graciespeaks

Happy Birthday, Virginia Woolf, January 25, 1882

When I first read A Room of One's Own in a Women's Studies class nearly 25 years ago, I underlined this:

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.  But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.

Today I don't battle "some Headmaster" and "some professor" as much as an internal critic and general self-consciousness and -doubt, and Woolf takes me by the shoulders: to succumb is "the most abject treachery."

Who are your Headmasters and professors for whom you would "sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision"?

Best New Persons of 2009--Angelica and Susan

Here's the next question for Gwen Bell's Best of 2009 Blog Challenge:

December 20 New person. She came into your life and turned it upside down. He went out of his way to provide incredible customer service. Who is your unsung hero of 2009?

Two yoga teachers came into my life in the last five months, only after I made myself available to meet them (once again, when this student was ready, the teachers came.)

I decided toward the end of July to give up a longstanding weekly commitment in order to create time for new pursuits and relationships.  It was hard to move on but time.

On August first, I made my way to a class at Shores Yoga, not sure what I would find or whom I might meet.

My teacher on that Saturday morning was Angelica.  She and her class turned my expectations (based on a few yoga classes ten years ago) on their head.  She was knowledgeable (appealing to my geek side with Sanskrit names for poses and detailed explanations of why were doing what we were doing) and I loved her unexpectedly hip playlist.  The class was at once meditative and physically challenging, and I was never bored.  She was teaching a four-week intro to yoga class beginning the following Tuesday night, and that worked perfectly into my schedule. I was hooked.  I took as many classes as I could every week in addition to the intro.

It turned out that Angelica taught the intro class in August because its usual teacher, Susan, was on vacation.  When Susan came back in September, I still felt like enough of a novice that I could benefit from another four weeks of intro. So I took Susan's intro and her Yoga 1 classes on Monday and Wednesday nights as well as Angelica's Saturday morning class. 

Susan's classes (and playlists) were excellent, too, and different enough from Angelica's that I began to realize that I can probably practice yoga for the rest of my life without ever losing interest. A few times I was the only student (not good for Susan but good for me).  Susan worked patiently with me on poses I had a hard time with, especially headstand.  When I finally did a headstand in a Christmas Eve morning class, she smiled like the proud mentor she is.

Thanks, Angelica and Susan, for introducing me to yoga, for teaching me patiently when I couldn't remember a sequence for what seemed to me a ridiculous amount of time, for helping me battle my perfectionism with lightness and fun, and for becoming my friends. 

the warmth of connection: a thanksgiving list

I am grateful for:

 

• Gracie and Max, my beloved Weimaraners.  You are in my heart and soul.
• Rosanne, who makes healthy, perfect food for Gracie and Max, and lost her own beloved dog, Kibo, over the weekend.  Much love and courage to you, Rosanne.
• Matt, Angelica, and Susan for keeping me strong, balanced and flexible.
• Michael’s family, who are sharing themselves with me this Thanksgiving. Thank you for accepting me.
• My family, for making me all that I am.  I love you all and will miss you Thursday.
• My old friends, who give and expect trust and truth.  Please don’t ever stop.
• My new friends, who encourage me to write and be my selfiest self.  Priorities.
• The connections of the internet, where people I will likely never meet inspire me every day.  You have no idea.
• Michael, who is big enough to hold me while I expand and grow.  I love you.
• My life, which contains all these blessings and more, including
  the gift of time to write and think.

 

I won’t be blogging again until Saturday.  I'm on draft #3, and will be pouring every word I have into it for the next few days.

 

Happy Thanksgiving!

"the work of symbolic restitution"

I met John Evans in a Florida International University Creative Non-fiction workshop in early 2006.  I admired his non-fiction pieces, and knew his reputation as an excellent poet.  We weren't friends; we didn't hang out. 

I didn't socialize with my fellow graduate students, partly because I was older than most of them and worked full time, and partly (well, mainly) because I was generally more concerned with what was going on at home in my absence than what I might be missing after class. 

John finished his coursework and so did I, and he finished his MFA in 2007, I believe, whereas I have fumbled around, only now planning a Spring 2010 thesis defense.

