In the month of April I run a “Yoga Challenge” at my studio, Main Street Yoga. It’s a “30 Days for $30″ yoga extravaganza. I run 3 classes a day Monday through Thursday, and 2 classes a day Friday, Saturday and Sunday. 70 people are signed up this year and it’s intense, let me tell […]
This year I set a goal to read a book a month, which seems pretty wimpy considering that I used to read a book a week in my college and grad school years.
But the thing about reading now, as opposed to then, is that now I am reading for me, for my own edification, curiosity, and pleasure, and not to write a paper about the book.
In college I didn’t so much read, as process books into papers. Armed with a pen, I would take copious notes on thematic approaches, character development, and how this novel might illustrate the philosophy of Aristotle or Nietzche. I was on the hunt for the meaning in those books, and also to be able to manufacture enough verbal garbage to fill up 10 double-spaced pages.
If, god forbid, I got to the end of a novel and I didn’t have a thesis statement and a rough paragraph plan for a paper, I knew I was totally screwed.
Even back then I knew this wasn’t what I was supposed to be doing with these books. Even back then I knew this was a travesty. I longed to let those books marinate, to seep into my psyche, into my life, my soul. I wanted to enjoy them, and understand them, not dissect them like a frog.
But I couldn’t. There was no time. I had a list, a syllabus, other classes to deal with. I couldn’t muse about anything. There was no time to let a book rattle around in my brain for a while, because hot on the heels of one book, was yet another one to be read and “papered.”
When I think back to all the classic Lit. I read between the ages of 16 and 23, I could positively weep. I was too young for Tristram Shandy, for the Red and the Black for Anna Karenina for Ulysses.
I couldn’t even maneuver my car onto the turnpike let alone follow Leopold Bloom around Dublin for a thousand pages.
Now that I am free of academia, I long to go back and re-read everything I read there. Nabokov said that the best reader, the only good reader, is the re-reader, but do I want to start over again? Now? At this late date? I don’t have that much life left, and even if I did, do I really want to go back and re-read the classics? I am out of shape for iambic pentameter. I’d have to work back up to Shakespeare, to Proust. I no longer have the attention span for the semi-colon. I twitter now.
But one thing I have become painfully aware of in the last few months is that, probably due to all that reading of classic Lit in my “childhood” I have become an insufferable literary snob. I expect a lot from books. I may not have gone deep into the classics, but I went wide enough to know what real artistry is, and I know how to appreciate it.
Funny, I am not this picky about any other art: not music, not painting, not theater. But when it comes to books, I have my standards; I make demands.
I expect structure and voice and poetry and beautifully articulated ideas. I want to be lured down the rabbit hole of a book and feel happy to live in that world for a long, long time.
I don’t pay attention to themes or motifs or character development or (god forbid) meaning anymore, all I want from a book is to learn something new about the world, and possibly a new way to look at my life.
Even though I am not consciously on the lookout for theme and motif anymore, I still care about them. I still care about character development and pacing and poetry. And I especially care about those delicious silences built in between the words, and the way when things are left out, that makes all the remaining things glow.
I am not often disappointed in anything I read nowadays because one, I don’t read much, and two, my policy is if I get to page 3 and I am not entranced, I will close the book and quietly donate it to the library’s book sale. I don’t waste my time on anything that doesn’t thrill me. And this is why I call myself a snob.
I am a snob because I don’t want to be disappointed, and for that reason I tend to limit myself to Pen/Faulkner Award winners, National Book award winners, Booker Prize winners, and Pulitzer Prize winners. (And yoga books, good and bad.)
I get all squinty-eyed and smirky-faced when it comes to the New York Times Bestseller list, especially when it is littered with the likes of Fifty Shades of Grey.
But recently I have read and really enjoyed “Bestsellers” in both the fiction and non-fiction categories that friends have recommended. I found Haruki Murakami on a friend’s recommendation, for example
Recently Emily (my daughter) said she was reading Gone Girl so I picked it up just to see, and got sucked down its rabbit hole. I admired Gillian Flynn’s storytelling, and especially how meticulously crafted her story was, and was flabbergasted when I saw her picture on the back cover. So young! I could not believe someone that young could craft such a remarkable book.
The book I am reading now, Quiet, is also on the Non-fiction bestseller list (NYTimes) but for some reason I don’t feel as embarrassed reading bestseller non-fiction. Is this just being snobbish? I don’t know.
