graciespeaks

A Little Salt

Last night, I wanted to see The Kids Are All Right, which was not playing in a conveniently located theater, and Mr. Z. wanted to see Salt, which was.   So we headed out for Salt, and I was prepared to have my mind numbed by thin-plot car chases.

Instead, I had fun. 

I admit a slight "Oh, here we go" when the movie opened with Angelina Jolie's Evelyn Salt, wearing only a bra and panties, being tortured in a North Korean prison.

There were holes in the plot, it's true, and no shortage of chases and guns. 

But there were also plot twists and surprises and character changes.  Salt the CIA operative is smart and resourceful, and the chase scenes were exciting to this fan of introspective, soul-searching dialogue.  The movie worked as a summer thriller.

But beyond the thriller-ness of it, I've been thinking, thanks in large part to Julie Daley's recent posts, about feminine power, and I'm not sure how Salt's physical strength, ingenuity, and courage fit into that thought process--they are a piece of the puzzle, though. 

I'm reading Denial: A Memoir of Terror by Jessica Stern, and in the opening pages, she describes her passivity when she is raped at 15.  You can read the Salon excerpt here.  In that context, and in the context of my own history of passivity and silence, Evelyn Salt's determination to fight anyone and everyone to save her life and the lives of those she loves is a version of feminine power.

I hope you'll go see Evelyn Salt's "feminismo" (Time magazine's word) for yourself because it's fun, and maybe we can talk about it.

an un-practice for finding your true self

In  Enlighten Up, a 2008 movie by documentary filmmaker Kate Churchill, journalist and yoga novice Nick Rosen sets out to explore yoga's transformative possibilities. 

Early on, Nick meets Shyamdas, an American yogi who reappears late in the film during Nick's visit to India.  Shyamdas takes Nick to meet Guru Sharan Ananda (the Guru of the Blissful Refuge), a practitioner of Bhakti yoga.

Nick's yoga journey is nearly complete, and he is ready to cut to the chase:

Nick: I'm a, you know, a, godless guy from New York City.  It doesn't make sense necessarily for me to embrace Bhakti and Krishna, because it's not my own ...

Guru Sharan Ananda:  I never said to you that you embrace Krishna.  No, never embrace. Never do it.  If you don't like it, don't do it. Go on practicing what you are doing. If you want to believe in God . . . believe.  If you don't want to believe, don't believe. And still you could be a religious person.

Nick: And what would make you religious or spiritual if you don't believe in God?

Guru Sharan Ananda: Be your self.  Be your true self.

Nick: It's not so easy for me to just . . . sometimes I don't trust myself to say, okay, I'll just find my true self.  Are there specific practices that one can engage in to help?

Guru Sharan Ananda: As much as possible, try to get rid of what you are not, and you are unnecessarily wearing on yourself.  Try to get rid of this.  Happiness is not outside, it is within us.

I laugh when Nick asks for "specific practices"--and I thank him for asking what I want to know. 

Guru Sharan Ananda doesn't laugh, but he gives a practice for revealing, as opposed to finding. 

His instruction to let go of what we wear that is not us reminds me that my true self is right here, only covered by removable layers, and the only practice necessary to find it is to remove what obscures it.

To use the Guru's words, what are you "unnecessarily wearing on yourself?"

following, following-through, and community

 A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about following and following through, and I've known that there is at least one more piece of that puzzle to be explored.

In "Midnight Blue," Lou Gramm says he's going to stop following and follow through.  My 10,000-hour posts have been about following through.  In a hierarchical system, if we stop following, then we lead others, or at least we lead ourselves.  Is this our only option? 

Wholly Jeanne wrote in the comments that it was time to stop "looking for handbooks and sitting in the back of the room."  Clearly, she has been watching me for years, because she's pointing out exactly what I have done and stopped doing. 

Not-following has to do, then, not only with not looking for handbooks to tell me what to do, but also with no longer being separated from community (sitting, isolated, offering little because I thought I had nothing worthy of contribution, in the back of the room).

In the picture I've chosen, the walker makes her own path through the wheat, but the other paths around her show that she is not alone--others have walked the same terrain, only taking slightly different coordinates.  Whether she finds her way by walking in their footsteps or by walking in contrast to them, she still participates with them in her journey. 

