Practice makes practice.


Several weeks ago, I finally brought myself to order a yoga mat and a balance ball so that I would have good tools for exercising in my own home. Last weekend, I took the further step of starting to attend yoga classes at our massive athletic center. Not very long after my first class began, I was already sweating and exerting myself more deeply than I have for a long time, in a way that I am quickly coming to love.

I've resumed exercising, after a long time away from it, because I think I see myself starting to loosen down into my age, and I don't much like it. Slowly, it's been dawning on me that I've been making the creeping non-choice just to start letting go, and it's way too early for that. Yoga on campus is a funny place to make one's peace with age, though: most people in the classes I attend are a good fifteen years younger than I am--and fifteen years thinner and more flexible. But when my teacher made a comment today about how some of us had more years on us than others, I took her comment for the truth it was. And that's the beauty of this teacher and this practice: both are about owning up to what I actually am, rather than what I might wish I were. I have been dispersing myself a lot since coming home last summer--if the process of dispersal didn't begin much longer ago--and I feel as though now it's time to gather back what's gone out.

Those of you who have been reading may remember that three years ago--can you believe it?--at about this time, I was making cryptic comments about how something big was coming, and just you wait, something big is going to happen. I was right: it is. But it's different than what I expected. Then, I expected that if I just kept building up and building up, suddenly I'd become this fount of creative production. Books would get written. Fame might be had. And those expectations meant that I felt as though I was letting everything down when I stayed in the building up and building up stage--as though I were my own false prophet.

This semester, I might be realizing that the big thing that was coming was, in fact, simply my life, and a reconception of my real life not as a big upcoming performance for which I'm always practicing but instead as a practice, plain and simple. I'm not going to perfect it--and even to type those words tonight feels slightly shocking to me.

One mini-revelation came to me right after I literally fell out of a pose during yoga class on Monday. The student who was meant to teach us didn't show up (!) and so another student took her place. Partly because his own practice is far more advanced than mine, it was more difficult for me to follow him (very much a novice teacher) than our regular teacher. At some point, we flowed into a familiar pose by way of an unfamiliar path, and before I knew it, I was starting to topple, collapsing to the floor like the purple cat toy I loved as a child: push the button underneath the black plastic base on which she stood, and her limbs and body bent and crumpled over. But rather than feel embarrassed or self-deprecating, I untoppled myself and tried the pose again. I hadn't hurt myself going down, probably because the whole point of these classes is to attain a state of effortless action, movement that follows from loosening and extension rather than from strain--and so, though I was working hard, I was also completely loose.

All week, I thought about that fall. I thought about it when I just wasn't getting around to posting here for much of the week. I thought about it when I didn't get to practice the piano as much before my Thursday lesson as I wanted to, and then when I wasn't able to be as focused at that lesson as I'd like, simply because it follows hard on the heels of my office hours. I thought of it when I missed a poetry reading I wanted to attend, simply because I couldn't see a way to lever it into the evening without pushing myself perilously close to sleeplessness before an early morning obligation. Every day, I get up and lunge forward and reach and look toward where I'm reaching, and I do my best to be open and to stretch myself as far as I can, and sometimes I overreach and fall down. Everything seems to be going at least a bit more easily as I'm adjusting to this idea of experiencing the falls as part of my real life, not as obstacles on the way to my real life.

Sweet crooked valentine.


After my mother's knee surgery was over on Thursday afternoon, my father pulled the car around to the front of the doctor's office, driving it up over the curb so that she wouldn't have to step down. "We've never seen a husband do that before," said the nurses.

Then they asked my mother, "Do you have any special plans for Valentine's day?"

"With a husband like this," she said --

On the phone, I cut her off. "You said, 'With a husband like this, every day is Valentine's day,' right?" We were talking on the phone while my father picked up her Vicodin at the pharmacy and their pizza at the Pizza Hut next to the pharmacy. Though she'd only been out of surgery for a little while, she was completely lucid and not at all nauseous, the beneficiary of apparently highly advanced anesthetic technology.

And what's funny is that I know so many perfect things that she could have said to those nurses, and that she has said over the years, that I can't even remember what she told me she did say. In my imagining, she told them that in her love, every day is special; every day is Valentine's day; and she and my father celebrate being each other's Valentine every time they see each other.

