Love Means Never Having to Struggle?

I can't agree with this (and I forget where I got it from - I've had the draft waiting to be written for a while). Here's what I wrote Then: It doesn't allow for the very real presence of difficulty (which is what I read in the word "force") in any passion. Writing is hard. I love it, and I'm good at it, but sometimes it drives me crazy. Does that mean I shouldn't be a writer? Nope. Relationships are hard. I love people and I care about them, but sometimes some of them drive me crazy. Does that mean I shouldn't be loved? NOPE. Let's allow for the very productive role of challenge in life. It's not a bad thing.

Here's what I want to write now: No way, José. Love is beautiful and weird and scary and thrilling and natural and distracting and a work of art and a work of sweat and somehow both unpredictable and predictable at the same time. So go ahead and struggle. Everything of value is worth some struggle. What would life be without it?

A List of Writing Tips from College Teachers

Never refer to an author by his/her first name. If the author is a woman, do not refer to her as "he."

Cite your sources, and use the proper citation style for the class you are in (your syllabus likely mentions it). Any ideas you include that didn't come from YOUR brain MUST be cited, both parenthetically and in your works cited. Quotation marks are not sufficient.

Support your claims with evidence.

The word is "nowadays," not "now in days." Regardless, use another word (and be sure the words you do use are spelled correctly).

Triple check the name of your core text. Similarly, always spell your professor's name correctly.

When revising an essay, always make the corrections your professor suggested on the rough draft. Our memories are longer than you think, and if you submitted your essay electronically, we have a copy of our comments.

Italicize or underline a book title. Quotation marks are for other kinds of texts. Also, a book-length work of non-fiction is not a novel, and an essay is not a story.

I'm Still Here

Mostly blogging over here these days - or will be blogging more in the coming weeks, I should say.

I'm having a fabulous and formative summer: writing, reading, moving my bod, talking with loved ones, and staying as open as possible.

I hope the same for you.

On Over-(and Under)Thinking

It's been a while, as the faux-metal emo among us might have it. The semester usually gets away from me, and this one in particular ended pretty powerfully and busily. But I'm still here, and I'm still writing. My summer projects are all dissertation-oriented - I'm not there yet, but I'm trying to think of the next phase as an integral part of it (which, in fact, it is, whether I think of it that way or not). I'll plan to write more focused and specific posts about that work over here, and save this space for less professional musings (for the four of you who read this primarily, I suspect, as people who love me).

I did want to get some thoughts down here on overthinking, though, since I'm good at it and I've been doing a fair bit of it as I embark on this next project. Some of my research interests as a comp-rhet person center on process, so my overthinking sometimes can morph into the framework for actual projects. I love to talk to my colleagues and my students, for example, about their processes as they write. Lately, the idea of what my Process Will Be on this Next Important Project has made it hard to get much Actual Writing done. Guilt comes along with that, and also Intransigence.

But I've made it through to the other side (where actual reading and writing live), and that in itself makes me think: we, as thinkers and doers and teachers, need breaks. But we also have a lot of thinking and doing and teaching that happen when we aren't looking. Every time I talk to a mentor or a friend or a loved one about my work, I'm adding to the thinking I'm doing. It's like a low-level buzz - never really off, for good or ill. It's underthinking: happening all the time, feeding into the actual work that happens. It's part of the reason I do what I do.

Happy summer to all!

Winterson and Silence

Consider Jeanette Winterson's essay "A Work of My Own," in which she writes:

 "My work is rooted in silence. It grows out of deep beds of contemplation, where words, which are living things, can form and re-form into new wholes. [...] It is sometimes necessary to be silent for months before the central image of a book can occur. I do not write every day, I read every day, think every day, work in the garden every day, and recognise in nature the same slow complicity. The same inevitability. The moment will arrive, always it does, it can be predicted but it cannot be demanded. I do not think of this as inspiration. I think of this as readiness. A writer lives in a constant state of readiness."