No one seems to be in her field, insisting that she follow their paths, but they are with her via the tracks they have left, as people are with me in the community I seek and now increasingly (and gratefully) find myself a part of, offering the path that they have traveled, sharing what they have learned. 

I learn from them even as I walk my own way to our shared destination.  Others will walk all around me.  Our ways can never be identical, and all of them are perfect.

10,000 hours part 2

I

On a lazy July 4 afternoon, I stumbled on Step Into Liquid on Showtime.  And at about the 19:33 mark, I met Dale Webster.

This is Dale.  The sign in his hand says "12419," and that's the number of days in a row that he'd surfed as of last September.

This is more than 34 years of surfing every day, through everything that life has thrown at him.

Dale doesn't seem to be thinking about how to be the best surfer.  He needs to surf.

In On Writing, Stephen King describes his writing process:

The truth is that when I'm writing, I write every day, workaholic dweeb or not.  That includes Christmas, the Fourth, and my birthday. . . .  And when I'm not working, I'm not working at all, although during those periods of full stop I usually feel at loose ends with myself and have trouble sleeping.  For me, not working is the real work (ital. mine). 

He goes on to say that "only under dire circumstances do I allow myself to shut down before I get my 2,000 words."

It seems like Stephen King and Dale Webster aren't thinking about Outliers and 10,000 hours or even excellence.

Webster surfs because he needs to surf and King writes because he needs to write.  Both men feel better when they do their art, that's all. 

Webster has set mini-goals along the way, and when he reaches them, he seems to wake up the next morning and say, hmm, will I feel better if I surf or if I don't?  And so he surfs.  

And King knows what I am just learning: the real work is the not working.

So post-21.5.800, I keep writing every day.  I upped the minimum daily words to 1,000 on weekdays.  2,500 on weekends.

I've finally figured out that writing can never be as difficult as not writing, that nagging feeling that you're missing out on your life, that time is passing you by, that your last moments or years will be filled with regret.

This morning I tweeted a quote from Annie Dillard: "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." 

Dale Webster and Stephen King have figured that out, and I'm working on it.  What do you think?

There, but for the grace of God, go I

I wished that I could snap my fingers and go back in time to the day before I met him, and not meet him.

I wished that he would get arrested for driving drunk.

I wished that he would leave me for one of his girlfriends.

When fear and humiliation and fatigue coalesced, I wished that he would die.

Gaile Owens is a battered woman on death row in Tennessee for arranging for the 1984 murder of her husband, a man who sexually, emotionally, and physically abused her.

In spite of accepting a plea deal in exchange for a life sentence, Gaile is scheduled to die on September 28, 2010.

She didn't testify in her own defense to protect her young sons from the details of her abuse at the hands of their father.

Gaile has been diagnosed with battered women's syndrome.

She has expressed remorse for her crime and been a model prisoner.

She would be the first woman to be executed by the state of Tennessee since Eve Martin was hanged in 1820.

A review of nine comparable cases from the past 25 years found that six of the nine cases received full probation or early parole; two of the nine are serving life sentences and entitled to parole hearings.  Only one of the nine, Gaile, is serving a death sentence.

Gaile's only hope now is for Governor Phil Bredesen to commute her sentence from the death penalty to life in prison.

Please go to www.friendsofgaile.com to sign a petition and read more about what you can do.

an 80s-radio reminder about courage

Sometimes you (okay, sometimes I) just have to listen to a little 80s music in the car.

A couple of weeks ago on my drive to yoga, I heard Lou (formerly of Foreigner) Gramm's song "Midnight Blue."  You can watch the music video, complete with plenty of 80s hair, here. 

The lyric I'm interested in comes at the 0:45 mark:

"I used to follow/Yeah, that's true/But my following days are over/Now I've just got to follow through."

I've been thinking about following--people, teachers, traditions--nearly everything but my self and my heart and intuition--and the ways that hasn't really worked out.

It takes courage to stop following and find your own way. 

You have to say (or sing along with Lou), Enough.  Going forward things will be different. Now I've got to follow through with whatever's on my own path.

Are there any ways you've been following instead of following through?

intention and the 10,000-hour rule

Today is the 21st and last day of Bindu Wiles' original 21.5.800 (5 days of yoga each week and 800 words each day) challenge. 

