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.