Some time ago I wrote an entry about how nifty people are because we have this incredible ability to take a bad situation and find something of value there. But no attribute is purely one-sided and I've been thinking lately about the flip side of this one. Unfortunately, our use of pure grit and wishful thinking to just make things work out is sometimes too successful and we find ourselves trapped in a cell of our own design somewhere we really don't want to be. The energy we need to just make the best of things is often less than the energy we need to change for the better. So, like the good little animals we are, we make the choice that requires less of us, and in the process we do ourselves damage.
I recently had a cold that took a tediously long time to resolve. I kept working during that time and just slogged through the days. While I was very aware of the feeling of my body working its way through the virus, underlying that I had a strong sense of general well-being and health. And, although I kept working while sick (don't try this at home, kids!), my body just felt strong and vibrant and I didn't feel too stressed out about the work. This experience was in stark contrast to how I felt when I used to get sick at my last job, where my body felt badly used and every virus made me feel beaten down. I point out the difference because I wasn't really unhappy at my last job, and, if I hadn't injured myself badly at one point, I might still be there today. In a job that I drifted into without any particular direction, a job that physically exhausted me to the point where I changed my other habits to accommodate my exhaustion, a job that didn't speak to me or challenge me, a job doing something I frankly thought was a waste, a job where I would come back from one vacation only to begin the countdown to the next one. Why did I stay there so long? I could give you a hundred reasons, but they all boil down to: It's where I was and I needed to find a way not just to be comfortable with it, but also to incorporate it fully into my own story, to make peace with being there, to care about it.
What is difficult is that it always seems so clear in hindsight, that choice we ought to have made long ago. I had a yoga instructor who would occasionally raise his hands to the sky, "Seventeen years!!" he'd cry, referring to his 17 years as a celibate monk. "Why?" he'd ask. I am thinking of this now because I just had another birthday which was the occasion of looking at the joy that is my life today, the places I would like to go with my life in the future that I am working towards, and at the same time looking back and asking that same question. "Why? Why on earth did I waste so much time?"
Yes, I know what you're thinking. You're getting all yogic on me and thinking about how we have to live in the now, and our pasts are what created us, blah blah blah. Whatever. And all kidding aside, I get that. I do. (Mostly.) But I think where I'm going with this is, how do we make the time that we waste less? When we fall into that trap of making the best of things, how do we know when we're doing it right? And how do we know when we're just trying to make our story end a little better by editing it a little?
When I was a kid, I thought that every book was somehow sacred. If I began reading a book, in order to show respect to the author and his or her work and experience, I had to finish it. It didn't really matter if I liked it or thought it was good, my duty was clear. Finish the damn book. I was well into adulthood before I broke that habit. I think as we get older we get less tolerant of wasting time. Or at least of wasting time with something that isn't fun or of value.
Lately in order to help figure this out for myself I've been just beginning to use a new tool that came from an odd place. A few weeks ago I decided to take the test to become a certified group fitness instructor. The process I went through will have to be saved for another day's tale, but one little piece of the information jumped out and made its way into my psyche in a way that I don't think was intended. In creating an appropriate class we were taught to ask 5 questions about the exercises we choose. The first question is, "What is the purpose of this exercise?" At first I wasn't very interested in the question, or in any of the others for that matter. In yoga, as far as I'm concerned, the purpose of the exercise is just to get all the parts of ourselves focused in one place and time so that we can really pay attention carefully. For this class, we were talking about purposes that involved specific muscles and bones and heart rates and body fat percentage–it just wasn't all that interesting to me. But I kept finding the question resonating around my brain. "What is the purpose of this exercise?" And I realized that using that question might be a good way to begin weeding out those things that simply aren't functional in my life, but that I have been making the best of anyway. The second question: "Is it doing that effectively?" Huh. Well, that's actually a really good question. Because if it's not, then why am I here?
I don't have any kind of final wisdom on the matter. I am sure that 10 years from now there will still be things I look back on and think, "Why oh why did I waste that time?" But I think being more mindful of asking those questions at the outset and really paying attention to the answers might help make that wasted time less.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Monday, September 28, 2009
Packing the 10 Essentials
My last blog entry got me thinking, so if the warmth of hospitality is one of the essential human elements I'd like to have for my own and take with me on the trip, what are the other nine, to continue the metaphor? I'm not sure (and you know I'll be trying to figure it out), but I have some thoughts about my next desired element on the list.
When I was a child I was smart but not kind; as a result, I valued intelligence over kindness, probably because I wanted to be loved for what I was. As an adult, I am still smart, but I hope I have acquired kindness, so now I value kindness over intelligence, perhaps still because I want to be loved for what I have become. I am still the child I was; I can see the same traits I was born with in myself today. But I want to know that I can grow layers, get larger, be better, move outwards.
In reading another woman's recent blog entry describing the bumbling and arrogant attempts by a man to impress her, I could hear and understand her angry and disgusted perspective on the story even as beneath it I could hear another possible variation, one where a lonely man in his attempt to connect with a beautiful and desirable young woman blows himself up, makes himself more than what he is. If you hear that story, you have to wonder (I have to wonder) is this such a terrible thing, worthy of disdain? What I always come back to is that the only thing I can possibly learn from observing someone else's behavior and actions doesn't have anything to do with them and their motivations and inner life, but rather with myself and my own choices. Who do I want to be? And I believe I want to be someone who gives people the benefit of the doubt. And even if someone is really and truly a complete and irredeemable asshole, what does that actually have to do with me and my life, except for me to know that I don't want to be one? I don't know that person's story, but if I want to give myself some room to move in my own story I need to allow it for him as well.
I have spent a lot of time and energy in my life making pronouncements for myself, that then become my rules to live by. I am this, I am not that, I like this, I don't like that. I have decided that in my personal practice I will try this: Instead of saying "I do not like cucumbers," to say instead, "Any time I have tried them, I have not liked cucumbers." This does not necessarily indicate a willingness on my part to go forth from now on eating cucumbers and loving them. However, I realize that I frequently don't leave myself any room around the edges of these pronouncements about myself to, I don't know, move a little. My method is completely appropriate for a science lab: I have observed this behavior/preference/whatever in response to this stimulus in the past and therefore can predict it happening again in the future. It sounds reasonable. But I know from my own experience that I have learned and changed–my behavior, my preferences, my interests, my desires.
I suspect cucumbers will not make an appearance on my table, but who knows what may?
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
When I was a child I was smart but not kind; as a result, I valued intelligence over kindness, probably because I wanted to be loved for what I was. As an adult, I am still smart, but I hope I have acquired kindness, so now I value kindness over intelligence, perhaps still because I want to be loved for what I have become. I am still the child I was; I can see the same traits I was born with in myself today. But I want to know that I can grow layers, get larger, be better, move outwards.