I often think of the unspoken (and the state of readiness) in specifically pedagogical contexts:
The frenzy (or lack) of participation
Wanting to get your comment in before someone else
Getting beaten to it (by students or professor)
Coming up with new things

 In this environment of intellectual rush, what does slow complicity mean to you?

Reflections

I'm writing on a train, and it's a train with no wi-fi. The man next to me is harrumphing his way through his coughs as he watches a show I don't recognize on his tablet. Everyone else is quiet. I have finished the homework I can do without wi-fi. My presentation for tomorrow is complete,  and to edit it, I'd need wi-fi anyway. My phone battery is fading, and I need to keep myself from draining it further in case I need to call my aunt to meet me at the station. This man next to me will not stop harrumphing. I shift my hands so he can't see what I'm writing, and then I write anyway. He's got his show.

In this space of relative disconnection from my preferred forms of new media (if with an inconsistent ability to ignore the other distractions around me), I find myself coming back to Erin's great description from last week of her own train experiences. What I like about getting work done on this train is that I don't have the internet to distract me. That is also what I hate about getting work done on this train. Since I don't travel this way that often, there's an allure to the out of the ordinariness of it that I think helps me focus. 

On the other hand, I've been riding this train, however intermittently, for years. I remember many trips when I'd call my mom on the way and she'd be the one to pick me up and drive me the 40 minutes to my aunt and uncle's house. Sometimes I'd chatter with her, and sometimes I'd be more sullen, depending on how attentive of a daughter I was being. (In my partial defense, I was in my early twenties.) I remember the one Thanksgiving when my ex-boyfriend called me from Texas and I spent the rest of the ride wondering what that meant for our fledgling friendship. (It's now definitely, deservedly ended.) I remember all of the times between December 2012 and the following January when my cancer patient uncle would pick me up and bring me to see my cancer patient mother. We'd moved her up to live with them, and my aunt cared for them both. I visited as often as I could. 

I remember the trip I took in the bitter cold of January 2013, my frightened cat in tow, when I thought I would have many more chances to take her to see my mom. (I think I brought the cat more for me than for either of them.) That's when I thought I'd go on leave from work and move up to Connecticut to be with my mom as she transitioned to hospice. Strangely, I don't remember the train part of the trip when my mom was, as I thought of it then, officially dying. What I remember is the car ride with my aunt, slicing through the dark, brining me closer to a mother whose last word to me, three days before she died, would be my name.

Internet wasn't the biggest concern for most of those trips. Even as I write about it now, I'm not crying. I'm still. I'm cried out for right now. Some of my recent tears have been for or because of other people. It's very interesting, I'm finding, when grief shifts to allow you to care about other things. Death is still there. My mother's loss threads through every aspect of my life. Even thinking of her as lost is still so evocative for me: it's like she's behind a wall, and I can't reach her. Sometimes she seems to be moving backwards away from me. Sometimes I can feel her calming, smiling, sometimes angry, always loving self practically peeking over my shoulder. That poor man, she might say, or Jesus Christ, just cough already. I wonder if the phrasing is hers or mine. 

The man next to me has packed his tablet in his suitcase and moved. I worry that he has seen what I wrote until it occurs to me that he's probably getting off at the next stop. As soon as he disappears, I wonder where the edge of the thinking I'm doing right now is. (I think this just as someone else coughs.) I have more space, so I decide to do a quick version of Sondra Perl's Guidelines. I settle my feet on the floor. I ask myself, what do you want to write about. I add, in silent parentheses, something that you're not already writing about. You are writing a memoir about your dead mother. You are writing about her life, and yours. What else do you want to write about?

I take mental stock of my in-progress abstracts. I flit my attention over to the essay I wrote for a professor the previous term, and the journal in my bag that I am hoping will accept it. I decide to edit it on the train home, after the conference. Thinking of the conference makes anticipation rise up, a combination of "oh g-d, am I prepared enough" and "oh boy, I get to present my ideas to smart people." I reflect on how far I am from my felt sense in this moment. I am having thoughts I have so many times, semester after semester. 

