shhhhh, it's Secret!

My genius sister and I are starting a writing course together on Monday and, as such, have been added to a secret group on Facebook.  The word *secret* is cracking me up. Shhhhh, don't tell anyone. 

 All it really means is that those of us in the Secret Group are the only ones who can see the activities, posts, members of the Secret Group.  Still, shhhhhhh, it's a secret!! 

I'm really looking forward to this class, which will run from Monday until sometime in December, almost every week for 45 minutes or so. Naturally, I even enjoyed the homework -- since it meant I had to sit and think about the Why of taking this class and the What of my goals.  And since my sister's doing it and there's a no-questions-asked money-back guarantee, What The Hell, might as well jump in, see what happens next. 

My favorite thing about the homework, which was a long questionnaire, was answering the following question:

What type of writing are you personally interested in doing? Essays? Journaling? Poetry? Blogging? Fiction? Short Stories?

I am interested in non-fiction, first-person narrative.  I periodically write poetry, but a lot less now than in the past.  I would like to try my hand at fiction, but so far don’t feel like I have had a great idea.  Actually as I write this, I am remembering that I would REALLY like to write young adult fiction.  It’s a genre that I adore.  And I also have begun to sketch out a picture book for kids (and adults).

What a good question to be asked!  And what a great opportunity to sit and consider the answer.  

What might come of devoting 10 weeks to a writing group?  My biggest goals, as stated in the homework, are to develop some kind of schedule and some kind of plan.  Note the hedging (some kind of), but also it's me trying to stay open to possibilities, to not put any boundaries around what might be possible, what might emerge.  If nothing else, as above, it'll be something new to do with my sister, another source of shared vocabulary and stories.

I knew I wouldn't be able to go for long without some form of school in my life.  

Stay tuned.  Here we go!

old mom

All year long, I've been wanting to say that I've crossed an important threshold.  Sometime in January, I passed the halfway point -- I've now been a mother for half of my life, with every passing minute more than half.  I was 24 when pregnant with The Kid, he'll be 24 in two months.  Maybe this doesn't matter at all, but for me, it feels a little significant to know that I've been This more now than I was Not This.  Puts a crazy haze over my youth, that's for sure.

But the haze could be because in some ways we became parents again two weeks ago when we brought Mr Burns home.  I contend, just as I did fourteen years ago with Jasper, that a dog is harder than a baby.  And I did baby largely alone whereas I've done puppy twice now à deux, so I think I know what I'm saying.

We have not slept through the night since Mr Burns came home, not one night in the past fourteen.  Last night was by far the worst.  It was so hot that the windows were open to let in whatever breeze there might be.  The dogs next door were having a field day barking at a raccoon in their pond (we surmise from our investigations), then all the area dogs seemed to have something to say almost hourly, to which sweet Mr Burns was compelled to reply.  He is now curled up sleeping right next to me, and sleeping is what he'll do all day.  Meanwhile, I have to power up and attend to the business of life, to the demands of my job and boss.

I have to say I don't know how older parents of human babies pull this off.  I honestly feel like I have never been so tired in all my life.    Being a mother to a human at 24 was hard, to a puppy at 34 was harder, now at 48 is hardest yet.  I wouldn't change anything, naturally, but dang, one does not have the resilience one once did.

What one does have is a bigger awareness of how precious this time is, no matter how freaking exhausted one is.  

What I also know is that I love this.  I love having somebody to care for, to teach, to love, to feed, somebody whose breath to listen for at night.

And right now he's snoring lightly, feet tensing periodically in puppy dreams, eyes tightly closed.  Just like Jasper before him, he knows exactly how to bed down in a pile of pillows, make a cozy nest to sleep in.  And even though I am not really literally sleeping these days, I am in the nest with him, tired old mom, happy as can be.  It's fine: I'm awake, he sleeps.  Just as it should be.

XX

What Peggy reads

My delightful friend, Peggy, has a life I covet.  I may be way off-base, but the way I think about it, she basically does two things: yoga and reading.  OK, and eating really good food, too.  And hiking and traveling and savoring every bit of joy there is.  Peggy has a love for life that is unmatched by anyone else I have ever met in my entire life, except maybe my parents -- and that is saying a LOT.  If you've been a student in her class, then you know.  It's always the most delicious music, the biggest laughs, the deepest sweaty delirium of practice.  Her total enjoyment of every moment is infectious and inspiring.

The reading part of Peggy absolutely delights me.  It's a thing that ties me even more deeply to her, imagining her tucked up with a book on her lap, lost for hours in its pages.  I've gone to her house for dinner before and left with a shopping bag full of books, a stack of titles that she's read and is loaning me.  As a bookworm, I love this just so much.

