselves to make. It's just a start. But maybe if I do something politically, socially yoga-esque not yearly but weekly or even daily, the hunkered-down feeling won't return and the something planet-healthy might take hold.