On Day 14, I wrote about the middle, and that post really needs a Part 2 here at the end of the first 21 days, and before the ten-day extension begins tomorrow.  And before we go any further at all.

Here is my question: how do I become an excellent writer?  What does it take?

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell discusses studies that show that more than talent, more than luck, more than anything else, "what it takes" is practice.

Gladwell cites examples of talented, lucky people, from Mozart to the Beatles to Bill Gates, who excelled beyond many other talented, lucky people because of their actions: they practiced.  10,000 hours of practice from novice to excellence.

Usually Gladwell's examples take about ten years to reach 10,000 hours.  So with the help of my trusty calculator, I can tell you that this means practicing 2.74 hours every day for ten years.  Yep, that's 365 days a year.

It's not a question of whether I'm willing to spend the time.  That's not up to me.  The time for practice seems to be non-negotiable.  The question is whether I want to be excellent.  When I imagine that I can become excellent by writing only when the muse calls, I am delusional. 10,000 hours will not happen if I wait for the muse to wake me up.  She doesn't show up unless I do first.

That's where a challenge like Bindu's, and the habits that it can create, is invaluable.  The framework of 21.5.800 has shown me that I can write every day.  Period.  Well, almost period.  I missed one day of writing out of the 21, the day of the mediation, and while I didn't try to write 800 make-up words, I made up the words in a couple of days.  Having the habit and the 21.5.800 framework in place meant that I wrote the day before, and the day after, and I didn't consider that I needed a break because I was tired or busy or any of the other excuses that I've used more often than I'm happy to admit. 

I was in a challenge: I was committed.  And I had gotten clear about my intention, which brings me to today's word from Dian Reid's Self-Evidence + Authenticity Challenge, to which I'm grateful for giving me a focus for blogging these last 21 days.

Intention.

Lyle Lovett's "Good Intentions" plays in my mind, and the lyrics are worth a click: "She wasn't good/But she had good intentions."

Which brings me back again to the "action" part of the equation.  I have to have good intention and 10,000 hours of good action, and a little luck and talent.

tears and the compassion of suffering-with

Yesterday I cried in the back corner booth of a bagel restaurant while having lunch with a friend. 

Long ago I learned to hold back my tears because of someone's belief that to cry for myself was self-indulgent, not to mention red-eyed and -nosed unattractive.  It meant that I was making too much of things, being too sensitive.  I've unlearned those teachings enough that tears come easier now, especially in private.

But public tears for someone else were still another matter. 

A few months ago, another, relatively new friend teared up while telling me something that was going on in her life.  Uncomfortable, I averted my eyes.  I rationalized at the time that I was giving her privacy, but as soon as my eyes shifted, I felt the connection with her break a little, which is probably what I wanted. I was not giving her privacy, but taking it for myself, and afterward I regretted retreating from her pain.  I felt stingy.

A few weeks ago, a domestic violence survivor told me her story, and she was dry-eyed, but I cried.  The connection between us increased with my tears.

I got it.  This was compassion, from the Latin "to suffer with."  Compassion given and received.

So yesterday when my friend told me about her ongoing struggle, I cried.  I apologized, worried about upsetting her, being, heaven forbid, "emotional." 

She said that my tears were the best gift I could have given her.

This post is partly in response to the word "compassion" in Dian Reid's Self-Evident Challenge.

the middle of the wilderness

The Summer Solstice in the Northern Hemisphere occurred today, June 21, 2010, at

7:28 a.m., EDT, the first day of summer, the longest day and the shortest night of the year, a pivotal day when days will begin to get shorter, bit by bit, as we move back toward the Winter Solstice. 

This is the 172nd day of 2010, nearly the half-way point.

I am a healthy 45-year-old woman with long-living relatives, probably more or less half-way through my life.

This is the 14th day of Bindu Wiles’ 21.5.800 21-day yoga and writing challenge, the end of the second “third.”

I am living in the land of the middles: in the wilderness.

According to the Torah and the Christian Bible, Moses and the Israelites moved from Egypt to the wilderness to Canaan.  They spent forty years, one generation, wandering the Wilderness in circles, wondering if God had abandoned them, wondering if they would ever get where they were going.

The wilderness can be a hard place to walk.

In Bindu’s post for Day 8 of her challenge, she wrote, “Middles are where we delay gratification.” 

From my spot here in the middle, sometimes I wonder, delayed for how long?

