Eons before the dinosaurs roamed land, life in water was busy diversifying by growing shells, skeletons, jaws, and eyes. Enter one of the oldest living creatures, the horseshoe crab, virtually unchanged today from its debut on earth over 400 million years ago. Today, even if broken and stranded on a near-empty Cape Cod beach, these living fossils inspire a contemplation on all that's transpired in their presence.
If they had the means to keep a collective journal over the entire history of existence, reporting on the foibles and failures, tribulations and triumphs, heartbreak and high joys of their descendent human cousins a million times removed, what might we see reflected in their steady, perhaps keen, certainly objective dispatches?
War, human subjugation, roiling storms for sure. Laughter, spills of luxurious light, embodied love and tenderness between creatures, also for sure. A flu pandemic 100 years ago come and gone, and another one arrived, with only the steady horseshoe crab to know for certain that this one, too, will pass. Imagining these observations collected with unflinching wisdom over several hundred millennia evokes a nascent yogic awareness: the horseshoe crab as an original yogi – calm and composed, reminding our troubled parts that time marches to a beat and at a depth we can't begin to fathom.
Yoga and meditation practice are keen tools to sharpen awareness and shape perspective, helping remind us that we are living in precious moments that may feel agonizingly slow and lightning fast, all in one turn.
We hope you're able to spend some of those precious moments in nurturing spaces with kindred souls, quiet enough to conjure the steadfastness of the horseshoe crab. And we hope Sun & Moon is one of those spaces for you. Our current schedule runs through June, and we'll be back with a fresh summer lineup starting July 5th (to be announced soon).