I try another version of one of Sondra's questions. What do I know about (and I add to myself, other than grief)? Today, I decide, I will think about knowing about - I cast around for something outside the window. Trees. No, reflections. There's a beautiful image outside the rushing train of the sunset above the lake and the evening-blackened trees reflecting onto the water. What can I write about reflections?

My first thought is that they express recursivity. You can look at them from two distance angles, but it's almost as though there's no beginning or end. You could have the trees without the reaction, but you couldn't have the reflection without the trees. Those ideas don't seem to go together. I look again, and I notice how fuzzy the trees' outlines are in the water, as opposed to to the way their progenitors cut sharply through the sky. This is Gendlin's edge: these fuzzy tree shadows. When you get to their end, you are firmly in the water, and there's no place to attempt to go but somewhere new. You probably haven't been there before. (I haven't.)

I am not the swimmer in this increasingly odd thought experiment, but my imagined figure doesn't want to go to shore just yet. She wants to see what else is out there. She wants to challenge her own orthodoxies, the meanings of her own words. She's not worried about someone else's coughing. She's like my mom in a lot of ways: fearless, open-hearted, gleeful, creative, dedicated. I like this swimmer. There's a bit of me in her somewhere. 

I take an email break (11% battery. Leave it alone, Hilarie). I take stock: 1,100 words and counting. Two guidelines at least partially considered. Annoyance at coughing man abated. Love for and feeling of connection to Mom re-established, as every moment I continue breathing ceaselessly allows me to do. In some ways, when my mom died, I thought I'd reached the edge of my strength. I didn't know how much I'd need to keep going, and to keep going in a healthy way. Sometimes now, fifteen months after her death, I still don't, but I keep going anyway. Like a train, like a lake, like a fresh thought, like love.

Thoughts from McCann

It's been a while, readerfriends. I've got some catching up to do, but until I finish that, here are two thoughts from Colum McCann from a talk at (my favorite bookstore) Greenlight last May.

"I never have a perfect day"

"Who in the world was more aware of their bodies in the nineteenth century than a slave?"

Happy New Year!

My Writing Process Blog Tour

Thanks to Alison Barker for tagging me!

1. What are you working on?
Long answer: article edits, syllabi, comprehensive exam prep, a memoir, a novel, some journal articles

This week: comps prep essays, notes, and reading

2. How does your work differ from others’ work in the same genre?

I guess it depends which genre you're talking about. Academic writing is an interesting one, because I straddled the gap between college and my MA at NYU obsessed with theory and its jargon. I think I thought that I could only be a successful academic writer if I wrote like that, and I also thought that I needed to pretend I understood it. In my Ph.D years, where I am now, my writing is much clearer, I think, and I'm less attached to slippery, polysyllabic words. Ultimately, I guess, I'm much more interested in how to make my writing elegant and clear than how to make it sound fancy.

Where memoir is concerned, I'm working on a grief memoir about my mom. What I don't want it to be is just that - I want to include as much or more of her happy, healthy, amazing life as I do of her illness, her death, and my experience soldiering forward without her. 

3. Why do you write what you do? 

Most boringly, I write because it's expected of me, but I wouldn't have chosen a career path so centered on it (academia) if I didn't love it. It frustrates me routinely, but then, so does love.

More profoundly, I write to honor my mother, who died unfairly, painfully, and too soon, and who gave me a voice and a desire to use it. She was one of the most poetic and clear writers I have had the pleasure to read. (Her personality was like that, too.)

I write because I feel most like myself when writing is part of my day.

I write because I can't stop - I have written on the walls of my bathroom and I write when I run (I pause and I take notes on my phone). 

4. How does your writing process work?

I could write a dissertation about that. I try to write at least 750 words a day, my favorite motivating tool for which is 750words.com. (It's free! It's fabulous! You should use it.) I don't always get that many down, but I like having a no-frills platform that I can access on any browser. I write on my iPad a lot, since I'm often in transit between home and campus and/or yoga studio or what have you.  

