Tag: childrens

Here Be Dragons

~ jessiwwriter ~ Leave a comment

Here Be Dragons

Dragons make everything better. Fairy tales, New Year’s celebrations, yoga. Real dragons, of course, would be a major downer, but dragons aren’t real (are they?) They’re fire-breathing, treasure-hoarding, flying magical creatures of our imagination. They might consume a fair maiden or two, but look what they give in return – great stories.

My son and I are reading Michael Hague’s Book of Dragons right now. Most of the stories are familiar – Smaug from The Hobbit, Eustace in C.S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawntreader, St. George and the Dragon. If you’ve never seen Michael Hague’s illustrations, look him up – the pictures alone make one of his books worth reading.

It’s a good time for dragons. The Chinese New Year, on January 22nd, features dragon dances for good luck. And I’ll be doing my own dragon dance this Thursday.

I teach gentle yoga every Tuesday, but I also substitute in other classes. This week, I get to teach a Vinyasa Flow class, which I haven’t taught in awhile. I’m pretty excited, and I’m going with my favorite yoga sequence of all time: the dragon sequence.

You can find several variations online, but I like the one my first teacher used. That was ten years ago, and I’m likely misremembering it, so the version below is an amalgamation of her sequence and my preferences. Once you get the hang it, it’s a full-body stretch, workout, moving meditation, and the only yoga flow I know that tells a story.

Here’s how my version goes:

  • The dragon sleeps (chair pose with prayer hands)
  • The dragon awakes (mountain pose)
  • The dragon crouches (lizard pose)
  • The dragon looks out its cave (lizard pose with bent elbows, look to sides)
  • The dragon stretches its wing (twist with arm up)
  • The dragon breathes fire (high lunge with cactus arms and lion’s breath)
  • The dragon flies (Warrior III)
  • The dragon waves its tail (3-legged dog and scorpion dog)
  • The dragon shows its belly (wild thing)
  • The dragon flies around the world (move through goddess pose to frame opposite foot)
  • The dragon sleeps (chair pose with prayer hands)

Here’s a video, totally different than what I described

You can then cry mercy or move through the whole sequence again in reverse, landing back asleep in your cave. It’s a challenging sequence, but I love imagining myself as a yoga dragon.

What are your favorite dragons tails?

Good Wives, Warriors, and Myths

~ jessiwwriter ~ Leave a comment

What do these three things have in common? A book – two books, really, and they’re both amazing.

Is it the illustrations, done in fantabulistic detail and psychedelic color? Yes.

Is it the sparse, visually invocative writing, just enough to make each creature come alive? Yes.

But most importantly, it’s the flipping fun.

Good Wives and Warriors (a collaboration between two female artists) have created illustrations for everyone from Crabtree & Evelyn to Johnnie Walker. Myth Match is their flip-book of mythological creatures. They have a more encyclopediac version, too, perfect for when the blurbs in Myth Match leave you wanting more, but the flip-page book is more fun. In Myth Match, the reader can either align the corresponding pages to show a mythological creature (Kraken, Phoenix, Encantado, Griffin…)

OR

Mis-align the front and back of the being to make an entirely new creation:

Phoe-nicorn

Kra-Neko

Mer-Fin

The possibilities are (almost) endless. And so is the writing inspiration.

What would that creature do? What stories would surround it?

This book inspired a story of mine, Immortal Medusae, about Encantados (river dolphins that change into humans). But that, by far, is not the only story hiding between these pages – perhaps you’ll find another. If so, please share it with me.

Or, enjoy their coloring pages of the Plant, Protist, and Fungi Kingdoms, and become a good wife or warrior yourself.