In reading another woman's recent blog entry describing the bumbling and arrogant attempts by a man to impress her, I could hear and understand her angry and disgusted perspective on the story even as beneath it I could hear another possible variation, one where a lonely man in his attempt to connect with a beautiful and desirable young woman blows himself up, makes himself more than what he is. If you hear that story, you have to wonder (I have to wonder) is this such a terrible thing, worthy of disdain? What I always come back to is that the only thing I can possibly learn from observing someone else's behavior and actions doesn't have anything to do with them and their motivations and inner life, but rather with myself and my own choices. Who do I want to be? And I believe I want to be someone who gives people the benefit of the doubt. And even if someone is really and truly a complete and irredeemable asshole, what does that actually have to do with me and my life, except for me to know that I don't want to be one? I don't know that person's story, but if I want to give myself some room to move in my own story I need to allow it for him as well.
I have spent a lot of time and energy in my life making pronouncements for myself, that then become my rules to live by. I am this, I am not that, I like this, I don't like that. I have decided that in my personal practice I will try this: Instead of saying "I do not like cucumbers," to say instead, "Any time I have tried them, I have not liked cucumbers." This does not necessarily indicate a willingness on my part to go forth from now on eating cucumbers and loving them. However, I realize that I frequently don't leave myself any room around the edges of these pronouncements about myself to, I don't know, move a little. My method is completely appropriate for a science lab: I have observed this behavior/preference/whatever in response to this stimulus in the past and therefore can predict it happening again in the future. It sounds reasonable. But I know from my own experience that I have learned and changed–my behavior, my preferences, my interests, my desires.
I suspect cucumbers will not make an appearance on my table, but who knows what may?
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Wednesday, September 2, 2009
Where were we going again?
I caught up with my father by phone today and got reports on how some of my younger relatives are doing in their lives. You know how we all have those funny little habits of speech? Well, I lost count of how many times the word "successful" was used by him, followed by a description of the work being done by the person in question. I wonder if I am described the same way in other phone conversations with these other relatives, despite the meandering path of my career such as it is. Is "successful" a circle that includes me?
Several years ago I had an odd realization. I have always wondered why, despite being serious of heart and disciplined in my focus, I never really have much of a direction at all. There's no inner compass telling me where to go next. Then I sat down one day and really tried to boil down the essence of what I value into some kind of statement of purpose. I came up with these:
I want to dance beautifully.
I want to love and be loved deeply.
I want to know god.
Um. Okay. Not a lot to work with in terms of, you know, an actual goal. And I don't think it would really go over that well in that spot on your resume where you talk about how much you want to work as part of a team. But this week I did realize that there are places in my life where I have reached a destination of sorts, something strongly intended by me and striven for.
I am a naturally shy person, an introvert. As a child I would have told you I didn't like people much; as an adult what I know is that I like them just fine, I'm just scared of them. I learned early on that it would ease my passage through this world to develop some social skills and I have labored mightily to accomplish this. What I originally did for my own survival I continued to do out of love, realizing that the fear I felt was felt by others as well and that I could help ease their passage, too. I was volunteering last week, picking out new people at a club and wandering over to introduce myself, answer questions, offer warmth and guidance. One man thanked me and said I had the gift of hospitality. Aah! My destination! Because I don't have that gift. But I have felt it in others, valued it and recognized its worth, and chosen to make mine by hard work what some have been born to.
Another compliment came my way this week, and again it was in an area that is not natural to me. As I collected and held close to me these acknowledgments, I realized that this is where I measure my success. I think about hiking and the 10 essentials you are supposed to have with you everywhere you go, no matter how long the intended hike, how many people accompany you, how perfect the weather. I believe my inner compass is less focused on where I am going and what to do when I get there, and instead points me towards the person I want to be as I travel and the tools I need for the journey. If I hone my 10 essentials, it won't matter any more what else I have or don't have, where I've been, where I might go, where I can't go; I am making myself my destination and I want the journey to be joyous and satisfying, successful for everyone making the trip.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Several years ago I had an odd realization. I have always wondered why, despite being serious of heart and disciplined in my focus, I never really have much of a direction at all. There's no inner compass telling me where to go next. Then I sat down one day and really tried to boil down the essence of what I value into some kind of statement of purpose. I came up with these:
I want to dance beautifully.
I want to love and be loved deeply.
I want to know god.
Um. Okay. Not a lot to work with in terms of, you know, an actual goal. And I don't think it would really go over that well in that spot on your resume where you talk about how much you want to work as part of a team. But this week I did realize that there are places in my life where I have reached a destination of sorts, something strongly intended by me and striven for.
I am a naturally shy person, an introvert. As a child I would have told you I didn't like people much; as an adult what I know is that I like them just fine, I'm just scared of them. I learned early on that it would ease my passage through this world to develop some social skills and I have labored mightily to accomplish this. What I originally did for my own survival I continued to do out of love, realizing that the fear I felt was felt by others as well and that I could help ease their passage, too. I was volunteering last week, picking out new people at a club and wandering over to introduce myself, answer questions, offer warmth and guidance. One man thanked me and said I had the gift of hospitality. Aah! My destination! Because I don't have that gift. But I have felt it in others, valued it and recognized its worth, and chosen to make mine by hard work what some have been born to.
Another compliment came my way this week, and again it was in an area that is not natural to me. As I collected and held close to me these acknowledgments, I realized that this is where I measure my success. I think about hiking and the 10 essentials you are supposed to have with you everywhere you go, no matter how long the intended hike, how many people accompany you, how perfect the weather. I believe my inner compass is less focused on where I am going and what to do when I get there, and instead points me towards the person I want to be as I travel and the tools I need for the journey. If I hone my 10 essentials, it won't matter any more what else I have or don't have, where I've been, where I might go, where I can't go; I am making myself my destination and I want the journey to be joyous and satisfying, successful for everyone making the trip.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Monday, August 10, 2009
First, Do No Harm
There are some things I just don't talk about much. Religion and spirituality fall into that category. I write about some of my beliefs here, where I am an anonymous author with an anonymous audience, but with friends and family, I don't bring it up much. I have a variety of reasons for that: I think it's personal; having grown up in Bible-belt Christianity, I am protective of my own brand of spirituality, and not interested in a battle over belief; I also believe that it is important to be respectful of other beliefs, so I keep mine to myself where I think it belongs.