Lately I have been rediscovering my own handwriting. I carry a small notebook now to jot in, rather than my usual habit of using the app on my phone. (I do both, actually.) It's very nice, and I'm rediscovering the ways in which my thinking is facilitated differently by different technologies. DragonDictation fits into this nicely (also free! You should also try!).

My dear friend Valerie Wetlaufer, an amazing poet, did this awesome process tour as well: check her out!

Fragment: Tatouage

I can't stop thinking about tattoos. I can still smell the ink, even though my newest one is a few months old. My industrial-size jar of Aquaphor sits in the bathroom and leers at me. My favorite artists' business cards live on my fridge, and wink every time I go out the door. Any kind of buzzing noise evokes a tattoo shop for me. (There are electric saws and lawnmowers outside my window as I write that both pull out the feeling. The quickening pulse, the impending sensation, the scent of ink.)

Healing Sources

From my horoscope email: "What are the sources that heal and nourish you? Where do you go to renew yourself? Who are the people and animals that treat you the best and are most likely to boost your energy? I suggest that in the coming week you give special attention to these founts of love and beauty. Treat them with the respect and reverence they deserve. Express your gratitude and bestow blessings on them." 

 I am nourished by strenuous movement, most of the time, but also, sometimes, by being still. Touch heals me, and laughter. Really good words put in a wonderful order. Really good notes and sounds and voices. 

What are your healing sources?

Scarlett O'Hara, Grief Counselor

I wrote this before going to my mom's to tackle the house. Now that we're in the during/after phase, I've got more thoughts, but I wanted to share this.

*

Now that I am staring down the packing up of my dead mother's things and the selling of her house, a task that's petrified me since the beginning of her illness, The house tasks glom together into what feels like an insurmountable mass, and that mass sometimes shines, mirage-like and as falsely, as worse than her death.

It's not.

Nothing in my life has been worse than her death, except the fact of the wall it put her behind, and the fact that I can't break it down.

But it's a hard task. It'll be like cleaning out her office times who knows what. I don't really want to think about it. So I'm not. Like the formerly unseen grief counselor Scarlett O'Hara, I'll think about it tomorrow. Another day.

Dwelling on it won't really help me handle it better, I don't think. I'm sure I dwelled the last time we went there, and that time, I utterly fell apart. I fell apart in a way I didn't in the days after her death. It felt like the house itself was suffocating me. Being there without her was worse than being haunted - it was utterly empty, except when it wasn't, and those two feelings alternated with me between them like a buffeted sapling.

There's no sense in being buffered more than you already are if you can avoid it.

Not thinking about things was a tactic I used when she was sick, too, though sometimes I'm not sure I realized it. Looking back at it now, I didn't spend a ton of time worrying about what would happen (or at least not putting the fear into thoughts or words). I focused on hoping, and when I wasn't focused on hoping, I was focused on doing. Taking buses to be with her. Living in yoga pants in her room in the ICU. Being forced by well-meaning nurses and family and sometimes Mom herself to go outside.

I thought about everything else another day. Today, and tomorrow.

Beauty Wellness Wisdom (Out of the Mouths of Babes)

Last week I was honored to represent a teacher of mine at a really interesting event that's gotten my thoughts churning and creativity flowing. Twice a year, ABC Carpet and Home does a Beauty, Wellness, and Wisdom event that "celebrate[s] holistic beauty, health, wellbeing, wisdom, and wonder — always relevant topics, but particularly apropos in the context of the season of renewal." I offered a writing workshop centered on the concept of felt sense. Felt sense, rooted in the work of psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin, is complex and fascinating way of accessing the deeper parts of creativity. My professor and mentor, Sondra Perl, developed a series of writing guidelines out of Gendlin's work, and I'm currently adapting it for a creativity and movement context.

The most powerful moment of the afternoon came right at the end. I had also been asked, in my capacity as a yoga teacher, to lead a yogic meditation to close out the day. I knew the space would be filled with chairs, so I had a series of open standing poses planned, and some dharma talk at the ready. Just as I was taking the stage, a small boy appeared at my elbow, and the producer said, "This is F. Is it okay if he comes with you? He'd like to demonstrate the poses." The only possible answer was yes - I love kids, and I was excited to see how his energy would affect the energy in the room. I wasn't prepared for how much.