In 2008, my ex-husband having died in December 2007,  I learned that John's wife Katie had died in 2007.  Moved by the news but with no idea what to do, I made a donation to the charitable foundation he and her family set up in her honor, and John responded with a thank-you email that began a  correspondence that was invaluable to me.

To write about our individual griefs is riskily presumptuous and inevitably reductive, but I believe that John grieved the loss of his beloved wife and the possibilities and hopes of their lives to come, while I grieved seemingly wasted time and dreams and the negation of the possibility of redemption. But our processes were not all that different.  Grief was grief, and his emailed insights and progress reports were often signposts for me.

Now John is a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University.  He has married again.  Several pieces from "Katie Ghazals" appear in the forthcoming issue of Hayden's Ferry Review.   His essay about writing about grief appears in the Hayden's Ferry Review Blog.  Once again, his comments about his journey illuminate mine.

His blog, How to Like It, and the poem that inspired its title, always deserve attention.

unconditional friendliness

I had never heard the term "unconditional friendliness" until today.  I googled it, and found this teaching from Pema Chodron.  Please read.

For Wes on Veterans Day

My ex-father-in-law died five years ago on Veterans Day, November 11, 2004. 

This is part of what I wrote in his obituary:  “He was born August 29, 1920 in Forest Park, Illinois. He volunteered and enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1939, serving on submarines, destroyers, and battleships. A qualified submariner, gun captain, soundman and radar operator, Wes served as gunner on five submarine combat missions during World War II, sinking numerous enemy vessels while he and his crewmates narrowly escaped death on a number of occasions. Wes was awarded the Navy Commendation, Asiatic Pacific Service, American Area, Philippine Liberation, American Defense with an 'A,' World War II Victory, Korean Service, United Nations Service, China Service, Navy Occupation (European) Medals and various other honors and awards. He retired after 20 years of decorated Naval Service at the rank of Chief Gunner's Mate.”

All of that would have been important to him, but five years later, I add this:

Wes was proud of the medals I wrote about.  He had wanted them for years, and getting them from the Navy was a project that took months.  Angela, have you sent the letters about my medals?

Naval service was, for him, about doing the right thing according to a simple code of honor that had to do with sacrifice for his fellow seamen as well as for his country.  He told the story of risking his life to disarm a live and malfunctioning gun, an act for which I believe he won the Navy Commendation medal.  He didn’t see it as particularly courageous. It was the right thing, it was who he was.  He was humble and brave and he was also one of the kindest men I have ever known.

During the last month of his life we traveled to Mobile, Alabama to attend a reunion of some of the men for whom he would have given his life, the veterans of the USS Texas battleship, and then almost immediately afterward he began the intermittent hospital stays that consumed his last weeks.  The time I spent with him then was indescribably sweet.

I sat with him in the hospital one weekend after I had just begun the MFA program I will (finally) complete next Spring, and I was working on something for a workshop.  I’m fine, don’t worry about me, he would say when I would stop writing in my notebook.  Just keep writing.  It’s important. 

On November 8, 2004, Wes went home from the hospital via ambulance.  I slept on the floor beside the hospital bed in his living room three nights, grateful for every breath. Thursday, November 11, Veterans Day, he died.

Happy Veterans Day, Wes.  May your soul be free.

a little yoga

I'm in Deerfield Beach this weekend for a workshop with Seane Corn.  Tonight was the first session and if it's any indication of what's to come, I have quite a couple of days in store.

In no particular order, sometimes paraphrased from Seane and sometimes quoted as best I can remember, here's what I took back to my room tonight:

1.    When I resist using props (and this would apply to yoga and to accepting help in any other part of my life) it's because I see needing help as failure, which I equate with death.  So using a prop feels like having "a slice of cyanide." 

2.    Everyone I have encountered in my life, whether they have helped me or harmed me, has been my teacher, has illuminated something for me that my soul needed to learn in its journey to learn (or remember, actually) how to love.

3.    I don't need to worry about passing for someone with more yoga experience than I have; it's about the breath.

4.    When I muscle my way through a pose or cheat with my flexibility, I risk hurting myself and don't fully experience the pose.  See 3 above: breath.

5.    My body remembers everything that has ever happened and that I have ever done.  When I repeat patterns, regardless of whether they are good for me, it's often because my body is remembering and repeating.

