Multi-Tasking with Yoga

I know. Not at all the point. Yoga is about focus, about yoking (literally) the physical body to the breath with the ultimate goal of releasing each individual's potential energy (traditionally, prana, or lifeforce) and ultimately, eventually, step-by-step, attaining a higher truth.

It takes abhyasa - sustained practice. It's a concept I had tattooed on my arm after graduating from teacher training. I believe in it. It's hard, and it takes time, but it's so worth working toward.

That said, I also believe that sometimes even a little bit of unfocused yoga is better than none at all.

Take my personal practice today. It's the last day of 2013. This year has been fraught with tragedy and pain for me. Family and yoga and kickboxing and writing have held me up when nothing else would. I honor these things above all, up there with my mother's blessed memory and my belief that each person on this planet has the capacity for positive change. Today's a day when I'm leaving lots of loose ends untied in order to make meaning. I'm no longer tethered to the feeling I always used to have when December rolled around, the feeling of needing to finish all chores and errands and start the new year without anything hanging over my head. It's a near-impossible task, I saw time and again. This year, my mother's last year on this planet, is different.

I was on my mat, sweating it out after an intense kickboxing morning. The cat crawled under my leg as I panted through my evolving Hanuman (full split). She didn't have room to stand up straight, which means I'm getting closer to the full expression of the pose. I worked through other sequences that I'd like to teach in class. I breathed. And then, from the top of my mat, I realized I hadn't dusted my bookshelf in a while. I paused to get 'er done, and then I tried out more yoga shapes.

When you don't have time or energy for complete focus, spurts of focus are okay, I think. Yoga is part of my busy, sometimes fractured life, and I'd rather have it punctuating chores and writing and other pursuits than not present in my day at all. Sometimes those spurts shift my whole day around - I toss myself up into a headstand and come down with a new idea for a section of a paper, or calm my racing thoughts with a few minutes of pranayama (breathing exercises).

Your yoga, as my teachers teach, is yours. It's nobody else's. It should look and feel like you, even when it's changing you from outside to inside and back again.

(Deep Breath) First Book

First Look at My Book sounded too Seussian for a post title, but that is what you are getting. Anyone who made it out to last week's Creative Fridays Showcase has already heard this (and thank y'all so much for being there! It meant so much to all of us).

Here's what I read. It's part of what will likely be an early chapter mixed with what will likely be a middle one. I started writing it after my mother died in January. Writing, along with friends, yoga, kickboxing, and grad school, is what kept me upright some weeks.

I am using other parts of the book as part of an ongoing project that sprung out of a final paper. When I read it in class, my professor suggested that I start blogging it to get it out there more. It's pretty amazing how many great mentors I still have (and find) even though my greatest one is gone.

Mom, this is for you. I hope you like it.

Love,
Hil



Nancy, my mom, had an absolute, all-encompassing interest in everything. She would read the New York Times and want to attend every cultural event and learn about every new issue. She was the embodiment of excited joy - she'd skip down the street in the rain, and would skip more assiduously if her only daughter got embarrassed. It wasn't until my adulthood that I really saw the importance of skipping, and of skipping together, with abandon.

This week is the eleven-month anniversary of her death. I keep thinking back to last year. I went home to visit her the weekend of St. Patrick's Day, and it was one of the last times we were able to walk around her town together. It was one of the last times I rode in a car with her driving. It was one of the last times that she was able to walk anywhere without incredible pain and at her normal speed.


It is still winter after my mother's death, perhaps creeping into spring. I make it to the platform just before the B train pulls in. I do not yet realize that I have left my travel mug of tea at home, sitting by the door. The subway smells like a damp dog. I read halfheartedly, sensing the dusty dull motes of sadness settling on me. Grief can be both blurry and hard: it comes in different forms, almost from moment to moment. It also has a strong grip, and I can feel it wrestling with my stress for control of my shoulder blades. I wish it were socially acceptable to take a sad day instead of a sick day. I could take an orphan day, a cancer witness day, a lonely day, a turning back time in my mind day.

I hope my grief lets me enter my kickboxing class first, trailing behind me like a wraith instead of sitting on my shoulders and driving me downward. My grief likes to remind me that it's still there. It's part of me now, because my mother will never come back. Even when I feel her presence the most strongly, and even when I am most in touch with the reality of her death, my grief sits right next to my other emotions. It's mine. It owns me, and I own it. Grief is disembodied, but attaches to you like a leech and stays there quietly. It uses your energy to keep itself going. It sidles up and grabs your hip and won't untangle itself, siphoning off as much energy as it needs in that minute.


On a frigid morning in March, I finally wake up scenting spring. It isn't here yet, but I know it's on its way. As I let my shower energize me, I feel that I am again channeling my mother's inveterate optimism. Her energy is my energy. It's part of me now, keeping me upright and moving forward.
On the subway, later, the train pitches sideways, and I am strangely proud of the other bleary commuters for not falling. They don't even trip. I reflect on the toughness and strange centeredness of the New York tribe. I follow the smell of skunk up the subway station steps, realizing that it's burnt rubber when I hit the sidewalk, but still feeling like it adds to my spring premonition. For a minute, I hover in my childhood backyard, and then the light changes.


My mom was magic. She led me in rain dances and I really believed it would rain. Even when she was dying, when she said it was going to be okay, I believed her, and she was the only person who could say that and make it sound like truth. Her memory is part of my being - she is in my DNA, as someone told me soon after her death -- she created it -- but her love and her memory and the way she raised me are part of the fabric of my world.


Now we are in spring, and we are gifted with hints of warmth, punctuated by breaths of winter. I think the weather wants to be different things. It struggles against the confines put on it by climate change. It reserves the right to be capricious, like a cat. It laughs, gently, at our obsession with it.

And the sun always returns.

Shyness, Bravery, and Compassion

I'm often struck by the perceptiveness and compassion that (comedian) John Hodgman shows in his rulings on the Judge John Hodgman podcast. The latest episode, The Right to Remain Silent, blew me away. The show is described this way: "Chris wants his daughter, Sophie, to get over her shyness and show more confidence in uncomfortable social situations. Sophie believes she is making progress in her own way and doesn't need any pushing from her Dad. Who's right and who's wrong? Only one man can decide." In these terms, the episode centers around a chance encounter Sophie and her dad had with comedian Eugene Mirman, one of Sophie's favorites (who happens to be one of my favorites, too). In an attempt to encourage his shy daughter to talk to Mirman, Chris pushes her forward, when she's already starting to cry from, it sounds like, sheer overwhelmedness. (It can be a word. Hush.)

Twelve year-old Sophie is much like I was at that age. She's the child of an outgoing academic type (difference: her dad is vice president of a college, my mom was a professor). She's shy. (I was incredibly outgoing through my early teens, and then took on shyness until early college. Now, I'm an outright extrovert.) I was firmly on her side for much of the episode, feeling like her father was pushing her too quickly and too hard to be someone she isn't sure she wants to be (yet).

Thing is, I do empathize with Chris. I can tell from what he says about his kid that he's genuinely proud of how smart and articulate she is, and how much he wants that to shine out for the world to see. (He also shares that he was even more shy than Sophie when he was a child - I wish he had elaborated on what that means.) His daughter writes poetry, and he wants her to participate in a poetry reading at his college. (As a faculty brat, I never would have submitted to such a thing. Even now, my poetry is winsome at best, and it's written for me, not for students six years my senior.)

What bothers me, other than the actual pushing, which Sophie said had gone too far, is his attitude that her shyness is something that can be "fixed." I'm not a parent, but as a formerly shy kid, what worked for me was having a parent who let me be who I was when I was it. My mom encouraged me to speak up and to try new things, but she also let me pull back when I needed to. The extrovert that I am today is shaped by the three decades of choice I got in that matter. I was never not enough for my mom. I don't think Chris' feelings about his daughter are that simple, by any means, but I think it's an important realization for any child to have. They are loved just as they are. They're encouraged to make changes, and to challenge themselves, but they're always loved, and the developmental stage they're in is (assuming nothing abnormally dangerous is happening) respected.

In the limitedly short glimpse I got of everyone's interactions with Sophie, I much prefer the way the comedians talk (to her) to the way her father does (about her). Mirman, in a surprise call-in appearance that initially breaks Sophie down, is gently funny in his typical deadpan manner, zeroing in on the problem with the pushing as he witnessed it. Hodgman puts it more bluntly - "Chris. Don't shove your daughter" - and talks to Sophie almost like she's a peer. He nudges her toward telling Mirman how much she likes his work, pointing out that "almost everyone in the world appreciates a polite, 'Hello, I think you're great. See you later.'" Bailiff Jesse Thorn, similarly empathetic to the girl, asks if she has "any plans to break out of [her] shell on [her] own time." The ruling Hodgman gives is in Sophie's favor, and in a lovely twist, the punishment Chris receives is just what he initially wanted his daughter to do: read poetry in public.