At the same time, I struggle with that line of respect, both in the realm of religion and in all those other delicate human matters. Yoga is part of my spirituality; the moral and ethical tenets are part of my practice. I've spoken of many of them here in this blog, but never of ahimsa, non-harming. Ahimsa is the first of the yamas, the ethical constraints. It feels like an easy one to get a handle on, so it's often used as an example, and I have heard it so frequently that I remember it easily, where sometimes I have to struggle to come up with the others on the list. By drawing a line of respect, I am trying not to do harm to others. It makes sense to me to do this. But is there a point where I draw that line in too close, boxing myself in so that I am doing harm to myself by denying myself? Or allowing others to do harm to me by not speaking up? There is no tradition in yoga of turning the other cheek, so there is no reason for me to expose myself to harm from others as I quietly respect them. I also wonder whether by drawing that line I am in fact separating myself from them, creating an us and a them, out of fear of what their response might be. Am I fooling myself thinking that I am respecting "them", protecting "them" from harm done by me, when in fact I am making a little safe space for me, so as not to be harmed myself? How often have we said, "Well, I didn't want to tell you, because I knew you'd be upset." Who is being protected there?
And how do we define harm anyway? Where and when do we begin to do harm? Does it only count if it's intentional? Can it be balanced out by good acts? I had a friend in college with a melodramatic turn of mind (or, I don't know, maybe we all had that back then). She believed that by our very existence we were doing harm, and that we were morally obligated to remove ourselves from life. We had this conversation over iced coffee in her dorm room and I never had the sense that she planned to follow through on this noble goal. But she's right in a sense; we all do harm in all kinds of ways, large and small, recognized and unrecognized. If we see that in ourselves there is every possibility that we will live in a kind of paralysis, unable to take a step for fear of the harm we might do.
For me, there is no easy way to wrap this up and answer my own questions, but I have a few thoughts that help to show me the way. In yoga there is a concept of samskara, or mental grooves, ruts that have been worn in our thinking and in our doing. Yesterday, I boiled some eggs. One cracked and spilled out some of the white; the water boiled over and left a huge mess on the stove and the burner. I cleaned up what I could at the time, but the burner was hot so I left that for later. Later, I had forgotten about it so I put some water on to boil. The nasty smell in the house reminded me of the mess, and now the burner's hot again so I still can't clean it. Still later, my partner and I had a whole discussion about it as we were putting water on to boil again. I told her what I had done, we talked about avoiding that burner, I moved another pot out of the way so I could use a different burner, she walked out of the room and I stopped paying attention. In that moment, I slid into habit, putting the kettle back on that same nasty burner. It only took a split second of inattention for me to lose my focus and my intention.
I think the tenets of yoga are really about helping us keep the focus, to stay attentive, and not about right and wrong answers. If we accept that we are equally so small a part of the whole as to be insignificant, and at the same time so expansive that we contain everything there is, then we have both no power at all to do harm or to be harmed and at the same time all the power there is.
I have a tattoo on my shoulder of a fan with butterflies and a lacewing flying out. I rarely talk about the symbolism of the design and what it means to me; to most people, it's just a pretty thing. When I was a child, I felt a connection bordering on the absurd with people, with objects, with animals, and particularly with insects. I had a hard time separating myself. I would rage and cry when my friends killed ants, I created little bug hospitals with sugar water for bees who had strayed too far and bits of cloth for dying moths, and no insect could be killed in the house if I had anything to say about it. I felt a particular connection with lacewings. Gradually, I learned to separate myself, to harden myself, but as an adult I look back with nostalgia for my better impulses. My tattoo is a reminder to me to care, to keep caring. I can't know what my life or my actions will mean to anyone. All I can do is live the life, send out my actions into the unknown, but with care. T.S. Eliot wrote, "For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." The trying is where we have to live.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
At the same time, I struggle with that line of respect, both in the realm of religion and in all those other delicate human matters. Yoga is part of my spirituality; the moral and ethical tenets are part of my practice. I've spoken of many of them here in this blog, but never of ahimsa, non-harming. Ahimsa is the first of the yamas, the ethical constraints. It feels like an easy one to get a handle on, so it's often used as an example, and I have heard it so frequently that I remember it easily, where sometimes I have to struggle to come up with the others on the list. By drawing a line of respect, I am trying not to do harm to others. It makes sense to me to do this. But is there a point where I draw that line in too close, boxing myself in so that I am doing harm to myself by denying myself? Or allowing others to do harm to me by not speaking up? There is no tradition in yoga of turning the other cheek, so there is no reason for me to expose myself to harm from others as I quietly respect them. I also wonder whether by drawing that line I am in fact separating myself from them, creating an us and a them, out of fear of what their response might be. Am I fooling myself thinking that I am respecting "them", protecting "them" from harm done by me, when in fact I am making a little safe space for me, so as not to be harmed myself? How often have we said, "Well, I didn't want to tell you, because I knew you'd be upset." Who is being protected there?
And how do we define harm anyway? Where and when do we begin to do harm? Does it only count if it's intentional? Can it be balanced out by good acts? I had a friend in college with a melodramatic turn of mind (or, I don't know, maybe we all had that back then). She believed that by our very existence we were doing harm, and that we were morally obligated to remove ourselves from life. We had this conversation over iced coffee in her dorm room and I never had the sense that she planned to follow through on this noble goal. But she's right in a sense; we all do harm in all kinds of ways, large and small, recognized and unrecognized. If we see that in ourselves there is every possibility that we will live in a kind of paralysis, unable to take a step for fear of the harm we might do.
For me, there is no easy way to wrap this up and answer my own questions, but I have a few thoughts that help to show me the way. In yoga there is a concept of samskara, or mental grooves, ruts that have been worn in our thinking and in our doing. Yesterday, I boiled some eggs. One cracked and spilled out some of the white; the water boiled over and left a huge mess on the stove and the burner. I cleaned up what I could at the time, but the burner was hot so I left that for later. Later, I had forgotten about it so I put some water on to boil. The nasty smell in the house reminded me of the mess, and now the burner's hot again so I still can't clean it. Still later, my partner and I had a whole discussion about it as we were putting water on to boil again. I told her what I had done, we talked about avoiding that burner, I moved another pot out of the way so I could use a different burner, she walked out of the room and I stopped paying attention. In that moment, I slid into habit, putting the kettle back on that same nasty burner. It only took a split second of inattention for me to lose my focus and my intention.
I think the tenets of yoga are really about helping us keep the focus, to stay attentive, and not about right and wrong answers. If we accept that we are equally so small a part of the whole as to be insignificant, and at the same time so expansive that we contain everything there is, then we have both no power at all to do harm or to be harmed and at the same time all the power there is.