I recently ordered Louise Erdrich’s The Round House (the 2012 National Book Award winner) so I can compare it to Gone Girl in terms of its artistry. I really wouldn’t mind being called out on my snobbery if Gone Girl holds up against The Round House.
All I know is that I love living in someone else’s dream, in their word world. I love the interiority of reading, the listening inside that it requires. It’s such a relief to have the voice in my head not be my own for a while.
This winter has been especially long, and tiring, and dreary, but I have been consoled immeasurably by the books I have read. I am happy I have mustered the self control to put down the IPad for awhile and let my brain marinate in books. I feel nourished in a new way already, and it’s only the end of March.
Here’s a list of what I’ve read since January.
Alone Together by Sherry Turkle
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a Worlk that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain
The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker
Have you read anything lately that has made you feel nourished? Care to share?
For a long time this blog has been a lie. When I started it back in 2009, its purpose, its founding intention, was to be a place where I’d report on inspiring people, places and ideas. I would live my life looking for such things and report my findings here, I said.
And for quite a while I chugged along happily with that intention. Then the fracking circus moved to town. And that completely and utterly derailed me.
I became terrified at what I was seeing. I became distraught to the point physical hand-wringing and heart palpitations.
I became frantic to get out of here and to find a place to live that was safe, because I no longer trusted that this would be, or could be, such a place.
And what was even worse, I felt like a paranoid lunatic because so few people shared my fears. Yeah, everybody bitched about the constant parade of residual waste trucks, water trucks, the flatbeds with their enormous piles of gargantuan machinery making it impossible to get anywhere on time anymore, but in the next breath they would say something about how good all this was for the local economy.
My inspiration sources began to dry up as quickly as open fields turned into wastewater ponds, old buildings were razed or repurposed for fracking-related businesses, and well pads sprouted where corn used to grow.
The idea of writing a blog called “Inspiration Location” seemed ludicrous, not to mention naïve and foolish in the face of this. I could no longer read my “About” page anymore because it sounded so Pollyanna-ish. “Oh good lord, I thought, “I said I was going to go on an inspiration hunt every day, and now look at me, my sole survival strategy is to just put on my blinders and try not to see.”
“Inspiration Location” felt like a lie. And I felt like a fraud whenever I approached the creation screen to write it. I thought seriously about killing it: taking it down, and starting over with a concept blog that I could write with more authenticity.
But in the end I didn’t kill it; I kept it and I still wrote on it, albeit sporadically. I made a conscious decision not to write about the fracking issue, though. If I couldn’t be inspiring, at the very least I would try not to make this my personal residual waste dump.
In my real life I spent a lot of time researching other places to live, cleaning out the basement, paring down for an eventual move, and occasionally writing here about oh, you know, stuff: sipping gimlets on the deck, practicing yoga, what I had for lunch—all that boring stuff the pundits advise not to write about if you want a blog that is read.
Fact was, I didn’t want to be read. “Inspiration Location” my ass.” I thought.
I clung to my daily rituals: writing in 750 words, and doing my home yoga practice to keep me grounded, stable, and operating with a certain level of unmedicated optimism.
Now the price of gas has gone down, and with it the truck traffic. Most of the white trucks are gone. The countryside is still staged for fracking, but the circus has moved to another town. It could all start up again tomorrow if the winds of profit shift, because everything is still in place and ready to go,
but….
In this little reprieve, I have had a chance to catch my breath.
And to be able to breathe fully, deeply and easily is a blessed thing, believe me.
It takes away the panic. And with this drop in panic has come the desire to find myself again, to find the self I was when I started “Inspiration Location,” the self I was before the Marcellus Shale Natural Gas Play came to town.
Right now, I am sitting here, watching birds at the feeder. Right now, there is a normal flow of traffic on the road in front of the house. A new year has started and with it a new/old desire to notice the little things again, and to become brave enough to remove some of my filtering screens.
I want to focus again on delight: a long soak in a lavendar-scented bath, a glass of pinot in front of the fire, a fat novel on a freezing cold day in January, the shocking red of a cardinal flying into a brown flock of sparrows. And, of course, the daily miracle that is my life as a small town yoga teacher.
In a few days I will turn 60. I have just completed most of a memoir. I have also recently finished another 500 hour yoga teacher training. I have resussitated a dormant meditation practice and I am challenging myself to a difficult power yoga practice every day. I continue to grow, and I would even say, flourish.