I’m fortunate to have had a version of Bindu's advice already.  I had finished a (middle) draft of my memoir, and I told her that I was thinking about turning my attention not (I claimed) away from writing but just a little bit toward something else.  Bindu called me out on the lure of the distraction, on my unwillingness to stick it out in the middle of my project.

That conversation led me to some soul searching about other middle-points in my life when I’d abandoned a sport, a skill, a project, a profession, a relationship. 

At the beginning of any of those things, we know the excitement of learning something new and also, simultaneously, the promise that we will surely get better,  the forgiveness granted to a novice.

At the expert phase, one has a sense of mastery, respect from others, at least some confidence in excellence.

But the middle: the middle can feel like a slog through averageness.  In the middle you know enough to know how little you know.  It is so tempting to stop here, find another venue where you can receive the grace and forgiveness accorded to novices, avoiding the possibility that you will work very hard and never achieve true excellence in your chosen field of endeavor.  

In her 21.5.800 post, Bindu talks about the middle.  In the middle you need the discipline of consistent daily practice—there is no way through but one focused step after the other, continuity, steadfastness. 

So we keep practicing.  Writing our words.  Doing our poses.  Doing our work. Doing our relationships.  Walking through the middle, toward the promised land of excellence. 

But there’s another side to wilderness that I’ve been ignoring: it’s wild. 

Last night after I’d written a draft of this post (800 21.5.800words), I read Julie Jordan Scott’s post on wilderness for Dian Reid’s Self-Evident challenge.  She reminded me that “no matter where you are, right now, there is wilderness.”  And to her that didn’t mean a numbing grind but endless possibility for connection and grace and new experience. 

The middle can still be a wilderness, but that means more than I thought.   Maybe it’s time for me to embrace the wild’ness, full of possibilities that will come as we walk through it.

listening to the roaring, or coming to self-awareness

For about three years now I’ve been paying lawyers to help me fight to end a relationship that was all about fighting.

I’m not much of a fighter. My default responses to real or perceived aggression include feeling trapped (essentially sitting in a corner in tears) or ending an exchange or even a relationship with frozen silence. If I have to engage in real fighting, I feel afraid, and sometimes I have to get detached to get through it. If I can’t fully detach, the roaring starts in my head, like a sound machine people use to sleep, an uninvited layer of protective cotton that gives me a buffer but makes rational, analytical thinking difficult.

The last in-person fight I had with him had ended with police taking him away, and then there was the fight with lawyers, but with the legal end of the marriage, I thought the end of the fighting would come as well. Then he died. And new lawyers came in, to clean up what the first round of lawyers had left undone.

Last Wednesday, more than two and a half years after his death, we went to mediation in hopes of avoiding going to court.

It was set to start at 930, but when we walked into the conference room at 9, there was already an Au Bon Pain coffee cup on the table, already big black briefcases and file boxes on carts stacked against the wall. We were early, but not as early as others. Apparently no one wanted to be late.

People returned to their coffee. Introductions were made, but no one smiled. I was the only woman in the room of twelve people.

The mediator sat at the head of the table. Across from me sat the Personal Representative for the estate, his two lawyers, and a lawyer for another person who had a claim. On my side, one lawyer for me, two for my business partners, and my father and brother. Mr. Z, a retired lawyer, was there next to me. Everyone on my side was there to protect me. To list the kindnesses and love expressed to me by the members of my side of the table would make this an even longer post than it will be already. To say that I am grateful to my team is an understatement.

Someone on our side joked across the table, Are you worried about being outnumbered? The other side said, Of course not. Our guy said, Well, you’ll be worried in the brawl in the parking garage later. Everyone laughed. But this early joking was not far off from how everything about the day felt to me. The roaring in my head had started even in the practice fighting of our preparations.

The stakes were high for me. My financial goose could be cooked. I understood the case as well as anyone, and if it hadn’t been for the roaring, I would have been an able advocate for myself. I could be an able advocate on another day in another room for someone else in my peep-toe wedges.

The mediator explained the rules of the fight.

One of their lawyers talked, then two of our lawyers talked, then the other team left to deliberate alone in a smaller conference room. My team spread out around the table. The mediator left the room to talk to them, then came back to tell us what they were thinking, then left us to consider our response, then took our response back to them, and back and forth, all day. There is a lot of waiting time in mediation.