I have a tattoo on my shoulder of a fan with butterflies and a lacewing flying out. I rarely talk about the symbolism of the design and what it means to me; to most people, it's just a pretty thing. When I was a child, I felt a connection bordering on the absurd with people, with objects, with animals, and particularly with insects. I had a hard time separating myself. I would rage and cry when my friends killed ants, I created little bug hospitals with sugar water for bees who had strayed too far and bits of cloth for dying moths, and no insect could be killed in the house if I had anything to say about it. I felt a particular connection with lacewings. Gradually, I learned to separate myself, to harden myself, but as an adult I look back with nostalgia for my better impulses. My tattoo is a reminder to me to care, to keep caring. I can't know what my life or my actions will mean to anyone. All I can do is live the life, send out my actions into the unknown, but with care. T.S. Eliot wrote, "For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." The trying is where we have to live.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
There Goes the Sun
I don't really have time for this post. I am busy with other things. But this post has to do with Solstice so writing it now is timely. Sometimes, the time determines itself regardless of what you have planned for it.
Time has been on my mind lately. I took a walk on Solstice to let myself feel what Solstice is out there. What's happening around me on the day that both celebrates the strength of the sun, while seeing it into its decline?
Oddly (or not) I've been very aware of my own strength lately while seeing ahead to my own decline. I feel physically/mentally/emotionally better and stronger and more full of juice than ever before in my life. At the same time, I have never before been so aware of my age and of the passage of time, feeling a kind of frantic need to pack in as much as possible all at once. The heightened awareness has been kind of annoying to me actually and I suspect maybe to my friends and loved ones as well. (No need to chime in! Really!)
As I walked I realized suddenly that not only is the planet in Solstice, but I am in my own Solstice as well. That realization brought me quite a bit of peace. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, but oh, we enjoy it so much when it's at its height! There's no point in worrying about the fall because we know it will come but it's not here yet. Solstice is what it is, for me, for the sun, for the planet. We don't get a do over for the springtime, and the fall will come when it comes.
I found another happy note in my ponderings on the seasons: My name is Autumn for a reason. As much as I fear the end of summer, I have an inkling the best is yet to come. But for now, I will revel in the sunshine.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Time has been on my mind lately. I took a walk on Solstice to let myself feel what Solstice is out there. What's happening around me on the day that both celebrates the strength of the sun, while seeing it into its decline?
Oddly (or not) I've been very aware of my own strength lately while seeing ahead to my own decline. I feel physically/mentally/emotionally better and stronger and more full of juice than ever before in my life. At the same time, I have never before been so aware of my age and of the passage of time, feeling a kind of frantic need to pack in as much as possible all at once. The heightened awareness has been kind of annoying to me actually and I suspect maybe to my friends and loved ones as well. (No need to chime in! Really!)
As I walked I realized suddenly that not only is the planet in Solstice, but I am in my own Solstice as well. That realization brought me quite a bit of peace. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, but oh, we enjoy it so much when it's at its height! There's no point in worrying about the fall because we know it will come but it's not here yet. Solstice is what it is, for me, for the sun, for the planet. We don't get a do over for the springtime, and the fall will come when it comes.
I found another happy note in my ponderings on the seasons: My name is Autumn for a reason. As much as I fear the end of summer, I have an inkling the best is yet to come. But for now, I will revel in the sunshine.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Honoring the Ancestors
Today I got together with 2 dear friends and celebrated Beltane, or May Day, together. We were a little low energy and it was raining so we changed our original plans a little. Indoors instead of outdoors, short and sweet. Because we were all so low in energy we decided it would be a nice addition to give each other the May Day gift of telling one another what we appreciate about each other. We are very different women who came together by chance, but over the years we have formed one of those bonds that you always hope will be a part of your life, a friendship where anything goes, where we can always speak the truth to one another. They each let me know that what they most appreciate about me is my direct communication, my willingness to be open about my life and my feelings, come what may, and that by doing that I have let them in on a perspective they did not realize existed.
They echoed what several folks told me at my teacher training. ***WARNING: Now I should warn anyone under the age of 18 that our culture takes a dim view of the combination of sex and truthfulness, and I plan to talk about both here. So, if you're under 18 you should go do something else, not read this, and let us grownups keep our fantasies that we can control your experience as children. Thanks.*** One of the items I packed for my month in Costa Rica was my vibrator. When my partner realized I was taking it along she asked, "What will you say if they search your luggage and find it?" "I'll tell them I'm going to be away from home with no sex for a month! I've got to have something to entertain myself with." During the course of that month, sex was a big topic of conversation and I was very open about my own arrangements, that I had brought my vibrator and was unwilling to go without masturbating for a month, that I had more than one relationship, that pain and power were part of my sexual identity. Near the end of the month one woman made a point of pulling me aside to tell me she was both surprised and appreciative of my honesty, because it opened her mind to a different perspective.
I am humbled when I hear that because I know that I still have so far to go in becoming completely open, completely honest. The kudos to me for what I have done so far just continue to remind me that I have so much more to do in becoming transparent. And this is the difficulty for me-how to become transparent, to allow people to see me completely, while being respectful, doing no harm to others, giving people space to draw away from what may frighten them.
Two nights before our May Day celebration, my sweetie and I watched Milk...finally. Honestly, I had avoided the movie a little because I knew how it ended and I did not want to mourn the loss again. But in watching it, I mostly found myself remembering my early days of coming out as a lesbian, and my discovery of my community, the history of those who had become my people. My ancestors. I thought about the changes my partner and I have seen; 19 years ago we couldn't hold hands on the street without fear unless we were in the gay part of town. Now we do it almost without thought. And it is because of people who had the courage to allow themselves to be seen.
When you begin to come out, you realize that the archetypal coming out story is a myth in some ways, because it's always spoken of in the singular as though you do it once and you are done. The truth is you do it almost constantly, over and over again. After a while it gets exhausting and you just want to go live your life and forget about it.
Lately I have been seeing little reminders all around me though about why it is important to keep doing it. Our culture seems to have a strong desire to put everything and everyone into one big easily defined box. When that happens, there is a pervading feeling that anyone who falls out of the box deserves whatever bad thing happens to them, and that it only happens to a few fringe people anyway, so why should we care? And for the ones who know they don't live in the box it can be terrifying and lonely.
Now I have no interest at all in writing details about my sex life here. Despite the warning above, this is not a "Dear Diary, last night I had such a great time..." kind of blog. The stories are true and personal, but not private, and while they probably tell you a lot about what I think and feel and believe as a human being, they don't tell you much about how I live my mundane everyday life. But part of what I think and feel and believe as a human being has a great deal to do with my sexuality and I don't want to erase that from my writing, presenting the sanitized Disney version of my life. Any child who has read "The Little Mermaid" and then watched the Disney version has the right to fury over the betrayal of truth. We keep trying to force everything into the box, especially for the kids, because we want them to believe that somehow all the confusions of youth smooth out and fall easily into line as we grow up, and everyone has a happy ending.