I am still looking for that place to jump to in case the gas drilling circus decides to come back to town in a big way. I am a person who needs a “Plan B.” But for now I am practicing gratitude, and trying to notice, and then write down, what inspires me each day.
I recently found a little piece of software called Happy Rambles that I like. Each night before I unplug from the internet, I open my email and jot down in Happy Rambles the sweetest things I can remember from the day that is about to close.
I want to go over that list each week and pick something and write about it in more detail here. I want to make this my Inspiration Location again. I want to make this the place where I deposit the memories of my moments of wonder.
I want to amass a collection of those things that delight me and put them here, in one findable (and searchable!) place so that when/if I ever despair, I will know where my treasure box is, and go there and paw through it to locate my most authentic life. Because really, whenever I am noticing amazements it is then that I am who I really am. It is then that I am living my life with integrity.
When I never forget that my life is amazing, and that I have an infinite capacity to love and be loved, and that it is the little moments, the small things, the everyday miracles and goofinesses that make it such fun, and such a kick, to start yet another amazing trip around the sun? It is only then that I can claim that I am truly living this one wild and precious life.
I am getting ready to go to the studio and set up for this afternoon’s Yoga Nidra class. Every New Year’s Eve I lead this deep guided meditation called Yoga Nidra, and then offer people the opportunity to stay afterwards and write a letter to themselves.
Here is what happens: Unlike my normal classes where people arrive and chat as they take off their coats and set up their mats, today they will be greeted with signs on the doors that read: Please Keep Noble Silence.
They will enter the warm yoga room, find a mat and settle in. There will be a bowl of stones outside the yoga room door and each person will be invited to take a stone as they enter just as a way of letting other people know how many spots are still left in the room as they arrive. This is a free class, but I only have room for 16 mats.
At each mat will be a piece of paper explaining what is going to happen in the next hour. There will be a half hour of Yoga Nidra which is like a guided savasana. At the end of the Yoga Nidra experience, I will ring the bowl 3 times and people are then free then to leave, still in silence.
I will then increase the light in the room and invite those who wish to stay to take paper, a pen and an envelope, and move to any place in the room, or even into the lounge, for the letter writing part of this experience.
People tend to be in a very introspective and open place in their bodies and their minds after the Yoga Nidra experience, so it is the perfect time for some deep listening.
I invite them to start their letters by writing on the paper: “Dear (their name)” and then write: “I have been waiting for this opportunity to talk to you for a long time. Here is what I want to tell you.”
And from there, to just let their inner voice speak.
When the letter is finished, they fold it, place it in the envelope, seal it, and address it to themselves and leave it with me. I will then mail it to them so that it arrives in their mailbox on the first day of spring.
I have done this for a number of years now, and I think it is both a beautiful and a fitting way to end the year that is passing, and begin the new one that is dawning.
Happy New Year everyone.
Namaste.
Yesterday I completed Day 750 on 750words.com
Milestone, I think. No badge for that, but still, the symmetry pleases me.
The one thing I am good at is sticking to things. If I commit to it, I do it. It’s the one thing my friends and students always say they wish they could do, too.
So lately I have been wondering what to offer at my studio in January. What can I offer that my students might want to learn? What can I teach them that I myself know how to do? Inversions? Arm balances? Hells no. I suck at those.
The big thing they always tell you in yoga teacher training is: Teach What You Know. So it’s unlikely that I will be teaching handstands in the middle of the room any time soon.
But when they tell you “teach what you know” they don’t clarify a few essential things, like: teach only those postures which you yourself have mastered? Or do they mean, only teach those postures that you know how to TEACH?
For example, I can’t do a handstand in the middle of the room, but if I have a super strong student who is kicking up freestyle and almost nailing it but not quite, I could go over and give that person some tips, or advise them to work at the wall a little longer so as not to injure themselves.
But should I just say, “No handstands in this room, please. That is not something I can allow you to do because I, myself do not practice handstand?”
Who knows.
But all that aside, what I do know how to do is practice consistently. My favorite Yoga Sutra goes something like this: A practice that is truly grounded is done incessantly, with reverence, for a long time.
I am good at “incessantly.” I am good at “for a long time.” (I am working on “with reverence.”)
Like 750 words. I have not missed a day for 750 days. That’s 25 months. That’s over 2 years.
I stayed with Holosync for 456 days, which was 15 months, well over a year.
I have been journaling in paper journals since I was 23 years old. Not every day, but consistently enough for me to have amassed an alarming quantity of notebooks in the basement. That’s 37 years of journaling.
