Making stars

I am thoroughly enjoying "Packing for Mars" by Mary Roach. Blasting off into the cosmos with Mary is exactly what I need right now, and it -- funny how that happens -- goes along so well with some themes that have emerged in yoga in recent weeks.  Here is what is striking me this morning:

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place.  It is practically God.  In the beginning, the cosmos was nothing but empty space and vast clouds of gases.  Eventually the gases cooled to the point where tiny grains coalesced.  These grains would have spent eternity moving through space, ignoring each other, had gravitational attraction not brought them together. Gravitation is the lust of the cosmos.

This is precisely how yoga has been feeling lately, that we could all be these individual particles blowing past each other in space, but somehow the practice exerts a pull on some of us and then those some of us exert a pull on others of us, until -- bam! -- a star is formed, kula is born.  And though we disperse, the gravitational attraction remains and we form and re-form, in the same pattern, over and over.

Naturally, I think I am using my will to arrive at the right place, right time, but from there, something else is in charge, I swear it.  Something beyond will. There's this sense at the start of class of acceleration, then lift-off, like some unseen force is kicking in, something beyond me or the other particles in the room, and boom, off we go into a delectable spin.

I feel like I might be talking a little crazy for some of you, but that's OK.  It sometimes feels a little crazy -- ok, sometimes downright spooky -- to be inside this sensation, inside it repeatedly.  

There's something truly delicious about it, as though we're participating over and over in the creation and expansion of the cosmos itself, as delirious as that sounds.  But it's truly miraculous, and fun, and satisfyingly challenging.

In that context, it's funny to read about people actually packing for space, training for weightlessness and life in a capsule orbiting the planet.  From where I sit this morning, it's crystal clear that for lift-off no NASA required.  To experience the euphoria of space, it just takes that bumping of particles into form -- you and your friends, on the mat, again.

Love the World You're With!

How about this, crazy so-called Christian nutjobs: sure, May 21st can be the end of the world, if you say so.  But how about we define the end of the world a little bit differently?  How about if instead of getting enRaptured and lifted up to paradise, you all, on Sunday, May 22, wake up in the not-over present moment and look around at the glorious world we live in, with all its flaws, and see it for what it already is: Heaven.

This is it, folks.  It doesn't and can't get better than this because it's already perfect.

I say, if it's the end of something on May 21st, let it be of fear, of ignorance, of wishing for some reality other than the one we're in, which is, as much as it sometimes can suck, perfect, beautiful, divine.

Love the world you're with!!

XX

Dental cleaning confessional

The view from the dentist's chair is not so bad, big clouds blowing past in a light blue sky.

I've been here for an hour now. My doctor had to step out for a consult, so I am enjoying the respite from the drill, writing this post, looking at National Geographic, tripping out on my very numb face.

Also thinking about what an exercise in enforced relaxation sitting in this chair is, how I have to repeatedly notice and unclench my clenched shoulders. If the novacaine didn't work, how is being tense going to be better than responding to the pain from a relaxed place. How?

Years ago I wrote something about how getting my teeth cleaned was like confessional, absolution of my sugary non-flossing sins, leaving me at a new beginning, filled with a resolve to do better, make changes, develop good habits. The thing about confessional, I suppose (only having done it a few times), is that you know you can always do it again, so the door is open in case really you don't mend your ways.

Before these last two appointments, I managed not to get to the dentist for 4 years, pretty much the exact duration of my last job, yet another way in which it was bad for me. Not getting to the dentist for four years is a small-scale disaster for someone with my particular mouth. So now here I am, back again, in some ways starting over, with a filling and a deep cleaning.

The dentist is lovely, small hands. Dental technology has advanced an absurd amount in my lifetime. It's so sweet to have the application of topical anesthetic, digital images of my teeth, young female doctors who explain everything as they go and apologize at the mere suggestion of pain. Progress, indeed, and a soft touch.

Better music too: faintly I can hear The Pretenders. Duran Duran. Elvis Costello. I am entertained. I am, finally, relaxed, confident that really truly I can't feel a thing.

When the appointment is over (resuming the post from home now), the right side of my face is so numb that I really can't speak. I am sent to the bathroom with some antibacterial mouth-rinse and instructed to perform the rinse bent over the sink -- no facial control. And it's true.

When I mention a meeting in an hour, the charming dentist offers me the injection of a reversing agent, a magical substance which shortens by 70% the duration of the numbness. It's a new product, so sci fi (Administer the Reversing Agent!). Faced with the very real prospect of hours of involuntary drooling and leering, I jump back in the chair and off we go.

Now I'm sitting here in my kitchen, taking a breather before heading in to the office. Reversing agent or no, I rescheduled the 11:30 meeting and will make it up later in the afternoon. It's beautiful to be here right now, extending a little bit the weekend feeling and experiencing these strange sensations on the right side of my head. And no coffee for an hour.