We also have methods in place to reinforce the box, to prop up the illusion of sameness. Every time I go to the doctor and check the box "single" I erase myself a little. It is a lie and there is no place for the truth of the web of relationships I live and love in on the form. I can explain and protest all I want, but the form remains implacable and unchanged, recording my life on paper as something it is not.
That experience makes me even more aware of the accomplishments of the people who came before me. My family values family ties and family history strongly, and my mother has often exhorted me to remember and honor them in making my life choices. I don't think she realizes that when she says that I tend to think not as much of my blood relations who made my physical existence possible, but of the people I discovered along the way written down in history, who lived their lives so honestly and visibly that they managed to be recorded that way for me to find and follow. Somehow they managed to check the box "other" to show me and others a way out of the box. To let us know that we can live and breathe there and be happy.
I began writing this post many months ago and, at the time, I thought it was connected with the yogic principle of satya, truthfulness. After watching Milk, I returned to my writing with the feeling that I was actually writing about ishvara pranidhana, surrender to the Lord. The Lord in yoga is understood as a pure divine awareness, as Stephen Cope puts it in The Wisdom of Yoga "...the Witness behind the Witness." Cope understands the concept of the Lord as being almost a gravitational force that draws us in, and in yoga we work to align ourselves with it, the idea being that we can't resist gravity anyway so if we can be aware of it and align with it, we can let go of resistance.
I think initially it can be confusing, all this talk of resistance and surrender in connection with real life. Because aren't I being resistant by being so stubborn and contrary about forcing the truth of my life out into the sight of others? And can't I surrender by just being quiet and going along with the status quo? The problem with that is that it is not the Box we need to surrender to, but the Lord. The Box is something that is constantly created and shored up by fearful people trying to control, understand and quantify something too big to control, understand and quantify. People like Harvey Milk understood that we need to surrender to the truth of our own lives, live them out in the open and transparently, understanding and accepting that there will be consequences we can't control, but that surrendering to that larger force behind us requires this of us. We can become the ancestors, showing a way out of despair for those who can't find the right box to check, until finally we can all understand that there is no box.
You thought I was going to talk about sex, didn't you? I am. There is no separate box for sex. I am always talking about it, because it is always in my life. Not dirty, not secret, not scary, not separate. Just life.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
They echoed what several folks told me at my teacher training. ***WARNING: Now I should warn anyone under the age of 18 that our culture takes a dim view of the combination of sex and truthfulness, and I plan to talk about both here. So, if you're under 18 you should go do something else, not read this, and let us grownups keep our fantasies that we can control your experience as children. Thanks.*** One of the items I packed for my month in Costa Rica was my vibrator. When my partner realized I was taking it along she asked, "What will you say if they search your luggage and find it?" "I'll tell them I'm going to be away from home with no sex for a month! I've got to have something to entertain myself with." During the course of that month, sex was a big topic of conversation and I was very open about my own arrangements, that I had brought my vibrator and was unwilling to go without masturbating for a month, that I had more than one relationship, that pain and power were part of my sexual identity. Near the end of the month one woman made a point of pulling me aside to tell me she was both surprised and appreciative of my honesty, because it opened her mind to a different perspective.
I am humbled when I hear that because I know that I still have so far to go in becoming completely open, completely honest. The kudos to me for what I have done so far just continue to remind me that I have so much more to do in becoming transparent. And this is the difficulty for me-how to become transparent, to allow people to see me completely, while being respectful, doing no harm to others, giving people space to draw away from what may frighten them.
Two nights before our May Day celebration, my sweetie and I watched Milk...finally. Honestly, I had avoided the movie a little because I knew how it ended and I did not want to mourn the loss again. But in watching it, I mostly found myself remembering my early days of coming out as a lesbian, and my discovery of my community, the history of those who had become my people. My ancestors. I thought about the changes my partner and I have seen; 19 years ago we couldn't hold hands on the street without fear unless we were in the gay part of town. Now we do it almost without thought. And it is because of people who had the courage to allow themselves to be seen.
When you begin to come out, you realize that the archetypal coming out story is a myth in some ways, because it's always spoken of in the singular as though you do it once and you are done. The truth is you do it almost constantly, over and over again. After a while it gets exhausting and you just want to go live your life and forget about it.
Lately I have been seeing little reminders all around me though about why it is important to keep doing it. Our culture seems to have a strong desire to put everything and everyone into one big easily defined box. When that happens, there is a pervading feeling that anyone who falls out of the box deserves whatever bad thing happens to them, and that it only happens to a few fringe people anyway, so why should we care? And for the ones who know they don't live in the box it can be terrifying and lonely.
Now I have no interest at all in writing details about my sex life here. Despite the warning above, this is not a "Dear Diary, last night I had such a great time..." kind of blog. The stories are true and personal, but not private, and while they probably tell you a lot about what I think and feel and believe as a human being, they don't tell you much about how I live my mundane everyday life. But part of what I think and feel and believe as a human being has a great deal to do with my sexuality and I don't want to erase that from my writing, presenting the sanitized Disney version of my life. Any child who has read "The Little Mermaid" and then watched the Disney version has the right to fury over the betrayal of truth. We keep trying to force everything into the box, especially for the kids, because we want them to believe that somehow all the confusions of youth smooth out and fall easily into line as we grow up, and everyone has a happy ending.
We also have methods in place to reinforce the box, to prop up the illusion of sameness. Every time I go to the doctor and check the box "single" I erase myself a little. It is a lie and there is no place for the truth of the web of relationships I live and love in on the form. I can explain and protest all I want, but the form remains implacable and unchanged, recording my life on paper as something it is not.
That experience makes me even more aware of the accomplishments of the people who came before me. My family values family ties and family history strongly, and my mother has often exhorted me to remember and honor them in making my life choices. I don't think she realizes that when she says that I tend to think not as much of my blood relations who made my physical existence possible, but of the people I discovered along the way written down in history, who lived their lives so honestly and visibly that they managed to be recorded that way for me to find and follow. Somehow they managed to check the box "other" to show me and others a way out of the box. To let us know that we can live and breathe there and be happy.
I began writing this post many months ago and, at the time, I thought it was connected with the yogic principle of satya, truthfulness. After watching Milk, I returned to my writing with the feeling that I was actually writing about ishvara pranidhana, surrender to the Lord. The Lord in yoga is understood as a pure divine awareness, as Stephen Cope puts it in The Wisdom of Yoga "...the Witness behind the Witness." Cope understands the concept of the Lord as being almost a gravitational force that draws us in, and in yoga we work to align ourselves with it, the idea being that we can't resist gravity anyway so if we can be aware of it and align with it, we can let go of resistance.