Moving (E)Motions

On NPR earlier this year, Sebastian Junger discussed the death of his friend Tim Heatherington, a journalist killed. He used a phrase to describe the pace of fear in combat - "[combat is] scary beforehand, the anticipation is very scary, and afterwards the fear catches up with you." The idea of an emotion catching up with you fits exactly with my experience of grief. I didn't have a lot of time to grieve when my mom was sick. I did it alone, at home, when I wasn't with her. I cried in hospitals, but I mostly tried not to, and tried to send all of my energy to helping her and hoping for her recovery.

Now, a little over nine months after her death, I'm grieving. (I could say I'm still grieving, but I hate the implication of "should be ending" that that little word adds. I'll grieve for the rest of my life - in healthy and productive ways, to be sure, but it will never end. The only way grief ends, I think, is if you don't love the person anymore.)

Compare Junger to this line from Fitzgerald's "The Crackup": "The world only exists through your apprehension of it." The first time I read that, I defined the second noun - apprehension - as understanding, as I think he intended. The second time, I thought of fear. Fear certainly creates worlds for some people. We talk a lot in yoga about letting go of fear, but it's not always so easy. When I was faced with the prospect of losing my mom's physical presence, I was more afraid than I've ever been. Now, just like grief, the fear is still with me - because the world without her is a scary place.

What fear and grief both do over time, rather than disappear, is shapeshift and change. They mold themselves to changes I'm making in my life. They shift a bit to the background, hovering, when I share happy memories of my mom or think of how earthshatteringly proud she'd be of me and all that I'm managing to handle without her.

Just as my fear and grief are unending, so does my mother surpass all boundaries. She is in the air, the sky, the sun, my smile. This isn't what either of us wanted, but it's what we have to handle, and I'm handling it in all the ways she taught me.

Research Errata

I'm currently going through citations collected by another research assistant. I'm also taking some time to add in new citations, and the process makes me think: how can we determine the search parameters of a previous person?

The answer seems obvious: from the results. I think it goes deeper, though. There's a kind of looking backward that puts you into that other person's head for a minute. Why did she choose this article? Did she overlook this other one, or did she just think it wasn't helpful? Which articles have been published since she worked on this?

I'm also getting into my professor's head a bit. Even though she encourages me to gather all I can, I'm trying to use what I know of the shape of her book to gather items that would be most helpful. Sometimes I come across something I think might give her a new insight - it will be very interesting to see what comes of those. She also encourages me to use the articles for my own research, which I deeply appreciate. 

The Shape of Surprise

I'm a schedules person, generally, and I set goals. I like to have plans and I like to accomplish things. I am not fabulous at relaxing without another person to motivate me. (Motivate me. See? Even relaxation can be a goal - even when it should, arguably, just be.)

To honor the beauty that I know exists in openness (as yoga and my upbringing both teach me), I'm setting myself some mid-fall non-goals. They're only goals insofar as that's how my brain works. They aren't check off-able, or schedule-able. They just exist.

Make room for serendipity - and room within time, really.
Breathe more deeply.
Know that most things return. Most experiences repeat.
This is the life you're living. Live fully within it.
Nobody's keeping score but you.
More people admire you than you even can imagine.

Blogging Thoughts

It's been about two months since I wrote my first public blog post for a class in my doctoral program. I have been blogging for personal edification for about a year, and I've used Blackboard to post discussion questions for my previous master's degree. Blogging as a community in a context that only that community is familiar with, really (those of us in the class), is a fascinating web of meanings, interpretations, and author/audience interactions.

Taking the last point first, it seems that if we have any readers at all, they are also CUNY faculty or graduate students. Just as in a seminar class, we are our own audience, constantly taking turns shifting the course of the discussion by what we choose to declare or to ask. The structure that surrounds our writing environment is pretty open, too. Our professor's RA, who is also in the class, posts a web of references for the works we are studying, and we are meant to engage with at least one reference per week and comment on it. In addition, we're free to post on anything relevant to the course, and then other students (and our professor) can comment on that as each of us sees fit.

This web of connections is very different from the way I write my personal blog. I haven't quite figured out how to tip over to an astonishing (or even respectable) number of viewers/readers, so I often feel as though I'm blogging to myself. One might argue that all blogging is like that, except for people like Nick Kristof. One might point out that I'm free from the often insidiously vilifying comments that some people seem to spend all day on their computer in order to post. What I would like is to develop a reading and writing community around my blog - perhaps even a network of several blogs where we all follow each other. I'd rather be in dialogue than monologue.

The Art of Fast Reading

I'm a fast reader. I've been one since I was a kid, and I swept the MS Readathon on an annual basis, toting home armloads of stuffed animals and trophies. (I'm glad to see it's still in existence - support it if you can.) The prizes felt pretty important them, but a quarter century or so later, I'm struck by the qualitative experience of reading (and writing) quickly.

There's certainly a balance to be struck - I notice that if I read too quickly, I skip words and sometimes meaning, and if I read too slowly, I get bogged down in unnecessary details. For me, reading quickly helps me navigate this disjunct, and it also assures that I'll find the curiosity and joy necessary to get through the hundreds of pages of reading required on a weekly basis in my PhD classes. 

Writing quickly isn't quite as slippery for me. I've been experimenting lately wi writing as fact as possible to see what comes out. My brain is usually a few steps ahead of my fingers, so that method works well for me. In a way, it does what Sondra Perl's groundbreaking notion of felt sense does when used in a writing classroom: it pushes away any overanalyses or fears or second guesses that can tend to hamper the writing process, and it allows me to explore my thinking more creatively than if my fingers are still. (There's an argument to be made here, too, for talking out loud, either as a writer at home or as a student in class.)

I'm exploring the power of speed and will keep it up in the coming weeks. After that, maybe I'll take another look at writing and reading slowly. I guess my stuffed animal days are over either way.

The Adventures of Axldemicat, Part One

Rest: She sleeps on the table my mom gave me that was once my great-grandmother's. that is where her sunbeam rests in the morning. I woke this morning to find her settled on my yoga blanket, something she usually only likes to do if I am already sitting there. 

Space: She jumps on the couch when I sit there, always on her side, and settles either on the New Yorker or a pile of citations I am working through for the professor I'm assisting. She is more than a paperweight - she is, as my friends say, my own research assistant. 

Projects: She burrows under the blanket draped on the back of the couch, then decides to sit like a turkey and purr even when I'm not petting her. 

Collapsing of Past/Present(ation)

I've had an academic interest in temporality since I took Emily Apter's class on periodization during my master's at NYU. Now, the personal side is coming in: my mother's death is sparking an examination of my childhood and my family history. That history is also intertwining with my theoretical interests in developing ways (more later on this).

Personal history comes up in my dreams a lot. My mother is usually there, sometimes sick, sometimes healthy, always recognizable. (This isn't surprising, according to grief literature. She was there a lot before she died, too, but now it's almost constant.) When I am stressed, I tend to dream that she is angry with me. more often, though, she's part of the fabric of my unconscious. Last night i dreamed that she was retrofitting a van to give herself a place to get ready for work. Two night ago, there was a grandma in my dreams: she looked like mine, but was mean instead of adorable. (When I dream that my mom is mad at me, its much the same feeling of displacement - not that I didn't ever misbehave and make her angry, because Idid, but because for much of my life, i have been my own worst critic and she has been my defender.) I realized today, with a bit of a jolt, that I want to talk to my dead-for-ten-years grandmother about the loss of my mom. I want to know how she handled her own mother's loss. 

I'm wondering if part of this is a trace of my extreme unease and anger that my mother wasn't given to chance to see me achieve more of the things I planned on. (She knew me as a master's student, but not as a PhD student, for one.) Both she and my mother had careers and children (and in my grandma's case, grandchildren) when their parents died. 

Even sharing this information in a relatively public forum is a decision I didn't expect. When my mother got sick, I decided, somewhat consciously, to post a lot of information about my feelings and the trajectory of her illness on Facebook. This was in part so I didn't have to explicitly tell people things and also, I think, because I wanted to vent and let off steam. (My mom often read and commented on those posts, including on some about my fears of her death. It was heartening and painful all at the same time, but I wasn't going to keep it from her.) Now that I'm working on my book and writing so personally in a wider online forum (for the four of you who read this and for the countless millions who could), I'm struck both by how reticent I am to air my grievances and what I consider defects, and by how necessary it is. I think my academic work and writing will always carry the stamp of who I am, and I think that's the way I want it.