F stood next to me and carefully mimicked my movements, holding his mic just as I held mine. We moved the group through a gentle series of asana, from half moon to forward fold and back up again to take it to the other side. Dharma talking is one of my favorite parts of teaching yoga, and I started mine with the intention to close out the session on the notes the whole day had been tapping: beauty, wisdom, wellness, wholeness, love, integrity.

Then F looked up at me and asked, "Can I say something?" He asked everyone to hold out their arms like wings, and led them through one of the more powerful guided meditations I've had the pleasure to hear. It was affecting and beautiful, and I am very proud of myself for not sobbing in front of everyone.

Thank you, F.

(More From A) Real Brooklynite on Girls: Whitewashing and Books

You may have seen my thoughts on "Girls" before. I have many more thoughts that I am trying to tie together into some sort of narrative coherent enough for at least an article. I suspect that Hannah's impending move will provide lots more thought fodder next season. (What details will the show get wrong, one wonders?)

"Girls" is set in an otherworldly Brooklyn. The borough has been fictionalized out of its multi-cultural, socioeconomically diverse reality, (seemingly) solely populated by white, trust funded hipsters. Much has been written on these dynamics and their validity, and, indeed, they underpin the organizing principle of this volume. I started watching the show really angry about the lack of diversity until I realized what story Dunham is trying to tell: tales of a very inward-focused tribe. The main Girls aren't afraid of people of color. They don't know any. They aren't really interested in other white people, either - they're the navel-gazingest characters I've seen on TV since, I don't know, Seinfeld. In connection with this, what interests me is how these and other identity-focused questions impact the curious literary sensibility of the show, one that molds itself out of odd social dynamics, tribal modes of discourse, and an almost bookless world.

Midway through the third season, in a trajectory marked by increasing vapidity and hostility among the Brooklyn trust fund hipsters, Hannah and Shoshanna evoke literature and literary thinking in the middle of a drag-out fight. In response to being called "unstimulating" by Hannah, Shoshanna snorts, "What is this, a Jane Austen novel?" (She goes on to snort, "I'm so fucking sick of all of you.") The context of the argument is (fictional) years of resentment (played out in actual seasons), and it comes out in the fight in different versions of what each character says another "always does." Writing becomes a device on the show - the characters love hearing themselves put words together in a formalized speech.

I am interested in considering representations of literature and thinking on the show. How does the trope of the high culture novel (and maybe other literary tropes) pushes back against the "lower culture" aspects of the girls' lives? How does the show's depiction of life impact its art and art appreciation? How do the girls work out their own anxieties relating to thought and education and reading? How does the trope of the Jane Austen novel both articulate and press back against the world Dunham and her actors are creating? (Preliminary answers: through class/privilege, and through race.)

The Economy of Adaptation (Scattered Thoughts in Death in Venice)

One could write a whole paper on the economics of adaptations, but I'm interested in the other meaning of the word - how do adaptations get transferred from original text to adapted text and in that, how is the original "meaning" (a concept I'll problematize later) transferred?

I think that novellas, in their economy of style, could seem to require more of their content to be included in an adaptation. Part of that is due to how we read: it's easier to hold onto descriptive phrases and small details in a book that has fewer of them (or even fewer words). Sparer prose is easier to remember but harder to film, in part, I'd like to suggest, because each word's role is deeper (not more important) than those in a longer work. By deeper, I mean that the overall sheen of a short work is more impacted by a given word than in a longer work.