I think initially it can be confusing, all this talk of resistance and surrender in connection with real life. Because aren't I being resistant by being so stubborn and contrary about forcing the truth of my life out into the sight of others? And can't I surrender by just being quiet and going along with the status quo? The problem with that is that it is not the Box we need to surrender to, but the Lord. The Box is something that is constantly created and shored up by fearful people trying to control, understand and quantify something too big to control, understand and quantify. People like Harvey Milk understood that we need to surrender to the truth of our own lives, live them out in the open and transparently, understanding and accepting that there will be consequences we can't control, but that surrendering to that larger force behind us requires this of us. We can become the ancestors, showing a way out of despair for those who can't find the right box to check, until finally we can all understand that there is no box.
You thought I was going to talk about sex, didn't you? I am. There is no separate box for sex. I am always talking about it, because it is always in my life. Not dirty, not secret, not scary, not separate. Just life.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Take Me For Granted
I have a confession to make. I'm not a crafts-y person. When I was little my great-grandmothers taught me how to cut out pieces for quilts, and I even did a little piecework of my own. A very little. I always got frustrated because inevitably I would lose track of which side the seam needed to be on. Teaching me how to knit resulted in a knot of yarn. Crocheting with my grandmother was more successful: I wound up with 8 inches of afghan to keep me warm on cold nights. My mother decided one year it was time for me to learn how to use the sewing machine so we went together, picked out the pattern and material, and I made a shirt. A whole shirt this time certainly but it wasn't a pleasant experience.
Nevertheless, my partner and I decided that it would be good to learn (again!) how to knit, and to knit with friends. Last night found us, needles in hand, working away. (I showed off my one knitting accomplishment: a whole sweater! Granted, it took me a year, living in a cold flat in Scotland, in the company of my flatmates who were also knitting, without the distraction of a tv or a computer, but it is a sweater!) Every time I pick up one of these womanly tasks, I feel that thread through time linking me back to my experiences with the women of my family. A girl growing up in Texas is expected to learn certain skills, even if she learns them badly, and I had multiple generations of women conspiring to teach me.
Earlier this weekend my aunt had called and left a message on my voicemail. She was glad to hear that I was planning to make a trip to Texas soon because my grandmother is in the last stages of kidney failure and will likely need to go on dialysis soon. I called and spoke with her in person later. She mentioned that my great aunt and uncle are trying to sell their home so they can move into an assisted living facility in Georgia, closer to their kids. She laughed talking about the garage sale they had, trying to clear out the clutter of decades, and how they were stubborn and immovable on their prices. I felt saddened by all the news but hardly devastated. None of this comes as a surprise. We are all aging; things are changing. We had a cat once who died of kidney failure; as deaths go, this is not a terrible one for my grandmother to face. We are all always in the process of losing one another.
We knitted last night and it came back to me quickly, as did the boredom of the task. Luckily I had good company and we laughed and talked together for a good couple of hours. As I worked, though, I would hear occasionally resonating through my mind, "My grandmother is dying." I thought of the generations of family I have lost already, my first great-grand dying when I was in fourth grade. I remember my second death in fifth grade as well because I finally had a year of perfect attendance, except for the day I missed for the funeral of my great-grandmother. My grandmother, my great aunt and uncle, they are the last of this generation for me, the threads of my experience unraveling behind me, coming a little closer to my own undoing from the pattern.
This morning the alarm came hard and brittle, jolting me into my day. As I ate breakfast I found myself weeping into my GrapeNuts, thinking of the woman who held me as a baby and who has loved me for 42 years for nothing more spectacular than my existence on the planet. I have felt frustrated before by this unconditional love, wanting to be loved for what I have made of myself since birth, feeling unseen and unrecognized for the things that I value beyond my mere existence. But I begin now to feel the value of these people who are woven so closely into my reality that I don't question them, I can struggle and flail all I want, go away and come back, and they are still just there; I can take them for granted.
I hope there are people in my life to whom I have given this gift, that I have knit my stitches straight and true in my attachments so that I can be relied upon, wound myself fully into my life to be taken for granted as part of the fabric of the whole. The stitching together of people is impermanent and fragile. It never lasts and it is also the only thing worth doing.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Nevertheless, my partner and I decided that it would be good to learn (again!) how to knit, and to knit with friends. Last night found us, needles in hand, working away. (I showed off my one knitting accomplishment: a whole sweater! Granted, it took me a year, living in a cold flat in Scotland, in the company of my flatmates who were also knitting, without the distraction of a tv or a computer, but it is a sweater!) Every time I pick up one of these womanly tasks, I feel that thread through time linking me back to my experiences with the women of my family. A girl growing up in Texas is expected to learn certain skills, even if she learns them badly, and I had multiple generations of women conspiring to teach me.
Earlier this weekend my aunt had called and left a message on my voicemail. She was glad to hear that I was planning to make a trip to Texas soon because my grandmother is in the last stages of kidney failure and will likely need to go on dialysis soon. I called and spoke with her in person later. She mentioned that my great aunt and uncle are trying to sell their home so they can move into an assisted living facility in Georgia, closer to their kids. She laughed talking about the garage sale they had, trying to clear out the clutter of decades, and how they were stubborn and immovable on their prices. I felt saddened by all the news but hardly devastated. None of this comes as a surprise. We are all aging; things are changing. We had a cat once who died of kidney failure; as deaths go, this is not a terrible one for my grandmother to face. We are all always in the process of losing one another.
We knitted last night and it came back to me quickly, as did the boredom of the task. Luckily I had good company and we laughed and talked together for a good couple of hours. As I worked, though, I would hear occasionally resonating through my mind, "My grandmother is dying." I thought of the generations of family I have lost already, my first great-grand dying when I was in fourth grade. I remember my second death in fifth grade as well because I finally had a year of perfect attendance, except for the day I missed for the funeral of my great-grandmother. My grandmother, my great aunt and uncle, they are the last of this generation for me, the threads of my experience unraveling behind me, coming a little closer to my own undoing from the pattern.
This morning the alarm came hard and brittle, jolting me into my day. As I ate breakfast I found myself weeping into my GrapeNuts, thinking of the woman who held me as a baby and who has loved me for 42 years for nothing more spectacular than my existence on the planet. I have felt frustrated before by this unconditional love, wanting to be loved for what I have made of myself since birth, feeling unseen and unrecognized for the things that I value beyond my mere existence. But I begin now to feel the value of these people who are woven so closely into my reality that I don't question them, I can struggle and flail all I want, go away and come back, and they are still just there; I can take them for granted.