Imagining Communities

As I learn my way around the vertical campus of my newest alma mater-to-be, I find myself thinking about community formation and belonging. I was welcome to attend CUNY events before I was a student there. The last time I did was several years ago. I will still be welcome to attend NYU events even though I no longer have an ID that lets me into its (many, spread out) buildings. I feel more at ease at the Graduate Center, even when I'm lost, knowing that I am allowed - and supposed - to be there. People whose job it is to critique and challenge and help deepen my ideas are supposed to be there. I am forming a close community with the people who will be my future colleagues. 

In a bit of an update to Benedict Anderson, then, I think the process of imagining communities is an important one. Some people stride right in like they belong. I'm one of those people, but I often don't have the feeling of belonging unless I have the sense that someone really wants me there.  I love the feeling of people looking up to greet me, the familiarity of walls, the sense that everything could be mine because it already is in some way.

Album Responses

I'd like to do a (sort of) Exile in Guyville number on The Strokes' Is This It. Not a rewriting as much as a re-recording, though the former would be interesting. (Possible title: Not Quite.)

I started by putting everything up an octave, but that wasn't enough. That wouldn't be the Phair treatment. Some of the songs do sound good without Julian's baritone, though. Something to think about for karaoke and sing-alongs.

What Phair was doing was reimagining the slant of an artistic piece by turning it on its head. Changing the gender of the singer is a great way to do this (see The Chapin Sisters' remake of The Everly Brothers for a fantastic recent example). Phair went further, though, by rewriting. 

This makes me think about which artists and albums are most ripe for rewriting (lyrics) or reimagining in  some other way. It'd be cool to see a new Rubber Soul, perhaps from a woman's perspective. The Jackson Five could be turned into hip hop. Sarah McLachlan could be made into metal. Et cetera.

Oracles

Kamenetz' discussion of oracles in The Jew in the Lotus has got me thinking about the influence (or non-influence) of oracles in my own life. The word has always evoked a Cassandra figure for me, but if I try to reimagine it, I can trace something more like a hint. Maybe oracles are just hints with hindsight. I'm more comfortable with that than with the idea of some predetermined future stretching out in front of me. I don't care to know the odds, but if there are small signs along the way that I can put together to get an idea of what might be in front of me, I'll do it.

I imagine these hints as autumn leaves swirling in a puff of air - or perhaps as clouds in the sky, the shape up to the beholder. They don't tell you what you'll do, but they influence you as you decide what might be possible.

Carolyn Hax on Self-Care

I love advice columns. I especially love them when things in my life are rough, in part (I'll admit) because it reminds me that other people have problems, too, and in part because I often glean some pretty applicable advice. The Washington Post's Carolyn Hax often helps me out on the latter point, but one of her columns this spring is such a gem that I feel like it was written for me.

She writes, 

"Taking pride in our strengths helps keep our spirits up and engines running, but too rigid a self-definition can become a straitjacket. In fact, get too tied up in being The One Who Can Handle Anything, and your first wobble will suddenly become the next thing on your list of terrible things you must face.

Instead, build some humanity into that self-image: 'I'm human, I get emotional, I get overwhelmed, but then I find my way back.'"

This is advice that I probably could have usefully tattooed on myself before Mom's illness and I would've gotten a lot out of it. Now, sometimes, I think it's even more challenging to accept help, even though I have more of a track record for it now, because I can think of myself as Having Come This Far (however This Far is on the endless road that is grief).

I am so lucky to be surrounded by incredible friends both far and near, the most wonderful aunt, strong yoga and kickboxing communities, and the memory and genetic imprint and embodied teachings of my incredible mother. Some people never get to have what I have right at my fingertips, or just a phone call away.

Murakami's Running as Metaphor

"I think certain types of processes don’t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform—or perhaps distort—yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own personality."

― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running


Murakami wasn't talking about yoga here, but he did a hell of a job evoking it. If you're doing a practice like Ashtanga or Sivananda that encourages structure, how do you find freedom? It's easy for me at Laughing Lotus (where variation within structure is the name of the game), but I love Ashtanga places too, and I'd like to bring my bodily creativity into the time-tested pattern of asana.

One way to do this is through breath. Breathing literally (yes, literally) makes the yoga yours. It brings it into your muscles and sinews. Deepening your breath can deepen the pose. It will deepen the pose, whether it does so physically or not. Your energy body will be shaped differently, and your chakras will open. (More on this later - I'm delving into some amazing chakra books and am about ready to shape that knowledge into some of my writings).

What about personal practice? How can something that you do daily - that may frustrate or annoy you just as it energizes and lifts you - become part of you without turning you into a robot? My personal practice used to be fairly robotic. I focused more on the counting of the breath than the feeling of the pose. I didn't listen to my body when it requested modifications or props (and if you're not careful, friends, it will request them more vociferously and rudely than you'd probably like). Now, I try to think more globally. I give myself a maha pose to work up to. I focus on a chakra. Really, what I'm doing is bringing my favorite (or most challenging) moments of my yoga classes home, and making them part of me where nobody can see.

What about Other Things Than Yoga? I'm about to dive back in to academia, which doesn't always encourage the kind of creativity you might think.

Lila(s)

My amazing teacher Emily talked in class yesterday about lila (लीला), the Sanskrit word for "play" or "concept" (as in "the play of good and bad"). She used it as a way to emphasize that the bad and frustrating is part of life along with the good. This was something I really needed to hear, and it's a concept that I think the Western world (at least!) could use more of. My world definitely could.

We don't always show our best selves, after all. Sometimes we make bad decisions. Sometimes we sell ourselves short. Sometimes our mind blanks.

We are always fighting to be the most ideal selves we can be, to have the most ideal life we can imagine, and we forget to leave space for the mistakes and missed steps that inevitably come.

This isn't license to ignore our goals and morals, of course. It's simply, I think, a way to allow us to be imperfect people while striving toward being our truest, best selves. It's the only way to appreciate the many millions of facets that make up each of us as people.

(In case you need a way to remember it: my favorite flower is a purple or pink one that in French is called "lilas," a gentler word than its English equivalent. No connection in meaning, but I like linguistic play.)

Fifteen Minute Story

Prompt: the thank you that went unspoken

The field was wispy in the summer sun, stretching as far as the eye could see. A small girl in Converse sneakers (too big) and a dirt-streaked dress (right size) sat on the side of the road. The road was from a Gus Van Sant movie, or a Cormac McCarthy novel. The girl was from her own time. She belonged to no one.

The Cadillac pulled up, gathering dust around its tires, dust that streaked its golden sheen. The little girl looked surprised, the driver thought, which made sense, because there were no other cars or little girls for miles. The driver was tired and lost. He didn't get paid enough for this shit. There was nobody to ask but this small, incongruous child. Certainly she wouldn't know which way the nearest town was. The back seat window rolled down. The little girl drew a circle with her sneaker in the dirt. She didn't move from her spot on the asphalt. The driver tensed, unsure who would speak first. He didn't want to leap in. He just wanted to drive away, go home, take his shoes off, and watch Archie Bunker. He didn't have an Edith, but sometimes he imagined he did.

His employer's voice came out of the window like a flock of birds, languid and loose. "Which way's Reno?"

The words came up to the little girl and stopped. She stared them down and shook her head.

His employer sighed loudly enough for him to hear. "You don't know?" The words were sharp now, and too fast.

The little girl nodded. Slowly. "I'm waiting," she said. "I'm not trying to go."

She looked at the driver this time, a blue gaze that seemed to know more than the driver's forty-five years on earth had taught him. He read the unsaid questions, and nodded.

Twenty minutes later, he was driving back the way he came. The little girl lolled in the front seat. His employer was a receding image in the rear view mirror, a cartoon enemy now in his past. The driver didn't know the route, but he knew the drive, and it was a long one, with no need for hurrying. They'd figure it out, everything, when they got there.

Movement (by (W)Rote)

I've been thinking a lot lately about the qualitative and intellectual differences between writing by hand and typing. (There's research out there, I know, and it's on my "delve into" list.)

Here's the fear I have of paper: it (can) turn(s) good ideas into ephemera that doesn't go anywhere.

