Metaphors

I'm helping a young woman from a Chinese-speaking family edit her college-application essay this afternoon, and I think I've come up with a metaphor for her to use in pruning out the excess: See an essay as a jigsaw puzzle, with a place for each piece that's in the picture. Any piece that doesn't complete the picture has to be jettisoned. Any piece that doesn't notch with its neighbors must be moved to the spot where it fits perfectly. Sort of works, though jigsaw puzzles generally don't come with extraneous pieces—and essays do.

And as long as I'm on the subject of metaphors, I keep thinking of yoga as a kind of origami for the body—folding, creasing, flattening, involuting, convoluting, everting, inverting, pronating, supinating.

I've fallen in love with my practice again—obviously—even though I had a "bad" substitute teacher today who chided students for not understanding her sloppy instructions. Note to self (and sub): If your student isn't getting it, perhaps you need to figure out what YOU are doing wrong as a teacher. Maybe that's a metaphor for communication in general.