I told one of my classes some version of this story on Friday and said, "May you all have such love in your lives." I'll say the same to all of you tonight, too. May we all.

[A third day away, whereupon not posting starts to feel like negligence.]


High winds ripped through my part of the world the other day, carrying away our glorious mid-February heat surprise and also doing things like taking the dragon down. Hurtling him, even.

By the end of today, and the end of this week, I am feeling vaguely blissed out and tired--but in an excellent way, perhaps because of my continued efforts to exert myself in centering activities, about which more tomorrow.

Gift.


Here is a moon for my friends who can't sleep and for my friends who are lonely and for my friends and loved ones who are sad or worried or grieving. Tonight my whole world is noisy and misty with snow-melt, but the night of that moon, all was clear and quiet and still.

Climbing up that hill.


Though we had already sweated through an intense yoga workout this afternoon, when my flaming-sworded friend and her excellent husband invited me to join them on a sunset/moonrise hike at the environmental center, I did not say no. And I'm glad I didn't: I realized that I've never seen the prairie in the snow before, because two years ago we didn't have much in the way of snow (and when we had it, I didn't venture down there). Today's outing gave us prairie snow, foot-slipping iced snow up wooded hills, and then a view of our whole world with a moon on top. If I had to call it right now, I'd guess that I'll still be able to walk tomorrow. But we'll see about that.

Unlikeliness.


And yet, who knows for certain?

The end of the week would seem to have thrown me for yet another loop, but I'm continuing to try to continue to try to do my best not to lose the thread altogether. I find myself wondering what Freud would do with my fingers' just having put "lose the threat" down, seemingly of their own volition.

Deliberation.


On Saturday, after I stretched myself from head to finger to toe, after I photographed the ice outside, after I read some things and watched some things, after my brain had ratcheted down from the week, I picked the three greeny-blue ones out of my carton of organic eggs and I broke them together with some water and whisked them up and cooked them into a cheesy omelette, forgetting for a moment that a year ago I had no idea how to do this very thing.

Too often lately I'm feeling as though the best I can do is keep my head in the neighborhood of above water. The good news is that most things are less emotionally fraught than perhaps ever before in my life, as I finally accept some of the things that people tell me about myself and where I fit in the world. (I did not tell you that a few weeks ago, I faced the question of what word I wanted to have guiding this year. You may recall that last year, I decided that 2008 would be the year of writing--and lo and behold, it did go in that direction in a couple of surprising ways, as witness the article whose proofs I returned yesterday, and the project from which that article comes. But when I confronted this year's question, I was startled by how quickly "power" surfaced as what I wanted this year's word/whatever to be. As in: what if I actually dared to step up and take full hold of the power that I know I have? We'll see where that goes. It's such a different idea than "control" or "strength"--the former of which I gave up even wanting, years ago; the latter of which I already hold firm in the look of my eye and the pit of the small of my back and the spread of my toes. And I know that part of the reason I want to feel out this idea of power this year is that the fall will see me up for tenure, and I can already feel transitions taking place that are making me ever more aware of the ways in which I could just donate my life away if I'm not careful and deliberate.)

That paragraph? That's how it is these days: on the surface, I get my things done, I eat my meals, I walk to my office, I teach my classes with as much depth and gusto as I can put into them, I go on to my meetings, I walk my way back home. But underneath and around, lots of parentheticals await my fuller attention, lots more even than what's here tonight.

While I cooked up those eggs, you would not have believed the way the world was shining.

The coming noise.


Tonight might be the last night when I'll only be able to give you an image with little or no caption: I've just mailed back the corrections to the proofs of that article I began working on almost exactly a year ago, and if the journal accepts the changes, it's possible that that sucker will be in print in a month's time. And that is good news indeed--for more reasons than I have time to talk about here, especially given that there's still all manner of class preparation to do for tomorrow.

Covered.


When the flakes finaly fell, they were small and fat like love notes.

Now, glitter below and glister above, my path by lamplight is six inches higher in hardpack, my footsteps groaning all the way home as though I were the world's ghost, as though I tracked the right wide floorboard, the broad plank on an iced ship.