I stand in a ballroom, freewriting at a piano, and even as I let my creative juices flow, I am thinking about the hassle of retyping when I get home, the pressure of my hand on the paper, the fear that I am consigning my ideas to closed off-ness. This is why I want, currently, to scan all of my college and grad school notes - to keep them usable. But really all it is is a matter of intention. Take the materials and use them. Of the rest, let go whatever no longer serves you.

Just move. Move on paper. Move on a keyboard. Find a spot in which to settle and be still, but let your thoughts out. Don't imprison them. Set it up to set it free, as my yoga gurus say. What good are they locked on paper or locked in a Word document? Let them fly.

The Hedonic Treadmill

I came across this not too long ago, and I find I am pondering, nearly to distraction, the phrase "hedonic treadmill." (It makes sense. I have several looming deadlines.)

What it sounds like: stagnant level of happiness. Satisfaction that goes nowhere. A gerbil on a wheel.

(The research in the linked article shows that the concept actually doesn't hold water, but I'll set that aside for the moment.)

Phone calls, music, warm weather: all of these things made a walk seem like an event. They all turn the mundane into the special. Maybe that's part of it.

I also think, though, that treadmills are highly beneficial. You might be seeing the same scenery, but your legs are tracing a slightly different pattern as you go, and your body is getting the benefits. A treadmill isn't stagnant at all.

So maybe it's all about perspective after all, as so much of my yoga learning is teaching me (and as I will doubtless find in grad school when it begins again in two weeks). The journey matters less than the way that you view it.

The Yoga "Wars"

Now that I'm a teacher training graduate (Jai Love Skool!), I'm ready to respond to this.

A friend sent it to me just as I was beginning my program. I bristled at first, I'll admit, before getting past the headline.

I can dig the writer's objection to the California situation. I was a "body only" yogini for many years, and now that I am more steeped in the other seven limbs besides just asana, I'm pretty attuned to how frightening it is that the meaning beyond the body is so easily obscured.

However.

Yoga is for everyone. It's not static - it's Now. It's all about getting yourself into the present. To keep practicing it the way Krishnamacharya and all his light-filled students practiced it would be to keep it in the past - and that misses the entire point.

We bring our awareness to the breath to bring our careless minds and willful bodies into the Now. We don't look ahead or behind. We mimic so many aspects of the human life cycle in the sequence of our poses (a very powerful symbol, for me) because each moment is precious. We are born and reborn with every breath. 

I guess that's my point. You can't have "yoga wars." In its true form, yoga won't allow it. Yoga is for everyone, and it meets you where you are. 

99th Problem

One of Jay-Z (now officially Jay Z)'s peeves must've been clutter. I have a solution. Put your piles of crap all in one place, to the best of your ability. Put it far from where you need to be productive or calm. I put mine on my bed. I may have to find another place to sleep, but I got more work done today than I think I might've otherwise.

My Inspirations

My teacher Dana Flynn asked us to portray what inspires us. She emphasized thinking about what inspires us today, rather than yesterday or tomorrow.

Since breath is literal inspiration, I realized that I am currently being held up and pushed forward by things having to do with the movement of air. I wrote all this down more freely than I often do, letting my thoughts motivate and my fingers follow.

*

 "Can you give me a knockout / I'll turn it inside out."
--Air Waves

"Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Come as you are / As you were / As I want you to be."
--Nirvana

Kickboxing. (Gineen and Vlad and Emmanuel have helped me direct my breath and movement to a more badass place than I thought possible. They've given me a place to put my anger, and reasons to see past the things I thought I couldn't do and turn them into daily habits.) I can now put my old selves and my current self toward the same brave purpose, and there I find my eternal self.

* *

"Jailhouse gets empty."
--Sublime

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."
--Pablo Picasso

"I'm not afraid."
--Eminem

Forearm stand. (Because of Dana and Sheri and Mary Dana, I am flying up the wall daily, and I am awestruck at my own ability to push aside the boundaries I've built for myself. I love this feeling.) I'm more free than I thought I could be.

* * *

"Take my hand 'cause I know what you're going through / At the time I had no way of knowing"
--Cut Copy

"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose--a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye."
--Mary Shelley

"He walked in circles till he was crazy and he lived that way forever"
--Neko Case 

The unseen. (Ali and Emily have opened my eyes to the subtle body and its powers.) I breathe into what I don't know and can't touch, and I'm suddenly aware of the energy that pulses through me and around me, and the things I can do to direct it into different physical and mental places.

* * 

"I love you 'cause you tell me things I want to know."
--The Beatles

"Find out who you are and do it on purpose."
--Dolly Parton

"And just where you are might be the right place / might be that sweet space / you don't know." 
--Blind Pilot

And, of course, my mother, the one who gave me breath in the first place, and held me through all life's difficulties, and and taught me to think as openly as possible. She is here with me as I breathe now, tracing her finger down the bridge of my nose like she did to calm me when I was a baby. Her baby. Her breath.

*

 "And who believes that my wildest dreams and craziest schemes will come true?"
--The Turtles

"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
--Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Today is the greatest day I've ever known / Can't live for tomorrow"
--Smashing Pumpkins

Living (in) Love

I'm fizzing with excitement to get to yoga today. I just know there will be miracles - maybe small ones, but significant ones. Body ones, mind ones, community ones. This journey is one I've wanted to take for a long time, and now that I am here, I can't imagine being anywhere else.

It makes me think about the action of love. How active can it get? How outreaching, how outward tending, how careful, how thoughtful? One of our teachers tells us that the hardest person to love is yourself. How does that action help you love others?

I think for me the crux is attention and trust. Love isn't never having to say you're sorry, but it's being willing to, and knowing one how that the person you hurt won't disappear. It's wanting to do your best not to hurt them again. 

Namaste.

Love

Love always wins. You can't drive it out. You can't wipe it away. You can pulverize it and it will regroup. You can tear it and scatter it and its pieces will find each other. 

You have to fight for it, and those battles take time, and they aren't completely won yet, but we will win them. Love will keep winning.

It really is all you need.

Thank you, SCOTUS majority.

On Grammar, the Uterus, and Free Will

Wendy Davis and Letticia Van der Putte are my heroines. They stood (literally) and spoke and were wholly present for a cause that should be close to the hearts of every human with free will and the desire to control their own body. Others have written far more eloquently than I on why that matters and why their fight needs to be upheld and why Texas women should not be messed with. I'm interested in my own gravitation toward the word "heroine" here. I generally support the use of non-gendered language - I wouldn't say "poetesses" - so why am I not saying "heroes"?

It probably comes down in some respects to the beauty of the word. It just looks strong. HEROINE. If you avoid thinking about the drug name contained within it, it's a pretty interesting assemblage of letters, with the O anchoring it all.

Maybe the "-ess" is problematic. What I like about heroine is that it's not as obviously derivative of hero (even though it is derivative, in point of fact). The "-ine" is less frequently used, and it shifts the word's pronuncitation, to make it a new thing. A heroine has free will. She isn't just a suffixed word. She has her own (vowel) sound.

I'm on a bus with no wifi other than on my phone, so I can't look up research on this that would bolster my flimsy argument, but I like thinking about this. If anyone knows of any citations that might be helpful, please send them my way!

Untitled

I have a recurring dream that I have lost my voice. I am sobbing for Mom, and sometimes I am screaming at someone about how unfair it is, and I can’t scream loudly enough. My voice chokes in my throat, and I scream without sound. When I wake, I don’t need much dream theory to suggest that this relates to the depth of my grief, and how it isn’t fully exorcisable, how it will always live in my chest along with my love for my mother. For the rest of my life, I will love and miss her. I will be only so happy. My happiness will always be laced with sadness - and yet I have to try to be twice as happy, for her, and for the happiness she embodied that she can no longer give to others. She gives it in memory, of course, and that is going to have to be enough - except it isn’t enough. It just is.

I hear a car on the avenue outside my window and I think it is my mother’s car pulling into the driveway of my childhood home. I think this for two full seconds, and then I remember. I travel back through grief and memory along the tow rope of the Way My Life is Now, Without Her, and I am back in Brooklyn, back in my pajamas, back writing about a mother who should be still alive but wasn’t given that chance. I should not be writing a eulogy. I should be planning to take her to Hawaii. I should be trying to convince her to visit, to hug her grandcat (a word I didn’t feel comfortable with her using until she got sick), to hug ME. I should be arguing with her over why I should take the couch and she should take my bed, with my discounted high thread count sheets. We should agree that they are not as luxurious as they should be, and we should then discuss that part of the appeal of hotels is the fact that you don’t have to do your own laundry. We should be making fun of my ex boyfriend together, and she should be meeting the dear friends of mine that she never got to meet. We should be visiting my aunt together.