A few weeks ago I came home and found a book in my mailbox with a note in her hand, a book I'm reading now, "Wolf Totem" by Jiang Rong.  That Peggy LOVED it is high, high praise.  That it's not really working for me, this book, makes me a little sad.  I want to feel her same exhilaration, but it's one of those rare reads where I don't get the same Pow that she did.  Generally, it's not this way.  Generally, I'm jumping around with delight, especially since I'm traveling the same wordy trajectory as Peggy did.

Regardless, I'm treasuring the note and the gesture and the invitation to be swept up.

We spent a day together in Point Reyes recently.  We went to the BEST yoga class, had the BEST grilled cheese sandwiches, enjoyed the BEST conversation and walk with Scout, tried the BEST sorbet at her sister-in-law's place in Marshall.  Everything, really, always the BEST with Peggy, life at its pinnacle of sweetness.  Peggy knows EVERYONE, and honestly I have met some extraordinary, gifted, delightful, amazing people through Peggy, thanks to her gravitational pull on all that is the greatest.

Every day, Peggy tells me, she reads three blogs.  The Force Expansive is one -- which is a super-big treat for me.  The other two, in case you're interested -- I know I am -- are The Sartorialist (naturally, as Peggy has exquisite taste) and The Improvised Life (naturally, as Peggy is nothing if not a creative force).  Some pretty excellent company.

Vogue-ing in the market,
Oaxaca

If you haven't been a student in Peggy's class, I urge you to check her out at YogaWorks in Mill Valley or Larkspur, or at the new Embrace Yoga studio in Terra Linda where she is now teaching a Wednesday 9am class.  For an extended good time, travel with Peggy through International Yoga.  Truly, some of my peak adventures have been in her company, on retreat and on nerdy yoga vacations -- in Haramara, in Oaxaca, in Peru.

It's an incomparable experience to be a student in Peggy's class, to benefit from her reading, her listening, her taste.  You will work hard, you will hear great music, you will laugh.  You'll emerge smiling, wrung out and ready for more of all that's tastiest in life.

Big love, Peggy!  XX

so nice to be home in the morning

I am so seldom home in the mornings that I miss my absolute favorite time here on a regular basis.  Today I'm finally, finally taking a day off to rest and finally try and get better from the head-cold that's plagued me for a week.  It's completely ridiculous the degree to which I'll go to ignore feeling bad, to keep going when my body is pulling the brake.  But even though I woke up on Monday a week ago knowing I should stay home, the imperative of my workload meant that I kept going, on a steady diet of caffeine and cold medicine, all in the interest of keeping all of the plates spinning.

Sound familiar?

The thing is that it is so unbelievably gorgeous here in the morning.  Any time I have the good fortune to be here, I immediately start scheming ways that I can *always* be here, every single morning, never have to get in my car and go.  Five days a week I leave to go to work, the other two I'm leaving to go to yoga.  It's kind of ridiculous.

Today the sun is shining, the bees are out.  There is small-scale weeding to be done : the seeds in Box 1 have sprouted, but so has the borage, so I got to spend about 5 minutes between chasing puppy around pulling out the unwanted to clear space for the onions and the beets.  Now I'm just looking at it through the windows, with a sleeping puppy nearby, just reveling in how beautiful it is, birds flying in and out of the apple trees.

Unbelievably simple and gorgeous.

In a little while -- surprise, surprise -- we'll be getting in the car to take Mr Burns to the vet. He has a little spot on his face that is either an infection or demodex, the latter being just a fancy way of saying mange. Mange! No wonder they refer to it as demodex instead. 

Whatever it is, I don't care. I'm going there and coming straight back, all day in the company of Mr Burns, in my sunny house, on my sunny couch, smack in the middle of my sunny life.

You learn something new every day, Norman Wong

I just submitted this story to More magazine. Which is a magazine I picked up in the dentist office this morning, because Naomi Watts is on the cover and there was an article about migraines.  Lo and behold, about 15 pages in, was an invitation to submit pieces to their site.  We'll see what happens.  Read it here first. ;>

* * * * *

“You learn something new

every day, Norman Wong.”

This is a line my mother is still fond of repeating. My sisters and I all say it, too. It dates to my mother’s years as a high school Spanish teacher. She spent her entire career teaching at Lowell High School in San Francisco, a public high school for the academically inclined, a school whose population was, during her tenure as during my sisters and my years as students there, predominantly Chinese-American. Which explains the Norman Wong of the quote. Norman was an actual student in one of her classes.

He was lucky. My mother’s class was all about learning something new every day, not just in or about Spanish, but about life itself. I was a student in her AP Spanish class and remember marveling at how good she was it, at how it truly was her vocation to stand before a room of nerdy naïve youngsters and show them how it’s done.