I have completed a 200 hour yoga teacher training at Kripalu, a 500 hour yoga teacher at Kripalu, and just recently another 500 hour yoga teacher training at Pranakriya.
This year I completed National Novel Writing Month by writing over fifty thousand words in twenty-eight days.
I have completed the Clean Program, not once, but twice, going 21 days without sugar, alcohol, flour, caffeine and other assorted inflammatory foods.
I have gone on long yoga streaks of not missing a day of practice for hundreds of days. So I think have some street cred when it comes to doing things for a long time. I am good at making commitments and sticking to them. Most people cannot seem to do this, but if they could, they would gain a lot of self-confidence and self-satisfaction from which they could build a life where their projects moved from the “maybe some day” realm into the “I am making this happen” realm.
So what I am thinking of doing is offering to help my students do this for themselves. Because there are tricks to it, and certain mind games that I play to keep these streak things going, and I so I think I will hatch a scheme where I offer to help my students do this through a yoga practice and other little tricky things.
Because most people aren’t lazy or undisciplined, they just self-sabotage. They start too big, or they start too unrealistically. Little baby steps and accountability are what is needed.
I’ve been reading Bringing Home the Dharma in the mornings. It’s my new ritual, this reading in the morning. I have broken my Ultimate Yogi streak and am now contemplating starting all over again and trying to make it to 108 Days.
I have a hard time when my streaks end. There’s a lot of mourning and self-recrimination. I have my rules and all, but it’s still hard. With the Ultimate Yogi it was a matter of not being able to fit in the hour-plus every day. All of my problems are with time: the desire to do so many things, but then running out of day.
Why is it that some people seem to have, or are able to fit in, so much more into a day than I can?
Time Management. Energy Management. Putting the Big Rocks in first. Battling the Resistance Monster. These are my ever-recurring themes.
Part of the problem is that I tell myself that there are certain conditions that need to be met before I can do other things. Like I need to start cooking in a clean kitchen, so dishes need to be done first. Or I can’t work on writing or computer projects unless my surroundings are neat and orderly. But taking time to pick up and put things where they belong takes time away from the activity that I want to do once the space is free of clutter and chaos. And there is never a lack of clutter and chaos.
And how come it is that once I’ve created order, I have now run out of the time to do the activity that required the order? And on top of that, I have now expended so much energy cleaning, that now my tank is totally empty for creating?
Errrr.
Okay. Switching topics.
G comes home today. Here is what I have been doing in her absence: I have eaten cookies. And the pie she baked (and left). I also ate a bagel with cream cheese. I have had 2 glasses of wine every night. I have been drinking caffeinated coffee. I have also been enjoying my Verismo and my frother.
In the past month or so I have acquired a number of new gadgets: a Kitchen-Aid Stand Mixer, a Cuisinart (which is not actually “new” it’s just been sitting in a box in the basement because I wasn’t psychologically ready, until now, to deal with learning “blades.”) I have also recently gotten a Verismo and a milk frother. Add this to the VitaMix and the Juicer and I now have no counter space. But, I have a shitload of gadgets.
Just to clarify. I love gadgets, maybe even more than I love the word “gadget” itself. I also love the word “gizmo” and I often have “gadgets” hang out with “gizmo” so that they form a little two-thing gang called “Gadgets and Gizmos” kinda like Bloods and Crips, but friendlier.
The other day I made a homemade chicken noodle soup with a leftover rotisserie chicken. While the chicken was cooking down in a pot of water, I sent 4 huge carrots through the slicer on the Cuisinart, followed by 3 stalks of celery. I then changed out the slicer for the chopper blade and chopped an onion. I minced 4 cloves of garlic in my hand mincer and in the blink of an eye I had saved myself a good half hour’s worth of chopping.
I used the “Heady Garlic” olive oil I got at F. Oliver’s to saute all that veggie wonderfulness, and the resulting soup was so so rich with flavor I wanted to invite the whole neighborhood for lunch. I boiled up a big batch of fillini (which is my fave “soup pasta–egg noodles are gross, I think) and kept them in a separate container and just add them to the individual bowls of soup so they don’t flab out, or muddy the broth with starch.
That’s going to be the “Welcome Home” dinner for G tonight. Maybe I will even stop at Wegman’s on the way to the airport and get a nice loaf of crusty bread and a little “sumpin’” for dessert.
(Do you know that “desserts” spelled backwards is “stressed?”) Turns out the antidote is contained right inside the poison.)