I have done and will do all of these things. I have done some with her in life, and I will do all with her in death - in After Life, I guess I should say. To me, the After of her Life is togetherness with me. She is on my shoulder, in my heart, in my DNA, in my smile, in my eyes, in every breath, in every beat of my heart. I am without her, and she is within me. And it’s not enough. It just is.

Every Day Mothers' Day

This Fathers' Day (and every day), I celebrated my mom. She was a superparent. She raised me with little help, lots of love, and the kind of boundless energy and attention that I aspire to show a child someday. She made me inquisitive, brave, and sensitive. She challenged the boundaries I set for myself. She skipped down the street with me. She gave the best hugs. She listened, always. She worried about me. She reveled in my joys. She fought with steely, warm strength to stay alive, and she told me it was for me - I don't think I will ever receive a greater gift, nor be loved so hard. Her spirit sits on my shoulder, and her voice rings in my ears. I miss her with my whole self, and I am steeped in gratefulness for her love, her example, and the precious time that we had. Every new thing I do and every old thing I cherish is in her name. My Mama Nancy.

I also celebrated my auntie. She is my Mom Person now - more than an aunt. She is a best friend, a confidante, a tv watching buddy, a jokester, a good shoulder for tears, a tower of strength, a model of generosity. She has been dealt some jaggedly painful blows, two in just this year, and she honors the memory of our loved ones with her grace and generosity and bravery. I am so lucky to have her in my corner, and I will always be in hers. With my cousin and his wife, we are a little family that leaves room for the presences of our loved ones. Just try to pull us apart. You aren't strong enough. I love, you, famdamily.

Kaddish

I can't imagine a year harder or more laced with grief than this one. My mom is my primary loss, the most gaping of the holes in my life. I'd rather hear her voice than any other sound. I remember the sheen on the skin on her hands and the sympathy sound she made if I stubbed my toe and her sneeze and her brilliance. Last year, my friend A died of complications from diabetes, and a few months after Mom, my friend J was found dead in her apartment. My uncle died in April. And now my friend D has taken her own life. Sometimes it feels like I can't handle any more, and then it happens again.

This post isn't about me, though. It's about D. She was one of the quirkiest, most infuriating, strongest people I know. Her story is inspiring - too much so to put into words now. She did a lot of hard work and got to a place where she knew herself better as a twenty-something than some people do in a lifetime. I was so proud of her. She shone.

The circumstances of her death are awful, and I don't want to put them here, either. I'm wishing she had sought more help, or that the hell she did seek had left her feeling like more things were possible. I'm crying. I'm watching the rain. I'm remembering her jokes, her style, her wit, her words. I'm sending so much love to her spirit. I'm hoping that she is at peace.

Brooklyn Weekend Moments

I stepped in the cat's auxiliary water dish. In my apartment, its presence is one of the ways you know that it's summer. The air conditioner won't get dragged out until the next time I have friends over.

I gave the cat a deep tissue fur massage while she purred on my abs. She shifted to tuck her little feet against my hip.

After years of eschewing them almost constantly in Gchat messages and Facebook statuses, I have realized that I love capital letters again.

I put sunscreen on for a cloudy rain, and then the sun came out. On my way out, I ran into my downstairs neighbor by the flagstoned nook that holds the trash cans and chatted - she said she'd let me go "because we'll stand here talking all day." (She's right.)

Outside the library, I realized that I was running in place in salsa steps.

Norwegian black metal is fitting for a grey day run. The sun peeked out. Should I switch to Letters to Cleo or something to encourage it?

It's amazing what a shower, a pretty dress, and a little makeup does for a grey mood.

Realization during a lovely reunion with a high school friend: things happen at their own time, and you are who you are because of them. Sometimes things happen when they need to.

I snagged two framed Van Gogh prints on my block from the detritus of one of the billion stoop sales today. I asked how much they were, and the dude said that anyone who could carry them could have them for free. I staggered along with one under each arm, and nobody laughed. When I got to my building, my neighbor leaped up from his spot on the stairs to open up for me.

On my run home from kickboxing, I passed a fuzzy dachshund trying to bring its owners into the pet stuff store.

Denizens of my neighborhood are not shying away from the heat, and they are scantily clad. (I passed a small child holding up her dress to show her undies.)

Sometimes the small moments are the most important ones to notice.

Home

Brooklyn is my home. In just under two years, it has sheltered me and sustained me. It has kept me happily awake and rocked me to sleep. It gives me a small release of stress whenever I come back to it.

My little part of Brooklyn has magic tucked into its corners. Now that I am on bereavement leave, I spend the lion's share of most days here. When I do go into the city, even to see dear friends, it's with a bit of squaring of my shoulders. In my neighborhood, I release.

I remember when it upset my mom that I started to refer to New York as home. It's weird and awful now to think that no home mine will ever have her in it, at least not corporeally. In another way, though, she will travel with me to all of my future homes. She lives in my heart, memories, spirit, and DNA. 

I love you, Mama.

Coffee Shop Thoughts

It's chilly and grey this morning, but I am warm in my sweater, and I do not use wireless here, so I expect to get much done. 

The guy next to me is poring over a graphic novel, arrow-shaped post-it flags at the ready. His accent is vaguely Spanish. 

I think about the time I came here and called Mom after. I think I'm holding on okay, and then I remember that she's dead. I wonder why writing in the present tense feels so right.

This coffee is too strong for me. It feels like it has made contact with my face. 

This weather is a preview of fall, when I will be able to do my homework here. I will be able to continue many of my daytime things (kickboxing, daytime park sitting, writing) around my class schedule.

I have a pillow here in my spot. I recline. I think of my aerie around the corner. 

I somehow switched my keyboard to AZERTY. Turning it off turns it back the way I want it.

The music has stilled. I feel sick, too cold without my sweater and too warm with it on. I am barely into my coffee. I think I need to start ordering tea here. It has kicked me in the face every time I have ordered it.

I watch the rain as it hits the flagstones and try to decide how much of a crush I have on the guy sitting in the window. 

THERE IS A DOG HERE. So much for heading home soon.

Guess Who

Guess the author or the subject. Don't google.

"He was a new beginning and every new beginning returns the world. In him, the rainforests were pristine and the sea had not been blunted. He was a map of clear outlines and unnamed hope. He was time before or time after. Time now had not spoilt him. In the space between chaos and shape there was another chance."

Gerund(ing)

So meta, that title. Sorry.

I've been thinking about gerunds ever since I noticed that one of my mentors says "breathing" instead of "breath," activating (sorry again) the noun. It makes me wonder: are we eliding an important part of certain nouns' nuances by cutting off their -ing (or refusing to add it)?

Spring

An ontological look at this spring leaves a lot of room for confusion. When we were officially in the end of March, the lion hadn't ceded power to the lamb: it was snowing, and was supposed to snow all day. Two days later, it was seventy degrees. What gives?

Now we are in May, and we are gifted with hints of spring, punctuated by grey, mid-fifties days like today. The weather forecast (to which I stay glued) tells me it will be reliably warm within a week - we just have to get through some rainy bursts first.

I think the weather wants to be different things. It struggles against the confines put on it by climate change. It reserves the right to be capricious, like a cat. It laughs, gently, at our obsession with it.

And the sun always returns.

Family: Loss and Love

From where I sit in my aunt's living room, I can almost see the room where my mother died. It's blocked by the bathroom door. One of the surprises of my visit here has been that I am not weirded out by walking through that room. I don't choose to spend time there, or to sit in the places where I often sat when Mom was dying, but I am okay being in the house. I came here because my uncle just died. My aunt lost her baby sister and her husband of forty years within four months of each other. My grief for my mother is deep, and I grieve for my uncle, but I also grieve for my aunt, and the unique and unfair position in which she finds herself.

My cousin and I have always been close, but now we are part of a special club. We have a bond that will never be broken: by losing our parents, we have become even closer. My cousin and my aunt are now my most immediate family. The three of us are a unit - it is now us against the world. We will have new traditions and inside jokes. My aunt will be the grandma to all of our children. Her house will become the family compound for holidays and special occasions. When I lost my mother, I felt the loss of my immediate family, but now I know that that was never true - i just lost the person at the core of it. It's a shattering loss, but not one that leaves me alone.

We have all cried a little on this visit - mostly tearing up. I decided a long time ago that crying is too emotionally and physically taxing to do all the time. My uncle died a week ago yesterday, and my mother died four months ago tomorrow. We have sat in the sun and reminisced. We have looked at family pictures. We have done lots of hugging. We have laughed until we wanted to pee. We have felt my mother and uncle's presences behind our conversations and shared experiences.