This was her true gift as a teacher, really. You thought she was teaching you the subjunctive, but really she was teaching thinking, self-reliance, self-discipline, enthusiasm – she taught life itself. I still meet people, native San Franciscans, who recognize me by my last name as my mother’s daughter and regale me with stories of how much she influenced them.

As her kids, my sisters and I were raised on this notion of learning something new every day. It’s a big deal in my family, and explains why after my parents retired from teaching, they immediately enrolled as graduate students in Italian. They’re constantly learning something – tango, Italian, Portuguese -- or going to the opera, reading, seeing films. Always learning, still growing.

I was thinking earlier today about this penchant to look at each experience as an opportunity to learn something. It can take the heat or terror or humiliation out of almost anything that happens. No matter what, you’ll learn something. You don’t always know what, but something will come of it that increases your store of accumulated wisdom, that expands your perspective and ability to understand the world around you.

Even something as simple as having my teeth cleaned can send me down this path. That’s where I was earlier today when I remembered Norman Wong and my mother’s manifesto.

I was sitting in the chair while a new hygienist worked on my plaque-y teeth. I suppose I’d never visited this dentist on a Monday so never had the benefit of this particular hygienist. She wasn’t new, really, just new to me.

She was different from the rest of the staff there, older. What I like about my dentist and the other women at this clinic is that they’re all young and they have small hands. In my childhood, I spent what seemed like an inordinate amount of time at the dentist. The dentist was always male, and I remember the tremendous pressure of those big hands on my little jaws. These new young ladies with their small hands and their super degree of empathy, always pre-apologizing in case of possible pain, delight me. The thing I realized today is that they don’t necessarily have the amount of accumulated wisdom that Jean, the Monday hygienist, has.

What’s incredible to me is that today, sitting in that chair for an hour, I learned things about my teeth and my mouth and my sleep and my breathing that no one, certainly not a Registered Dental Assistant, has ever told me before. Keep in mind that I get my teeth cleaned a lot, every three months or they're out of control. And do I have to remind you that I've had these teeth one hell of a long time.

Anyway, this woman Jean blew my mind. It was hard to make out her words sometimes, over the sucking of the tube in my mouth, the whine of the scaler, the muffling effect of her facemask. But when she asked me whether I was right or left-handed, that got my attention. When she told me that I am a mouth-breather when I sleep, I paid more attention. She has been doing this so long, she said, that she can tell everything about people from the condition of their teeth.

Me? She had me pegged. Allergies and a runny nose mean I generally breathe through my mouth when sleeping. She asked me if the first thing I do when I wake up is blow my nose. Why yes, indeed, ma’am, how did you know? Also asked me if I run or do aerobic exercise. All that breathing dries out the mouth, causing one to salivate more, leading to more plaque build-up.

Hearing her talk I was visualizing my mouth as never before, as a coral reef constantly growing itself. It wasn’t anymore about my failures to floss (I’m diligent!). It was to do with my genes, with my breathing, even with my handed-ness – although there I defy the odds as most right-handed people have cleaner teeth on the left side of their mouths since they typically start brushing there. Me, the right side’s cleaner even though I’m right handed. But I think it’s because I generally sleep on my left side. I’m surprised she didn’t ask me this.

I suppose I could regard the whole experience of cleanings four times a year as a chore, as something unpleasant and uncomfortable. Certainly it isn’t altogether pleasant, and generally not comfortable -- sometimes there are stabs or zings of pain. It’s not my favorite thing in the whole world, but I have to say that, coming from where I come from, it’s amazing what you can learn, sitting in that chair, when someone with years of accumulated wisdom sits there with her eyes and tools and tells you what your teeth say you’re about.

As I was leaving with my fantastically clean teeth and all this new insight about them, I stopped to make my next appointment. I made it for a Monday, so that Jean could regale me with more of her expertise as she scours the coral reef of my mouth three months from now.

It’s really true that you can learn something new every day. Even the smallest experience, the most mundane, the least dramatic, can unfold whole vistas right before your eyes. But Norman Wong, you knew that already, right? You learned that a long time ago.

super-wow weekend

This was one of those weekends when I'm really glad that my partner and I each have our own consuming passions.  Some people might call these activities of ours "hobbies," but we know they are so very much more than that. Basically, if I subtract the hours we spent sleeping, then probably we've seen each other for at most 9 hours since early Friday morning. It's Sunday evening and it's just me, Mr Burns and the crickets in the house. I don't expect Joe home for hours, even if it is a school night.

Not every weekend is like this. We have had a good stretch of weekends with plenty of together time: harvesting honey, working our micro-farm, going to the movies, hanging out and doing nothing. But it's not unusual for us to spend a lot of time apart on the weekends, each of us deep into our own interest, investing hours into cultivating our abilities in separate realms.