When considering our responses, we argued among ourselves, or more accurately, they argued among themselves, as only men, particularly men who are lawyers, can do, no one taking offense at the arguing, rams slamming their racks against one another, crash, crash, crash, backing off and going back in again.

No one meant for me to feel unsafe. No one meant anything else than to do his best to protect me. But the arguing, and the feeling of being trapped in a situation of tension, reminded me of too many other arguments and conflicts and unsafe nights for me to argue along with them without the roaring in my head increasing.

There was no way to escape the tension but to go to the bathroom, so I drank glass after glass of water, and when the pitcher was empty, I switched to little plastic bottles, always happy to have a reason to leave the room, walk through the reception area, past the elevators, left down the hall to the first door on the left, and into the relative sanctuary of a stall, where I could take deep breaths to try to slow my heart rate and regain my composure.

My attorney went out into the lobby and asked the receptionist, Is there a goddamn tv in this office? Does it have cable? And the tv appeared, in the closet in our conference room, so we could watch the World Cup. Switzerland upset Spain. The South African goalkeeper got a red card. Unheard of. The mediator came in and out, talking to us, talking to the other side.

Around noon I thought we were near an agreement, and we were, and I wondered if we would finish soon, but no one else thought so, and sandwiches were delivered, sliced turkey stacked high, egg salad sliding off the rolls, potato salad in a formed plastic container. I ate half a turkey sandwich.

We started again at 12:30. I picked up paper clips from the carpet at my feet under the large conference table. I looked down at a tangle of computer cables, a large power supply. I wondered who would use it.

When it was all too much, when even picking up the paperclips or going to the ladies room couldn’t distract me, I walked to the window. Sometimes I looked out at a beautiful view of Biscayne Bay and the Port of Miami, turning my back to the men, and sometimes I turned my back on the bay, surveying the room, listening to what they were saying, trying to engage my left brain.

Sometimes the roar in my head drowned them out for a few seconds, and around two o’clock I was afraid that the roar would become so loud that I wouldn’t be able to hear them, follow their reasoned and documented arguments at all.

I took the paper clips I had amassed from the floor and placed them on a counter at the end of the room.

At one point, following the soccer theme, I made the Time Out sign with my hands and said, since my neck is on the line here, let’s do such-and-such. That was probably my last substantive comment of the day.

The junior lawyer of my team asked me if I was okay. He had stayed out of the fray and was able to sit back and see that I was struggling. Maybe he could hear the roaring, too.

Finally it was over, we reached an agreement, and the junior lawyer began to draft a hand-written version for everyone to sign. While he wrote, everyone sat around, chatting. When the draft was finally circulated for signatures, I could barely read it. Fortunately my lawyers wrote it and read it.

We left the building without incident in the parking garage, and Mr. Z and I went to a restaurant where I drank two martinis (exceeding my one-drink maximum). Late the following day I began to ask, Why the roaring?

I realized that the fighting in a closed conference room, regardless of the fact that people were often fighting for the way to best help me, brought up a lot of old fears of conflict and being trapped. My body knew it, responding with a racing heart and shortness of breath, wrapping me in a wall of sound.

I was able to recognize this as a stress response, but instead of tracing it to other instances of detachment or frozen-ness, I tried to fight it. I would have been better off acknowledging it to someone (the best candidate would have been Mr. Z) but I was so frozen in fear or panic, unable to fly or fight, that I tried to overcome it, and as the day went on, my protective self grew stronger, trying to get my attention.

Only talking to Mr. Z at three a.m. Friday morning did either of us realize that I had been frozen, panicked, by the arguing against the other side and among my own side. I was trapped in the past, in my reactions to the present that weren’t based on a room full of men debating the best way to legally protect my interests, but on the past room with one man who wanted to berate me or hit me until I disappeared.

But it’s over now. No more fighting him in the bedroom or the living room or the conference room.

It’s time to fight in new arenas: on the manuscript page, on the web page, on the tweet, over tea with another woman who is where I’ve been. And time to listen to the roar, if it starts again, and ask it what it’s trying to tell me.

This post is partly in response to the writing and yoga challenge by Bindu Wiles, 21.5.800, and Dian Reid's Self-Evidence + Authenticity theme of Self-Awareness.