I hope there are people in my life to whom I have given this gift, that I have knit my stitches straight and true in my attachments so that I can be relied upon, wound myself fully into my life to be taken for granted as part of the fabric of the whole. The stitching together of people is impermanent and fragile. It never lasts and it is also the only thing worth doing.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
A Valentine to Strangers
Strangers get a bad rap in general. As children, we are taught to fear and avoid them. I'm not sure how we are supposed to ever meet people, make friends and establish relationships if we don't ever talk to strangers, but that is not a question we are supposed to ask. And who are these strangers anyway? Well, I think maybe they are us.
I have been thinking about an entry about encounters with strangers for a long time now. And then just this week, I have been seeing lots of commentary on a particular social network about love, how to define it, how important it is in a relationship, how to rank relationships by priority...basically, how to use intangibles to set up some kind of ratings system for the people in your life. In thinking about all of that, together with my earlier thoughts about strangers, I realized that strangers have been pretty damn important in my life and I have never sent even one of them a valentine!
So here's to the strangers:
To the three separate people who gave me rides back to where I was staying when I was new to Seattle and had forgotten how to get back there. To the woman who picked me up at a bus stop when it was vile and stormy out. To the couple who picked me up on the highway in Texas when my brother's car had broken down, drove me to a gas station to pick up oil, and then drove me back. To the man in Athens, who, when I had left my hotel, wandered out into the market and gotten hopelessly lost and terrified, took me out for espresso, got (and paid for!) a cab, and, by way of 20 questions in halting English, found my hotel for me again. To anyone else who has given me rides, friendly company and good-natured searching when I've been wandering lost and alone in some strange city, with no idea where I am. According to our cultural mythology, all of these events should have ended badly. Every time I've been in this situation it has been terrifying. And every time I have been delivered safely to my door.
To the man who saw my partner crying in the cookie section at the grocery store after we had had a particularly challenging Thanksgiving with her family; instead of turning away, he said, "This holiday can be tough, can't it?" and we all laughed together. To the mother of the rape survivor I had worked with, who, after her daughter died, got in touch with me and wrote me a thank you note I still have, closing with the words, "...when you can no longer do this work, know that you have done your work well." To the fellow student who told me, "Don't ever stop writing! You have something important to say." To all of the authors who have written books that have fed me, supported me, lifted me, engaged me, kept me company with their words. To everyone who has chosen to speak their love and kindness into my life rather than keep silent.
To the bus driver who knew me by sight and knew I was always running from work to catch her bus. She would roll slowly to the next intersection and look up the hill for me; if she saw me, she'd wait. To the man who gave me a daffodil my very first day in Seattle. To the boy who talked with me at a party, came home with me, had sex with me and slept in my bed before sneaking out early in the morning to get out before my parents arrived. I know–one night stands, especially sneaky ones, are supposed to be bad and I should be ashamed of it. But earlier that night, I had been crying, after a summer of crying, and crawling around on the floor in the kitchen, searching for a sharp knife to do damage to myself, when the phone rang with a friend's invitation to this particular party. The invitation and the party, with their reminder that life was still available to me, and the boy, with his interest and enthusiasm, broke my depression and let me begin to climb back into my life. To everyone who has given me a gift out of the blue of exactly what I needed that moment.
Strangers bear witness to each moment in our lives, and, by their choices, can nurture and support us. It seems that my primary relationship is the one I have with the strangers in my life. So, thank you. I love you. Happy Valentine's Day!
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
I have been thinking about an entry about encounters with strangers for a long time now. And then just this week, I have been seeing lots of commentary on a particular social network about love, how to define it, how important it is in a relationship, how to rank relationships by priority...basically, how to use intangibles to set up some kind of ratings system for the people in your life. In thinking about all of that, together with my earlier thoughts about strangers, I realized that strangers have been pretty damn important in my life and I have never sent even one of them a valentine!
So here's to the strangers:
To the three separate people who gave me rides back to where I was staying when I was new to Seattle and had forgotten how to get back there. To the woman who picked me up at a bus stop when it was vile and stormy out. To the couple who picked me up on the highway in Texas when my brother's car had broken down, drove me to a gas station to pick up oil, and then drove me back. To the man in Athens, who, when I had left my hotel, wandered out into the market and gotten hopelessly lost and terrified, took me out for espresso, got (and paid for!) a cab, and, by way of 20 questions in halting English, found my hotel for me again. To anyone else who has given me rides, friendly company and good-natured searching when I've been wandering lost and alone in some strange city, with no idea where I am. According to our cultural mythology, all of these events should have ended badly. Every time I've been in this situation it has been terrifying. And every time I have been delivered safely to my door.
To the man who saw my partner crying in the cookie section at the grocery store after we had had a particularly challenging Thanksgiving with her family; instead of turning away, he said, "This holiday can be tough, can't it?" and we all laughed together. To the mother of the rape survivor I had worked with, who, after her daughter died, got in touch with me and wrote me a thank you note I still have, closing with the words, "...when you can no longer do this work, know that you have done your work well." To the fellow student who told me, "Don't ever stop writing! You have something important to say." To all of the authors who have written books that have fed me, supported me, lifted me, engaged me, kept me company with their words. To everyone who has chosen to speak their love and kindness into my life rather than keep silent.
To the bus driver who knew me by sight and knew I was always running from work to catch her bus. She would roll slowly to the next intersection and look up the hill for me; if she saw me, she'd wait. To the man who gave me a daffodil my very first day in Seattle. To the boy who talked with me at a party, came home with me, had sex with me and slept in my bed before sneaking out early in the morning to get out before my parents arrived. I know–one night stands, especially sneaky ones, are supposed to be bad and I should be ashamed of it. But earlier that night, I had been crying, after a summer of crying, and crawling around on the floor in the kitchen, searching for a sharp knife to do damage to myself, when the phone rang with a friend's invitation to this particular party. The invitation and the party, with their reminder that life was still available to me, and the boy, with his interest and enthusiasm, broke my depression and let me begin to climb back into my life. To everyone who has given me a gift out of the blue of exactly what I needed that moment.
Strangers bear witness to each moment in our lives, and, by their choices, can nurture and support us. It seems that my primary relationship is the one I have with the strangers in my life. So, thank you. I love you. Happy Valentine's Day!
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
On Becoming Strong and Flexible
I've been thinking about travel lately. Nope, this post isn't about yoga despite the title. Instead, a very random and brief conversation together with a lovely book have me thinking about getting back out on the road and getting actually in reality lost, instead of just wandering in my own head lost. The conversation was truly brief and random, but the book is worth mentioning. It is Adventures in a Mud Hut:An Innocent Anthropologist Abroad by Nigel Barley. A book I found by following the bread crumb trail of other books, it is exactly what it advertises. I cackled, snorted and hooted as I read, recalling many of my own absolute worst travel experiences.