Someday I will wrestle small children onto the train along with my bags, and my husband and I will head up north to join the rest of my (now diminished) family here at my aunt's house. My aunt will pick us up at the station, and my cousin and his wife and their children will come out to meet us. We will remember my mom and my uncle, telling as many stories as the children's attention will hold, so that they can feel them as part of our family.

Thai Yoga Massage: Snippets

I am in a cab, late for the Thai yoga massage training I've been awaiting for weeks. I'd feel worse about being late on the first day if I didn't feel so exhausted and nauseated. I slept till 7:30, when I had intended to run first and arrive early.

While in cab: we pass by Lawrence House. Hi, Mama.


I can get my tattoo now. I've made some brave decisions and commitments. Maybe that is what I was waiting for.


As I sit in my training, I see a light glancing off the window across the way. It's a small ball of fire, seemingly disconnected from anything terrestrial. At the very least, it's source doesn't show through our big window. It's only there for a second, and nobody else seems to notice. Hi, Ma.

I write a message to her on the bathroom wall, in the provided chalk.


During our discussion of the four Brahma Viharas, someone says, decisively, "I'm going to be okay with that." It's not a prediction - it's an action. This distinction knocks me flat for a second. I think about what such a pronouncement could do to and for my life.


Upekkha, our teacher tells us, can be defined in English as equanimity or as non-prejudice. I am struck by the link between those two concepts. I have already linked metta and chesed, but that's because the English translation is the same. This comes from the other side. As I muse over the connection between the words, I realize that part of my own difficulty with the idea of losing contol can be mitigated by the following mindset: so I didn't get to do the thing I wanted or accomplish the thing I expected. What will I get out of this day instead? Get is active here, not passive.

In the discussion of the term, someone brings up her bipolar diagnosis. She says that she renames the stages in order to see them in a different light and (I suspect, knowing something about naming) in order to be more in control. She also wears grey when it reflects the complexities of her mood. I wonder if I have such a power color.

Another way to look at it, in the language of this practice: tension is potential energy that's been tied in knots.

Sunday Morning Thoughts

"Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within."
- Teilhard de Chardin

Nick Flynn quotes de Chardin in his memoir. He quotes a lot of people at the beginning, and then he shifts into his own voice. He mentions that catharsis, in Greek, is more of a practice than an event (282). I think that this might be the perfect description of grief for which I've spent three and a half months searching. I conceptualizer it as a Derridean event (my iPad does not know this adjective - it autocorrects to "deride and").

I open my window to air things out. I lie in my sunbeam, just my legs coated in its rays. I keep an eye on the cat, ready for her surgery 24 hours ahead of time. I know I need to get up, but I lie still a moment longer, and listen to the birds hiring, trying to turn this event into a practice.

Thoughts on the Brahma Viharas: Upekkha

Here we are at the final of the Four Brahma Viharas:

1. Metta: loving kindness
2. Karuna: compassion
3. Mudita: sympathetic joy
4. Upekkha: equanimity

This is maybe the hardest brahma vihara of all for me. I live my life on an emotional rollercoaster, and I always have. I tend toward the happy, except in periods of sadness. This year of such deep mourning finds me in a near-constant spiral between the two extremes. 

Buddhanet again: "In the practice of Upekkha Bhavana one first selects the neutral person. Bearing him [sic] in mind one reflects that he is the owner of his own Kamma. [...] When one does so with understanding, the even state of mind with regard to the person arises." What interests me about this passage is the notion of equanimity as a characteristic of a person as well as a way of relating to that person. "The neutral person," it seems to me, isn't necessarily an even-keeled one, but they may be touched by your equanimity towards them. It's a little bit like paying it forward.

When I think of trying to regard someone with that "even state of mind" even as my joys and sorrows cloud around me all the time, I imagine ascending to a small cloud, above the riot of sunshine and rain, and observing the person from there. Up there, all of the preconceptions and assumptions and other baggage one might carry with regard to a person fades away, and all you are left with is the connection between that person and you. The world might be a better place if we all had those little clouds to tote around.

Thoughts on the Brahma Viharas: Mudita

Halfway done. Now, the third of the Four Brahma Viharas:

1. Metta: loving kindness
2. Karuna: compassion
3. Mudita: sympathetic joy
4. Upekkha: equanimity

I've gotten better at sympathetic joy over the years. Buddhanet defines it thusly: "Mudita means sympathetic joy or rejoicing at others' happiness and prosperity. It is the opposite of jealousy or envy, and therefore it is suitable for one wishing to overcome it. The object and near cause of sympathetic joy is the prospering or happy being. So one who wishes to develop mudita should select such a person who is doing well spiritually and materially. Preference will of course be given to spiritual happiness as it is a more true and lasting type."


I'm pretty prone to jealousy and envy in a knee-jerk kind of way. As I've gotten older, I've worked harder and harder on making it just a knee-jerk reaction, and making congratulations just as automatic. I still get envious of people when they have something I want, but automating congratulations makes it easier to be happy for them immediately, and then when I reflect on it, I find an even more genuine kind of happiness for them.

I also think that part of being able to practice mudita is keeping joy about your own circumstances and achievements close to the surface. What better way to combat envy of what another has than to stare straight at your own pride in what you have? It' a rationalized way of getting to mudita, maybe, but it's a start.

Thoughts on the Brahma Viharas: Karuna

On to the second of the Four Brahma Viharas:

1. Metta: loving kindness
2. Karuna: compassion
3. Mudita: sympathetic joyt
4. Upekkha: equanimity

It seems to me that one immediate difference between metta and karuna is one of vectors. Loving kindness doesn't have to go in any one direction or have any particular target, but compassion is transitive. (It's also reflexive, but more on that later.) As the reliable Buddhanet has it, "it is clear that the degree and quality of compassion comes with the degree of understanding of what suffering is."

My life is turbulent right now - in the last six months, I have lost, to illness and death, two close friends and, worst of all, my mother. Now my uncle is dying, as well. Now feels like a particularly apt time to think about compassion. I'm receiving a lot of it, from more directions than I probably even know. I'm working on showing it to myself as much as I can. I tend to be pretty exigent where habits and expectations are concerned, and I'm trying to learn how to loosen up a bit, to give my grieving soul a little more freedom to breathe.

I'm also making sure that I show compassion to others. Even so-called "silly problems" can be important - we all have them - and I've been taking care to let my friends know that they can still vent to me and confide in me. If I haven't said it directly, let this be their notice that this is true. I wouldn't be able to get out of bed every day without the love that I receive from friends and family on an hourly basis, and I need to make sure that they know that I'm sending it right back, just as my mother always did.

Life Lessons from Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay

I sped through Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay over the weekend. It fits in with my grief and death books - the familiar atmosphere of a hospital, doctors who can't insert IVs, worried family members. The difference is that Manguso lives, and writes another book, which just came for me from the library.

The book is a fascinating study in the representation of illness. Other reviewers have pointed to Manguso's background as a poet to detail the lyricism of her descriptions and the litheness of her form. Often there is just as much white space on a page as there are words. Pairs of sentences stick together and stand out more, one thinks, than most sentences that are clustered together. What would writing be like if we adopted this convention? It fits poetic descriptions of illness and wellness and in between, but would it fit news? Book reviews? Financial statements?

Looked at through my lens of grief, some of her sentences grabbed me by the throat. From page 82: "I started listening to Oldies 103 because it reminded me that something had happened to me since I was sick, and that I was different. And that even if I forgot to stay that way, I'd keep the habit of listening to the new radio station, and it might remind me." I have taken on several new habits and interests in the three short months since my mother's death (spinning, composting, and, to my mother's certain chagrin, fancy makeup). My current favorite authors are ones I didn't know much about when she was alive (though she probably had read at least one of them). Manguso's take on beginnings and endings that center on a dramatic and painful event is more optimistic than mine. It helps me cut away at my tendency to over-memorialize, one which I've miraculously been relatively free of since Mom died, and one which would surely hobble my recovery. (The line between memorializing and fetishizing is a provocative one that I'd like to take on in another post.)

In line with my current interest in the conflict (and harmonies) between movement and stasis, Manguso says this: "I didn’t know it at the time, but I was paying attention. I was not hoping I would learn how to do it, or despairing that I might not learn how to do it. I was unaware that I was learning or practicing or doing anything" (109). The "it" she's talking about doesn't matter for my purposes (and you really should read the book anyway, so go sleuth it out!). I'm interested in the idea of not realizing that you are learning or improving or changing or even backsliding in the moments in which you are doing it. Such confusion is nearly constant - we all, as the cliche goes, learn new things every day - but there must be moments when it doesn't actually need attention paid to it - the point is the learning, not the fact that you know you're doing it. 