Let's take some phrases from Mann's Death in Venice (trans. Michael Henry Heim). His lengthy description of Aschenbach at the beginning of the book is easily cast: just find (or adapt, through makeup and camera angles) an actor who looks the part and can also play it. However, take a detail like one about the hotel manager: "a short, quiet, obsequiously courteous man"(42). Short is easily cast. Obsequiously courteous may not be so easily directed, especially for such a small role. (I can imagine it being overdone, but it's harder to imagine it being as subtly struck as Mann's description.) Maybe I'd have an easier time of this if I were a better actor myself?) Even more complex is this description of the gondolier: " A "lightweight" outfit (52) is more easily portrayed than a "washable" one (ibid.).

This is a text of introspection more than action. There isn't even any dialogue until a third of the way through. In that vein and in contrast to what I've been arguing, the beach scene on 54-55 is written like a painting. It's easily reproduced, almost as through Mann were himself a set dresser, until Aschenbach starts musing on the sea and the "deep-seated reasons" that he loves it (55). I'm not sure that a voiceover would do any of the musings justice, although that's the easy solution to the problem I'm setting up.

One other complication that Mann's book throws in is that of translation. Michael Cunningham's introduction to the Heim translated edition (Ecco, 2004) foregrounds the issue of translation right away. He says that fiction in particular in "an ongoing process of translation" (vii) -- and his point that Aschenbach changes in the new Heim translation.

Mann himself offers something of an answer to my conundrum. In describing Tadzio and Aschenbach's preoccupation with watching him, Mann has Aschenbach say, "What discipline, what precision of thought was conveyed by that tall, youthfully perfect physique!" (81) and "he longed to work in Tadzio's presence, to model his writing on the boy's physique" (85).

A Tattoo Meditation

I got my fourth tattoo this weekend. It was my largest (size of a face), longest (two hours), most complexly designed (lots of little lines running over differently sized curves), and most intense (on ribs and touching hips).

Getting a tattoo is so meditative, despite its intensity (and I don't call the feeling pain - it doesn't operate on me the way that pain does). I kept very still, didn't clench my toes or fists, and barely had any muscle spasms (something that did happen with my first hip tattoo). I breathed into any discomfort, and tried to still my thoughts. I imagined my body moving up to the needle instead of it moving down into me - when I mentioned it, my artist concurred that that really works. I turned on my yoga teaching mindset and thought about which bandhas I was engaging. I traced the sensations like a map across my hip and rips, trying to determine where it felt better (I think my back ribs felt best, with hip and front ribs coming in as more intense). I also noticed the times when I was wrong about where the needle actually was. I bathed in the buzz and the smell of the ink.

I didn't think twice about wandering through the shop with my shirt hiked up (which, to be fair, I don't think twice about in kickboxing, either). I walked barefoot (same). What I said, when the artist and my friend asked about how I felt, was that I was okay. And I was. When it got tough, that moment ended, often replaced by a good moment. Sometimes just letting my gaze unravel its focus was helpful. Sometimes I curled one set of toes. I though about my mom, my ex-boyfriends, my friends, my cat, my homework. I got Writing Ideas. I thought about all the things the tat and I would experience together. I took in as much of the experience as I could, and when I left, I felt a high like the one I got after my first (fifteen minute) tat.

First Book. Next Installment.

I read the following section of my memoir at the 2014 Winter Follies at Spoke the Hub. (Please never spell my name this non-way.) See if you can find one of the title contenders.

Dedicated, as always, to my amazing mom.

The year my mom died - 2013, last year - wasn't light. It sat on my shoulders and pressed me deeper to the earth, the earth they say receives us when we die. I saw the worst ravages of cancer claim her formerly healthy body. It only took nine months. She fought her physical demons and I fought my emotional ones, both of us staring down the prospect of our little unit of two being torn apart. It was unthinkable. I spent most of my childhood thinking it was unthinkable. Now it's my reality.

In another sense, though, the year was suffused with glow. It was the year I learned to take myself upside down in the advanced yoga classes I used to shy away from. It was the year I learned to lighten my own load of grief, discovering a fierce kickboxing warrior inside my runner's frame. It was a year with a lot of self-discovery and love along with grief and loneliness. It was the year in which I had to find a middle way - between that of my life with my mother and my life without her. It would take a book to tell you our story, a book that I'm writing, a book that will have this in it. It only takes a few minutes to tell you that she lived, she was so important, and I miss her with every fiber of the being that she made.