Except for the fact that I hardly saw my husband, I had a super-wow weekend.  I was in an amazing workshop all weekend that blew my mind.  I did hours and hours of yoga, hung out with my friends, laughed, thought big thoughts and was generally a little bliss-drunk, like a pollen-heavy bee just buzzing around.  I am still filled to the brim with impressions, with pages and pages of notes to go through and muscles reminding me of how much I used them.

It's probably not dissimilar from how Joe is feeling right about now.  I imagine he, too, is very aware of how much he used his legs this weekend, what muscles he used mountain biking that the road bike doesn't require as much.  Twenty minutes away, in a room full of people that doesn't include me, I imagine he is feeling this same feeling of physical contentment from using his body well all weekend, and laughing with his friends and enjoying the last bit of the weekend.

I'm relishing my quiet house, Mr Burns dreaming his puppy dreams on the couch while the gecko's crickets make their music.

This having of your own passion is, in my little opinion, a major key to a successful long-term relationship. It is so important for each person to have something they're wild about, something they do with their own set of friends, something that draws on the deepest part of them and allows for its expression. And let's be honest: if Joe didn't have this passion for his bicycle -- i.e., if he didn't have a "hobby" that took 8 hours on Friday (century + travel time + hang-out time), a couple of hours yesterday, and all day today (mountain bike ride + Biketoberfest + watching the World Road Championships with his team this evening), then I'd probably feel a lot less free to pursue my own heart's desire in the form of hours and hours of yoga, away from home.

Plus there's something about the sport that so suits him. Something that he needs. When he's had moments -- and there have been some -- when he's talked about hanging up the bike, I bite my tongue and wait. He needs this. For all its dangers, it's more Good for him than it's ever been Bad.

There are some wives who complain about being Bike Widows. I can see their point. If you looked forward to the weekend as a time to spend lots and lots of time with your partner only to have him or her gone for hours on end, that would be a drag.  I've always had my own interests, but have definitely had those times when I was a little pissed off about waiting for him to come home.  But ever since we had a couple of real-life run-ins with almost-death -- cancer, a really bad crash -- I can't use the word Widow lightly. Even when I'm not busy with yoga, I am more than happy for Joe to be on his bike, being healthy, being strong, doing what he does, contesting the sprints and winning them. What a precious thing indeed to have a body that functions, lungs that can power those muscles, feet that can turn the pedals. Precious.

Still, this separateness sometimes feels a little perilous.  After a weekend away with my friends and teachers in Tantric Philosophy Land, I feel like a stranger in a strange land a little bit. My head is full of ideas and thoughts and sudden flashes of insight that are hard to share without the full context. I know that sometimes my excited yoga-chatter is just so much bla-bla-bla, in the same way that sometimes I zone out completely when a portion of that day's ride is being re-told.

The challenge is always in being separate enough and still together, like enough yet different enough, bound together loosely but bound together still, the knot holding fast.

I'm alone here with Mr Burns and the crickets and feeling happy.  I miss Joe and I know that he is better for being where he is right now, doing his own thing just as I am doing mine.  And when he's back, that'll be great, too.  We'll be happy to be together, each of us deeply satisfied both with our own lives and the one we make together.

XX

be a scholar, not a dweeb

As we were leaving hour 9 of a weekend-long Tantric philosophy and asana workshop, as we were happily babbling our way to the car, Jen commented on how very many hours we devote to this practice on a regular, daily, weekly basis.  Is there anything else under the sun we would choose to do for 12 hours a weekend?  

All assembled marveled at how happy we are to do so, to sit for hours on end, practice for hours on end, learn and grow and expand in good company for hours on end.  We're such yoga dorks and we couldn't be happier.

It's like a sweet, sweet dream.

As a lifelong nerd, it's so, so, so deeply satisfying to indulge this side of myself, all the while balancing it out with a physical practice that makes it REAL.  It's not an academic pursuit, it's not a purely intellectual exercise.  It's taking the beautiful stories we hear and giving them life through the practice, feeling them on our mats, becoming Arjuna or Kali or Saraswati, experiencing the story at a muscular, cellular level, being heroes, goddesses, gods.  

It's fucking fantastic.  

One of the things I love best about my teachers is that they are real people.  They are deeply devoted to yoga, to study, to learning, to topics that might seem esoteric or far-fetched or loony.  But they're real people, with lives and kids and their own messes.  They make silly puns and goofy pop culture references, they swear, they make me laugh.  

They are scholars without being dweebs.

And that pretty much kicks every kind of ass there is.

I am just so inspired by this weekend.  I'm already 9 hours in and already sad that only 3 hours remain.  I could do this for weeks at a time.  And how not to?  How not to feel this bone-deep intoxication, this excitement at being invited repeatedly not just to be successful, but to be GREAT.  

Like I said, fucking fantastic.

With so much gratitude to my teachers, XX.