Since I'm thinking about the battle between anger and loving kindness anyway, this sentence struck me, too: "I’d have to do harder things before my self-regard lost the mean air that had inflated it" (137). How many of us can say that we puff ourselves up with niceness instead of jealousy or competitiveness or other negative forces? I think one of the common misconceptions about sickness is that it turns people into angels. My mother was a sweetheart, but she certainly got frustrated - less than she could have, in my opinion. Part of what Manguso is doing here is asserting her own right to a complex humanity full of power, fear, anger, meanness, love, and courage. We all have that - maybe it's time to start looking harder at the relative proportions.

Maybe these thoughts aren't life lessons for everyone, but they made me stop and think during a hectic weekend in which I was trying pretty hard not to do either. My mother was my calming agent. Now I have to learn to do it for myself. I'm thirty years old, and I'm re-learning to breathe and be still. 

Thoughts on the Brahma Viharas: Metta

The Four Brahma Viharas are:
1. Metta: loving kindness
2. Karuna: compassion
3. Mudita: sympathetic joy
4. Upekkha: equanimity

I'm going to devote four posts in the next two weeks to an examination of each of these as part of my homework for a Thai yoga massage training I'm about to take.

Metta is a word that I've known for most of my life, at least in terms of the sounds of its letters. My mother had a college friend named Metta. People talk about it a lot in yoga and in peace and justice circles in which I participate. When I started studying Judaism, I learned it again as chesed, which also translates to loving kindness. (It's interesting that the term in English is mostly used as a translation for other terms. I'd bet there's a word for it in Irish.)

Buddhanet (linked above) says that "the direct enemy of Metta is anger." In the wake of my mother's death (and the deaths of two close friends preceding hers and additional family illness shortly after her death), I've spent at least part of most days angry in some form. Now feels like a perfect time for me to take stock of the relative frequency of anger and metta in my life, and work on decreasing the former by increasing the latter. I can't reject my anger entirely, because that wouldn't be true to how I feel, but I'm happy to try to make it smaller. I first learned that love vanquishes anger from my mother, and then from The Beatles. The concept seems much more simplistic in English than in Sanskrit, but not necessarily any easier to deploy. Without having looked at the other three principles, I wonder if there is any sort of enemy of sadness. It can't be happiness. I feel both simultaneously on a regular basis.

What's especially interesting to me in the texts is the link between Metta and concentration. Any time I'm angry, I definitely feel that my anger makes it hard for me to focus on anything but my anger, and it makes it hard to show loving kindness to anyone, least of all the object of my anger. Sometimes movement is the only way to shake me out of it. That's deliberate. Ive also had what i think of as surprise infusions of loving kindness toward a person I'm angered by. Sometimes it starts with pity or regret, but it ends in a rush of love. Even if it's fleeting, the fact that it sometimes appears makes me wonder if my yoga is having more of an impact on my spirit than I sometimes think.

Buddhanet also says: "The cultivation of this state of mind [of Metta] is called Bhavana or normally translated as meditation. When we cultivate it, it becomes strong, powerful and useful. It brings us abundant, deep and intense peace and happiness. The cultivation of it involves the following:
1 The concentration of metta. Concentrated, it becomes strong and powerful.
2 Metta is also trained so that it can be given to anybody. That is, it is flexible, versatile, universal and boundless.
3 When this potent force has become powerful we can make use of it to produce many marvels to make everyone's life better.
To do this effectively one needs the method. Acquiring the skill requires patience. With experience one improves."

That's a lot to unpack, but I quote it all in case it's helpful for someone, and to remind myself to return to it when I need a metta boost.

Bringing things back around to the beginning, a simplistic look at the sounds of the word compares it to the English adjective meta, one of my favorite words. Intellectually, I know they don't have any connection through their shared sounds, but more imaginatively, the concept of metts seems pretty darn meta to me. It should be, at the very least - couldn't we all use more loving kindness that, in referring back to itself, never ends?

Little Things

I think that the little things kept my mother going through cancer, since so many of the more traditionally important ones were off-limits or impossible. When you can't go outside, the tweeting of a bird at the window is a bright spot in a monotonous day. When all your body does is hurt, an hour nap is a beautiful thing. Three months after her death, as I spiral into one of the most suffocating phases of grief (when the Toad Cave looms behind everything I do), I notice that the little things are all that feel important, some days. I only have a small fraction of my normal energy, so I have to be proud of myself for running in the unseasonable cold when before, I did it every day. A caring note from a friend means the world.

I have been thinking a lot about how to pull myself out of the cave. I discovered that a midday bath, in my particular bathroom, is a soul rejuvenator. (Listening to Charles Bradley at the same time helps even more.) I relaxed in the bath salted water in my tub, adding more and more hot water to the lukewarm silk of the bath oils. Then I had an exquisite moment under the shower, looking at the sun streaming through the water, making its way from the skylight to my face. For just a minute, I felt like everything might actually be okay, like my mom always used to tell me.

Some of my more prosaic small pleasures include: Vitamin Water Zero, warm breezes, a cat purring, my living room on a sunny morning, my block at night.

Hisham Matar, Multilingual Selves, and Memo(ir/y) of Another

I discovered Hisham Matar by chance, on the New Yorker's podcast. I started listening idly, thinking that he was a writer my mother would have liked - she liked memoir, and tales of faraway places, especially the Middle East. I had to catch my breath when he described writing about his kidnapped father: "the challenge is trying to retain the person, and not have this event abstract them." I read this as how the hard part is keeping the person whole, or, in my case, as alive as possible. The challenge is to represent my mother as I knew her in a way that is recognizable to the others who knew her, and that is as authentic to her as I can make it.

Authenticity has always been an academic interest of mine, and something bordering on a personal fascination. When I lived in France, I wondered where my American self stopped and my French self began. I could tell that they were different. The tones of their voices were different. Their attitudes were different, too. My French self was tentative, in some ways, when words failed me, but also fairly argumentative, yet more polite with shopkeepers (as any Parisian will tell you, a pretty important skill). (Here I go again with the refracted self.)

Matar goes on: in writing a memoir, "the motor of the imagination, [which] gets excited about these black holes of not knowing, binds us to the person." The mysteries of my mother's life - the stories I have to reconstruct, the questions I can't ask, the specific emotions or thoughts to which I might not have had access - can only be filled in by me, now, and by the others left behind who loved her. We recreate her every time we talk about her, and we ensure that she will never disappear every time we say her name or picture her face or share a memory. The mystery, Matar soothes me, isn't as frightening as my mother's loss is. It's a way of knowing her in a different way, from a different distance, but it helps keep her alive all the same. 

As I write this post, I watch an Italian movie (by way of Austrian filmmakers), La Pivellina. The tale, of a red-haired circus performer who comes across an abandoned two year-old, utterly charms me. I have to look up to catch the subtitles and really understand (since, at this point, my Italian matches directly up with that of the eponymous toddler). But sometimes I let the sound wash over me, in its music that I'm not yet able to decipher. Head down, looking at my writing, I try to catch intonation and inflection. I try to guess what the characters are talking about. It's not entirely unlike trying to represent a person on a page in the way Matar describes it, particularly when you are delving into their past, a half reconstructing a story you've been told, and half inventing it.

The (Over)-Interpretation of Dreams

Last night I dreamed that I lived in a two bedroom apartment owned by my real landlord, I guess in Brooklyn, but I don't know. I had a roommate, who I think was L, a friend of mine from my mom's hometown. L threw a lot of my stuff down the stairs, including the cat's litterbox. I went down and collected it while someone was seeing another apartment in the building. It was one of those dreams where I yell a lot: that if L had an issue with my stuff, she should have brought it up with me; that you don't just throw someone's stuff down the stairs; that I was the one with a good rapport with the landlord, so he'd back me up. At one point that roommate must have become another friend of mine, P, because I thought of the (real) text that P sent me about getting together this weekend, and sending me love.

This dream in particular makes me think about the dreams in which my anger tends to come up. Often it's rooted in a real incident, which makes this one interesting, because it didn't actually happen but it draws on past emotions from bad roommate situations. It isn't a rocket science observation that I must be filtering my rage at my mother's loss through other things. I'm intrigued at the fictionality of it, though - like why would I be mad at P? She is a dear friend who knows from grief, and has been quite an ally in my part of that process. I don't think I've been mad at her at all in the years I've known her. For that matter, the only thing I have to be mad at L about is that she hasn't offered any condolences. I'm trying not to be angry at people for that, because I know it's a tough subject and a lot of people just don't know what to say.