Excellent.
Last night I came home from my wild and crazy Fall Flow class, starving. On the counter stood a warm rotisserie chicken and a bottle of wine at the perfect temperature. Oh god, it was the sight of heaven.
I fixed a plate, poured some wine and settled into the couch for a DVRed episode of The Amazing Race.
Ever since I have come off Clean, I have been super-aware of the effects of food on my mood, my sleep and my energy levels. This past weekend, for example, I indulged in pulled pork on a roll and, of all things, Cheese Balls.
Yeah. You know, cheese balls–those things that come in a jumbo plastic jar that are nothing but salt, preservatives and chemicals? Yeah, I ate those. After the 10th one I felt like I was going to throw up. Seems I no longer have the “palate” for crap I used to.
Cheese balls
The white roll that housed the pulled pork was this tasteless piece of “meh” that didn’t even offer that chewy, doughy, satisfaction of really-bad-for-you carbohydrate. It was just a hunk of processed white flour posing as food.
Last night though, the chicken was tasty and greasy, the wine fruity and satisfying. Alcohol has not been a big player in my life for the past 2 months, so as I sipped this nice Cline Zin (on a Monday, no less) I was aware that even though this probably wasn’t the best thing for me to be drinking, it nourished my soul.
The biggest problem with me and wine is not the wine itself, but how it lowers my resistance to other things. Like chocolate.
After I drained the first glass, I went to the kitchen for “just a splash more” and returned to the couch with my splash, plus a square of Ghiradhelli.
And then another one.
I went to bed and slept the sleep of the dead.
For 2 hours.
Then I was UP. Chocolate at night. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
I looked at the clock at 1:30. Then again at 2:45. Then at 3:30. I adjusted pillows. I started the fan for some white noise. Squinted at the clock again at 4:45. I planned my NaNoWriMo project in my head for awhile then woke with a jolt at 8 AM.
I shuffled to the kitchen and made a big batch of amaranth cereal with apples and dates, and while I ate it I said 3 Our Fathers and 3 Hail Marys.
Clean slate.
Recipe for Amaranth cereal:
3 cups almond milk
1 cup amaranth (find this in the bulk food section of Wegmans, near the candy)
1 apple and 5 pitted dates pulsed in the food processor until they are in little pieces.
A good healthy shake of cinnamon.
Put all of these ingredients into a pot and bring to boil. Continue to simmer uncovered until the cereal is of the consistency you like. For me, this takes about 20 minutes. It makes a lot, so save it and heat it with a little almond milk the next day.
Amaranth is an ancient grain with a lot of protein, fiber, lysine and magnesium. It will absolve you of the sins of cheese balls and chocolate and wine at night. I hope.
Even though I get melancholy when the season changes from summer to fall, and even more so when it changes from fall to winter, I have to admit that I really do love the return to interiority.
I just read a piece in Elephant Journal by a woman who went to a retreat at Kripalu and decided that she didn’t want to be alone with her “Self” after all.
That’s not me. Not at all. Me? I need solitude, a strong daily dose of it. When I am too much the “social butterfly” I become lost and scattered and my “self” starts pixelating beyond recognition.
In the Stephen Cope book I am reading now, I underlined this: (he is talking about Robert Frost here.)
“He intuited that he needed a life set close to nature–nature, which had always been his muse. Frost was intuitively aware of an important principle: In the cultivation of dharma, there is nothing more important than understanding what conditions are needed, and relentlessly creating them.” (p.81-2)
This has made me think about what conditions I need, and to try to actively create them. Do you know what conditions make you feel like you are living like your True Self?
As a result of reading this, I have instituted a new morning routine. I now get up a little earlier and make myself a cup of decaf . But instead of sitting down at the computer and checking email and Facebook, which was my usual habit, I now take my cup up to my Space Chair, turn on the little heater, and settle in with my book for an hour.
Winterized Space Chair
I can’t tell you how cozy and delightful this is! It seems like I’ve been whining forever about how I need more time to read, and here it is. Now, instead of leaving my book to the end of the day, when I am toast, I am reading in the front part of the day, when I am rested, alert and receptive.
After an hour’s read, I go and make myself some amaranth cereal and bring it back up into my cozy lair and start alternately scribbling in my journal and shoveling cereal into my mouth.
When another hour has passed, I am good to go: ready to be physically active and socially engaged.
These may not be all my “conditions” but they are certainly key: solitude, reading, and writing.
Do you know what yours are? Care to share?