In The Long Goodbye, her memoir of her mother's illness and death, Meghan O’Rourke talks about mourners thinking that their lost loved one is somewhere else and will appear. I empathize. For me, it's like my mother is just around the corner, or behind an invisible wall that I can't beat down, no matter how hard I learn to punch. I wonder if some part of me thinks that writing this will bring my mother back. My words will somehow alchemize a turning back in time, or a sea change in biochemistry, a putting-together of rended matter. It sounds plausible to my little girl brain. The four year-old who lives in me doesn’t believe in the finality of death or what it does to the earthly body. The yoga teacher that I am now is starting not to either. It's more comforting that way, and there are holy traditions behind it.

I try to do things my mom did, to carry on her many, many small good works, working up to the bigger ones. I pledge to my local NPR affiliate in part because she always did. I compost like she did. I say, "Hey kids" the way that she did, and "I'm well, 'n you?". I wear her earrings and, when at home sometimes, her robe. I kept it folded next to my pillow for some months after her death. When I was tiny and she would leave me with a babysitter for a few hours, I would wear the same robe, and wouldn't go to sleep without it. I'm in grad school pursuing my Ph.D, and I'll be the second Dr. Ashton in our family, after my mother. I always knew it was something I wanted to do, but now I realize that it's in my blood.

Here's some of what I've learned in the year without her. Live your life as fully as you can. Don't save anything for a special occasion - use it now. Use it when it calls to you. Say the word love until you can live inside it. Make room for serendipity, and room within time. Breathe more deeply. Know that some things return. Some experiences repeat. This is the life you're living. Live fully within it. Nobody's keeping score but you, and guess what? You don't have to either. More people admire you than you even can imagine. And so many people love you. 

Yoga Is

I've been thinking about the general pressure in the fitness world to make yoga "for" something. I read a lot of fitness mags and get headlines emailed to me, and they often scream, "Yoga Poses for a Better Butt!" "Tone and Tighten with Yoga!" "Yoga Your Way to a Sexy You!" (I made that last one completely up. It seems plausible.)

Look, I'm a yoga teacher, and I've been practicing for years. I know that yoga tightens and tones. But what bugs me about headlines like these, particularly at a time of year that is all-too often focused on "improvement" and "resolutions" and "doing better" (phrases that I am all too susceptible to believing, just like you may be) - well, hell, let's keep some practices sacred. Let's let yoga be. It is what it is and it does what it does, but it shouldn't be saddled with reasons. We have enough pressure out there. Let's keep our spiritual practices empty and see what comes to fill them.

Teaching Out in the Open

All of my teachers this semester hold their tricks and challenges out in the open. Some have shared personal stories in the service of the topic at hand. All have discussed their scholarly practices. It's a level of academic engagement in the highs and lows of the profession that I haven't seen since the conversations I used to have with my mother, a professor of psychology. The communication lines were different in my master's program. Though many of my professors there shared their honest experiences, there's a level of professionalization in the doctoral context that I think institutionalizes their honesty a bit. We're being treated, to some degree, as future colleagues, which is such a meaningful move. My yoga teachers make similar moves that chip away against the divide between teacher and student. They talk about the poses that challenge them, problems they overcame, things that bother them. They do it with love, underlining the yogic belief that we are all works in progress. 

This aspect of my academic and professional training makes me think differently about what kind of teacher I want to be. There's less performative drama and less hierarchy, but more listening. I try to be this kind of yoga teacher, and next year I hope to be this kind of college teacher as well. The wall between teacher and student breaks down when these qualities come in, and it will be my challenge to keep that wall down, or at least low, in lecture settings and in situations when I need to discipline. A version of the latter scenario can come up in yoga - when a student attempts a pose for which the class hasn't warmed up, for example - and in those situations, I've found it's pretty easy to shift from warm to stern and back again. The balance of that in my college teaching experiences will be interesting to compare.

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.