I'm still gathering my thoughts about Mom's first memorial on Sunday, and I've got some academic thoughts to work through, as well. (I'm trying not to turn this into a blog about grieving, but since it permeates my thoughts and life, it'll be part of this no matter what I intend.)

Refractions in the Self: or, the Toad Cave Theory

Part of the experience of grieving, for me, is knowing that there is now more than one person inside of my head. One of these people is my mother, who, to be fair, has always been there. Her voice comes out of my mouth when I talk to babies and animals. I also channel her when I teach, or when I have to be disappointed in someone, or when I am proud of someone, or when I console or congratulate a friend.

I'm also finding that I now have a divided self. There's the Normal Me, who writes every day, exercises like a maniac, laughs a lot, reads a lot, and is rarely home. The state of grief in which I now live overlaps that self with another, less familiar self. I think of this one as Toad Cave Me, because when I am most deeply sad over the loss of my loved ones, I feel like a toad at the bottom of a subterranean space, wedged in the corner of a deep, deep hole. I lie still, I cry a lot, and I sometimes lose momentary sight of the point of the things that Normal Me does. Normal Me moves a lot, and Toad Cave Me is the picture of outward inertia. (The brain can overpower the body, I guess.) Even when Toad Cave is on the move, she's lethargic and scared and often doesn't want to be where she is. You'll see both Normal Me and Toad Cave Me crying in the street, but I bet you could suss out the differences between us by our respective demeanors and the looks in our eyes.

Toad Cave Me has only appeared once or twice since my mother's death, and one of those times was immediately after my friend's death last week. The only other time she's been strongly present was a weekend when my mother was in the emergency room and a sort-of manfriend mostly best friend had just shattered my little heart to pieces. Toad Cave's presence makes sense, people tell me, because I am going through a serious trauma. My only parent is gone. Nobody misses her like I do. It takes more energy than I realize.

In the days after my mother's death, I was so motivated to be the daughter she knew that I wondered if stillness would ever come. It took about a month and a half for Toad Cave to reappear, on hiatus since my breakup and Mom's ER visit.

The ways I'm finding to pull away from Toad Cave's grasp now, or to ameliorate it when the pull is too strong, are varied. One is to imagine motion, and that at least lets me know that I'm valuing it almost as much as I normally do. Another is to stop, take a breath, run off and cry if I need to, and tell myself that feelings shift, and the courage and grit and love that my mother inculcated in me will rise to the surface soon enough, and help me power through. When it's really tough to move, another way is to ride out the stillness, to remind myself that it won't continue forever, that maybe I need the rest, and, above all, that my mother would be the first one to tell me that it's okay to take it easy, even for a mile-a-minute person like me.

Both Normal Me and Toad Cave Me are comforted by the recent words of a friend of mine: "How can you have expectations of yourself right now when you don't even know yet who you are without your mom around? Do the best you can do, for now. That's all you can do, anyway. And besides, it's enough."

Piling up

A dear friend was found dead in her apartment late one night last week. I am bowled over by her sudden, unexpected death - she was a vivacious person in her early thirties who had made lots of strides in creating the life she wanted. We don't yet know why she is no longer with us. I can't stop thinking about the overseas trip I was meant to take to visit her later this year. We were both so excited. Now her family has to bury her.

J was helping me through my mom's loss, out of the generosity and caring of a heart that was lucky enough not to have been through this. Now, in this space of missing both of them, I desperately want to talk to each to process the death of the other. All I wanted this weekend was to hide in my mother's arms and cry on her shoulder and ask, like a child, why J was taken from us so early. Now I have two loves' worth of grief sitting on my shoulders. My grief is not as bad as the fact of their absence, but it feels to heavy to carry nonetheless. Nobody shares both losses with me. I am the only one deeply mourning them both.

Another friend recently told me that when her dad died, she experienced several other losses soon after. She said she believes that when that happens, karma catches up with you and sets things right eventually. What really spoke to me was her conviction that the piling up-ness will end. My family's last experience of that was in 2003 and 2004 - my mother's cousin died, my grandmother died, our cat died, and at least two other relatives died, all in about a six month period. I had always thought of that as my annus horribilis, and I expected another the year of my mother's loss, but I thought I'd be much older and much more ready, and I didn't imagine any other deaths accompanying it.

While I am the only one mourning both my mother and J, I am also the only one who knows how their different versions of magic complement each other. My mom was magic. She raised me on her own, playing the double parental role with love, trust, and humor. She was the inciting architect of lots of my childhood daydreams and imaginings and plans, and she obliquely directed me to the path that allowed me to elaborate on them and work my way into a life of no small amount of creativity and movement. (That's a pretty good metaphor for my whole life, in a lot of ways.) She led me in rain dances and I really believed it would rain. She knew which college would suit me before i knew, but she stayed quiet and watched m make my own decision. Even when she was dying, when she said that it was going to be okay, I believed her, and she was the only person who could say that and make it sound like truth.

J was magic, too. She earned three master's degrees before the age of thirty, and moved to a new country knowing nobody for the third one. She straddled the two cultures of her parents in beautiful and inspiring ways - talking to her always meant learning something about India or Ireland. As she helped me through Mom's illness and then my grief over Mom's death, she made sure I knew that because she was overseas, she was available to talk when nobody else was awake. We became friends because she reached out and told me she wanted to be, and I was so flattered, and now I am so grateful that I was able to have her in my life, even for a short time. My memories of her glow, and I will never forget her or stop missing her.

Both my mother and J were strong, brilliant women. Their intellects shone, and sometimes burned with the strength of their incandescence. They both cared so deeply about the world around them and the people inhabiting it, both in their immediate orbits and beyond. The world is a colder, sadder, duller place without them. I will spend the rest of my life missing them and trying to live up to their examples and their love.

Male gazes in a female sanctum

On Saturday night, I did something I've been wanting to do for a while: went to a male strip club. A dear friend, A, called and said that a friend of hers had bought a table for a girls' night out, and that I was the fist person she thought of when her friend told her to bring another person. (A and I and several other friends had a plan last summer to go to this very club after we saw Magic Mike. Cliched, yes, but we were excited about it.)

What I did not expect, and what became A's favorite moment of the night, was that I would lean over to her from our VIP couches and comment, "The male gaze is all over this place." I'm not even sure that men are allowed in, but the desire of the straight male was the backbone of the entertainment. Unlike Magic Mike, which features dancers in a Tampa strip club who do routines, the bulk of the show at this joint was what the dancers would do to women in the "hot seats." They were brought up on stage in groups of six and, one by one, lifted and grinded and ravished by the dancer on stage with them. I'm not easily shocked, and even I turned red when one of that dancers put his face through the leg hole of a woman's thong.

I know my experience with this is limited by fiction and by my experience in one particular club, but I wasn't expecting a venue that caters explicitly to straight (and often engaged) straight women to indulge so heavily in tropes that would attract straight males. I wonder, too, how many of the men performing these acts might actually be gay. The most pandering to things straight women purportedly want was when one of the dancers was billed as "the original Magic Mike."

Less surprising was the blatant pandering to American military and civic power in a segment with different dancers dressed as Marines, policemen, firefighters, and a Navy Seal. What A and I didn't expect was the introductory film strip that featured, prominently, footage from the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We were not among those who cheered.

It was interesting, invasive, and also often hilarious (not all at once). I left feeling slightly dirtied, slightly confused, and slightly intrigued by one of the dancers. I have never seen so many dollar bills on one floor.

Grief and generality

I have been reading many loss memoirs lately, and I notice so many of my phrases in them. Parts of Claire Bidwell Smith's The Rules of Inheritance resonate particularly. My first reaction was a twinge of writerly betrayal, like my beautifully crafted ideas were pre-conceived before I got to them. My deeper and truer reaction, though, is that these feelings are universal, and sometimes there is one best way to express them. Drowning in grief, for example, seems like a metaphor that rings true for a lot of people when they have lost a loved one. Sometimes it's hard to breathe. Sometimes you have chest pain. Sometimes you cry so hard you can't breathe. Sometimes you wonder when the tears will stop, as you watch them springing and trickling through the day like rain on the curves of a car window.

My grief is different from Bidwell Smith's, to be sure. It's particular to who I am and to the person I have lost. It is shaped by my age, my upbringing, my surroundings, and how I spend my time. Ultimately, though, this shared vocabulary helps to remind me that other people have been through this, and have not drowned - or have drowned and come back to shore.