When everything's back to normal, for reals this time I'm flossing my damn teeth every day. This morning's appointment was a pleasure compared to others earlier in my life -- so much more humane. Still, the less time I can spend in this chair the better, kind feminine hands notwithstanding.

New outlet for my scribbling

Last week I published my first post on San Rafael Patch in their Local Voices blog section.  I'm delighted to be writing in a different medium to a different (potential) audience -- i.e., people I don't know! 

Following a sad article in today's Marin IJ, I just submitted another piece on beekeeping, which I hope they'll run (tomorrow?), and which I hope will make some small contribution to reversing prohibitions and reducing permit costs to keep bees in your backyard.

Yay!

Is This Real Life?

Yesterday was about this.



And yoga and this:

And then this.

Nice!

Saying I Love You with gravel

When I asked Joe earlier this afternoon, by way of inviting him to carpool home with me, whether we needed two cars this weekend, he demurred.  In a mumbling kind of way.  I should have known something was up.

A few weeks ago, we started making a list as a consequence of one of my rules for the year: Fix The Small Stuff.    We have a habit of leaving small tasks undone, because we put them off until we do the Really Big Project.  This is how we came to use janky stacked-up old fence-parts outside the French doors of our bedroom in lieu of stairs for at least 10 years, thinking we'd do stairs when we made a deck out there.  Stepping off from our room onto the first quasi-step was a big drop, something none of us, not even Jas, could manage gracefully.  I never liked the look of those stairs, but whatever, there they were.  And the deck?  Hasn't happened, and it probably won't for a while.  I'm pretty sure we're not alone in this small task deferral.  It's easy to gloss over the small things.

But when it comes down to it, the small things make all the difference.  It's the little details that make a house or a garden or any place really, so remarkable.  It's the details, truly, that delight.

When you take care of them, that is.  Put off, ignored, the undone-details rankle or remind you (like the unread pile of New Yorkers by the table) that you can't really stay on top of the business of your life.

Enough, we said.  Well, OK, I said it, inspired by Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project.

And so we started the Small list.  And then added Medium and Large.  And lest you should think I'm just adding stuff to the Honey-Do list unilaterally, I protest: the compilation is entirely collaborative, something we do in restaurants when we're waiting for our food or while driving distances in the car.

The timing of starting the lists was a little tricky.  We started in April, not long after Joe had that last horrific bike crash, 4 broken ribs, the clavicle, the scapula, the punctured lung.  While making it, we agreed that we were just probably going to move forward on small Small items, things that didn't require a lot of arms.

So naturally two days later, I came home from work to find stairs, actual stairs, constructed from those janky fence-parts, proper-sized steps and all, freshly stained, lined up outside the French doors.  True to form, my sly husband snuck home early that day to unload and install them, all to surprise me.

Which is a thing he does that explodes my heart every single time.  Because I know he does it all from love, even when he only has the use of one arm.  That's just how he is.

I could make another list, and it would be a super-long one, of all of the projects Joe has undertaken to surprise me -- the built-in bookcase in our room, the fence, inumerable little secret plantings in the yard, now the stairs, and so many more.  And always, really, he's just looking for one thing: for me to jump around and clap and sing my total delight.

Just last night, as we were waiting for our food at the aptly-named BJ's at the mall (and allow me to digress and say I love getting the 5 oz beer and the fish tacos there, freaking delicious), we were, of course, perusing the list, crossing things off (yes!), moving some items over to Medium, reconsidering some of the items on Large.  And we added one item to Small -- filling a space next to the driveway with gravel, a spot where there's a bit of a hole, disconcerting as you're driving in or backing out, clunk.

You know where this is going, right?  Yep, when I got home tonight, there was my delightful husband, shovel in hand, saying I love you with gravel.

So sweet.  And of course, he did it one better -- prettified the other side of the driveway at the same time, and while I was greeting him, offered to fix a stranger's bike of its loud squeak, chatted with the neighbors, was his usual so-friendly self.  I am a bit in awe.

I am reminded on this Friday The Thirteenth of just how lucky I am, how loved and how lucky, and how much I love too, him that is, crafty funny sweet clever Joe.  I couldn't have a better partner in this life, a better companion to make lists and get shit done with, to make a home and garden with, down to the smallest detail.  So so lucky, so so wonderful and sweet.

XX

Two Months and I still miss you

Jasper Bacon Trelaun
in his Regal Beagle pose

Lately I've been writing about other stuff, excited about other things, but don't think for a second, Pony, that I don't think about you all day every day.  My heart is still broken and I miss you madly, little daemon, gone from us two months ago yesterday.

Every Wednesday at 6:45 I remember it all with such a sharp pang.

I miss you so much and will love you always, always, always with every atom of my being.  I know you're still here, still part of everything as you always were.  I just miss your shining eyes, your sounds, your fur, your company so much and still see your brindle form everywhere I look.

Covering you with kisses, always.