6.    I do yoga because it helps me present my best self to the world.  Without it, I turn to various anaesthesias, resisting and shutting down.

7.    In order to heal, I have to deal.

8.    It's a good thing Bindu recommended bringing Batherapy and arnica.

9.    I am blessed to have yoga.

10.  I am infinite spirit in a temporal body.  I am magical and mystical.

Max, "the next dog"

If in terms of Pam Houston's Sight Hound, I play the role of Rae, and Gracie is my Dante, then Max is my Rose. 

Each Irish Wolfhound has his or her own sections of the narrative, as do the human characters, and each canine has a unique purpose in Rae's life. While Dante is Rae's soulmate spirit guide, whom Rose refers to as "the evolved one," Rose is younger, sillier, and recognizes her own status as "the next one."   

Dante writes (as Gracie might), "Buddha said, 'Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.'  My work, this time around, was to teach my human that she deserved to be loved.  And faith, of course, because you can't have love without it."

Rose says of her role in Rae's life early in the book (as Max might say), "I told you, I'm the next dog.  My assignment is to teach her how to play."  Later, she says, "And unlike the enlightened one, who keeps one eye on Rae 24/7 for the first hint of distress, I am a girl who both needs and enjoys her sleep.  Sleep is important to those of us who--how can I put this?--lead with their looks."

Max leads with his looks, beautiful and sleek.  He is tall for a Weimaraner, about 29 inches at the withers, and weighs nearly 100 pounds.

It's not even 7 pm, but it's dark and Max has gone to his bed.  He has taken his Wolverine blanket (pictured) with him and now he's getting his beauty rest.  He is a happy, silly dog, enjoying only a treat stolen from the kitchen counter more than he enjoys being the center of attention.

Gracie's wonderful vet, who comes to the house to give her acupuncture treatments, says that Gracie worries that Max won't be up to the task of taking care of me.  But I think that, like Rose, someday (I hope a long time away) he'll "step up."

recovery: from and of

One of my favorite tweeple, Bindu Wiles (@binduwiles--follow her!), has inspired me (and the end of daylight savings time has made it easier) to get up earlier to write morning pages and meditate and pray.  She was inspired by a recovering alcoholic friend who gets up at 5:30 every day to go to a meeting.

I started thinking about the "recovering" part of "recovering alcoholic friend."

I am recovering, in recovery.  

Wikipedia lists uses of the word, from the recovery of hard drive data to the end of an economic recession to physical and emotional healing to repossession of material goods and the extraction of petroleum and minerals from the earth.

I am in recovery from the past, for sure, but I am more interested at the moment in what I am in recovery of, the repossession of what is mine, qualities with which I was born but which I gave up or were taken from me and I now am determined to recover, qualities like faith, trust, joy, and daring.

Shawn Colvin's "Diamond in the Rough":

As a little girl I came down to the water
With a little stone in my hand
It would shimmer and sing
And we knew everything
As a little girl I came down

But in a little while I got steeped in authority
Heaven only knows what went wrong
There is nothing so cruel than
to bury that jewel
When it was mine all along
I'm gonna find it

You're shining I can see you
You're smiling that's enough
I'm holding on to you
Like a diamond in the rough

Every now and then
I can see that I'm getting somewhere
Where I have to go is so deep
I was angry back then and you
know I still am
I have lost too much sleep
But I'm gonna find it

You're shining I can see you
You're smiling that's enough
I'm holding on to you
Like a diamond in the rough
Like a diamond in the rough

In my dreams I go down by the water
With a little girl in my arms
And we shimmer and sing
And we know everything
In my dreams I go down

You're shining I can see you
You're smiling that's enough
I'm holding on to you
Like a diamond in the rough
Like a diamond in the rough

I am recovering.  I will get up in the morning and work my program, one day at a time. 

Is there anything you want to recover?

time to go inside and close the blinds

Thomas Merton asks,

"What is the use of complaining about not being a contemplative, if I do not take the opportunities I get for contemplation?  I suppose I take them, but in the wrong way.  I spend the time looking for something to read about contemplation--something to satisfy my raffish spiritual appetite (ital mine)--instead of shutting up and emptying my mind and leaving the inner door open for the Holy Spirit to enter from the inside, all the doors being barred and all my blinds down."

--Sign of Jonas