Word of the day: savasana

The word of the day is savasana:

Corpse Pose, also sometimes called Final Relaxation Pose (yoga)

Its Sanskrit name, “Savasana” (shah-VAHS-uh-nuh), comes from two words. The first is “Sava” (meaning “corpse”), and the second is “asana” (meaning “pose”).  (https://m.yogaoutlet.com/guides/how-to-do-corpse-pose-in-yoga)

"The anthropologists are studying two things: how the Texas sun turns a body into a rusted mummy feeding switchgrass, and how vultures scavenge those bodies.  To learn about the former, the donated cadavers are laid under metal mesh cages.  To understand the latter, they are left exposed, tagged wrists crossed, or open, as in savasana — the corpse pose."

 - Chelsea Biondolillo, "Back to the Land", The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2016

Word of the day: mandala

The word of the day is mandala:

 

1. Oriental Art. a schematized representation of the cosmos, chiefly characterized by a concentric configuration of geometric shapes, each of which contains an image of a deity or an attribute of a deity.
2. (in Jungian psychology) a symbol representing the effort to reunify the self.

1859, from Skt. mandala "disc, circle."

"In the biology classroom of college instructor Caryn Babaian, students learn about the interconnectedness of diverse life forms by seeing ecosystems in the form of mandalas."

 - September–October 2015 American Scientist (http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/2015/5/visualizing-biological-networks-as-mandalas)

word of the day: chawl

The word of the day is chawl:

< Marathi chāl a row of rooms let for lodgings, < Sanskrit shālā house, hall.

An Indian lodging-house. (OED)

"You've been to the Nadalands a couple of times before; shit, your family came up out of those spaces.  Squatter chawls where there are no roads, no lights, no running water, no grid, no anything, where everybody's slapdash house is on top of everybody else's, where it's all mud and shanties and motos and grind and thin, smiling motherfuckers everywhere, like falling of the rim of civilization."

 - Junot Díaz, "The Cheater's Guide to Love", New Yorker 23 July 2012

Word of the day: dharma

 The word of the day is dharma:

Sanskrit, = decree, custom.

In India, social or caste custom; right behaviour; law; esp. in Buddhism and Hinduism: moral law, truth. (OED)

"Sunim has placed a gilded Buddha statue in a prominent place on the first floor, and in the big window along the sidewalk, where a dozen different menus were once on display, there is now a new sign:

Zen Buddhist Temple
Sunday Public Service
7-8:30 meditation
10-11:30 open to public
4pm dharma service"

 - Gay Talese, "Past lives", 25 July 2011 The New Yorker