My strongest memory is also my most recent, involving my trip to Costa Rica for yoga teacher training. (Okay, so there's a little yoga in the post.) Once I made the decision to go, I did very little of my own research about travel in Costa Rica, focusing instead on the finances, setting things up at home to be gone for a month, figuring out how to pack for several daily yoga classes in a hot and humid climate, and trusted to the travel agent recommended by the school. We did lots of emailing back and forth which led me to the understanding that English was not a comfortable language for her, and Spanish, despite the early efforts of Sesame Street and 3 Spanish lessons in 5th grade, was certainly not a comfortable language for me. Due to time and money constraints I decided to do the entire trip to Nosara as one single Herculean effort, with no breaks. I flew from Seattle to Miami, a long flight in itself, and landed there to find the entire airport under construction, with no signs anywhere indicating where to go, left security, came back through security, and hiked what felt like the same distance I had just flown, carrying 50 pounds of yoga clothes and a mat, to find my next departure gate, which then changed, sending me hiking off again with a fervent promise to myself to check my luggage next time. On that first flight my bottle of water had leaked all over my travel documents, fading my careful print-outs of contact information and addresses. I spent a good chunk of the flight in the bathroom, blotting papers with paper towels, trying to salvage anything I could. I was completely exhausted and I hadn't left the States yet.
On arrival in San Jose, the capitol of Costa Rica, I went through customs and out where I had been directed by my travel agent to meet my driver. My flight was a couple of hours late and I was worried about this next connection. Out in the heat, I searched the crowd for a sign with my name on it. Up and down I went, the whole length of the concourse searching every piece of cardboard held aloft. My name wasn't there. A strange man approached me and asked me if he could help. I explained the situation and he helped me look for my name. I didn't have the phone number for the car company or for the travel agent, but he used his cell phone to track down the agent and spoke briefly with her in Spanish. When he got off the phone, he explained that she didn't know where my driver was and I was on my own for transportation. By an interesting coincidence, he himself was a professional driver and with a little schedule finagling would be able to take me to Nosara. (I know what you're thinking, but, shhhh...just wait and we can talk about that later.)
I've forgotten now, a couple of years later, exactly how long I had been awake by this time. One of my flights was a red eye, I had a delay and a layover, and now I was looking at a 5-6 hour drive to the coast. I went with the stranger to his car after he had a couple more conversations on his cell phone. He didn't speak much English and I spoke no Spanish. I tried hard to stay awake and make conversation; he tried hard to entertain me with information about the countryside. He offered to stop for dinner but we both laughed at the thought, realizing at the same time that I'd just snooze on the table. He warned me that once we were on the peninsula the roads weren't paved and we might have to leave his car and rent a jeep. The thought of any more delays made me want to weep, so I just refused to think about it. As it turned out, we didn't need a jeep, but once we were on those roads I had no trouble at all staying awake, bouncing from pothole to pothole.
We finally reached Nosara and the hotel that would be my home for the next month. He gave me his card and told me to call him if I needed anything. I gave him his fee and half again for a tip and all of my gratitude. It was late at night, I had been up for more than 24 hours with nothing to eat but cashews and graham crackers. I checked in at the front desk, was shown to my room and opened the door on...a roomful of ants. Big ones, little ones, red ones, black ones. All over the room. I was too tired to have whooping hysterics so I just sat on the bed and cried. I wanted nothing more than to run back out and find my stranger, tell him to "take me back, take me back! I just want to go home. Please just take me home." Instead, I cried. I called my partner using the hotel phone and damn the expense. And I went to sleep.
Why would anyone travel? Here's a postcard from the rest of that trip, one particular memory of many: It's night and I've spent sunset alone at the beach. You can't call what I've been doing "swimming", it's more like making love with the ocean, playfully. It's warm and pouring rain. I'm padding home in my pink flip flops, splashed with mud up to my thighs, in just my bathing suit and multi-colored sarong, room key tied to one corner and a flashlight in my hand. The fireflies aren't out tonight; it's raining too hard. When a bike or car goes by, the driver and I wave to one another, or call out " 'noches!" When I get back to my room, I'll shower, shake out my bedding to check for scorpions (my roommate and I have a ritual for this, calling out, "Scorpion! O-oh, scorpion!") and set my alarm for 5 AM for my early morning yoga class. Sometime tomorrow I will go to the local ice cream stand, peruse all of the flavors for the day and get what I always get, one scoop of coffee and one scoop of chocolate chip.
Have I ever known a feeling like this? Do I even have the vocabulary for it? I can only make snapshots with my words. The pictures would show the kindness of strangers, on which I have often depended without regret. The quick response to my own intuition. The little gifts to myself, the contentment in my own skin. And finally the proof of my own indomitability. I do not need to become strong and flexible; I am strong and flexible, and here is the proof for myself. Travel is an easy way to prove it to myself, over and over again.
I don't think travel is necessary though to find the proof. Sometimes the tests find us. But sometimes we have to go looking for them. Remember the fairy tales, the ones with the impossible task to complete by morning? Our hero's despair in the face of it? But then he or she begins, and help comes. Inertia can be hard to overcome. I know because I love nothing more than to just be left alone to sit and read. I would sit and read my life away given half a chance. But if I do that then I can't believe in myself, and I need to believe in myself. If life doesn't give me an impossible task, then I have to give it to myself, somehow, find the adventure I can have, the monster I can slay, so I can know myself. More importantly, so I can trust myself, and trust that help will come in the form of the stranger, in the form of my own willingness to stay put until my impossible task becomes just, well, my life and I'm just living it, triumphantly.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
My strongest memory is also my most recent, involving my trip to Costa Rica for yoga teacher training. (Okay, so there's a little yoga in the post.) Once I made the decision to go, I did very little of my own research about travel in Costa Rica, focusing instead on the finances, setting things up at home to be gone for a month, figuring out how to pack for several daily yoga classes in a hot and humid climate, and trusted to the travel agent recommended by the school. We did lots of emailing back and forth which led me to the understanding that English was not a comfortable language for her, and Spanish, despite the early efforts of Sesame Street and 3 Spanish lessons in 5th grade, was certainly not a comfortable language for me. Due to time and money constraints I decided to do the entire trip to Nosara as one single Herculean effort, with no breaks. I flew from Seattle to Miami, a long flight in itself, and landed there to find the entire airport under construction, with no signs anywhere indicating where to go, left security, came back through security, and hiked what felt like the same distance I had just flown, carrying 50 pounds of yoga clothes and a mat, to find my next departure gate, which then changed, sending me hiking off again with a fervent promise to myself to check my luggage next time. On that first flight my bottle of water had leaked all over my travel documents, fading my careful print-outs of contact information and addresses. I spent a good chunk of the flight in the bathroom, blotting papers with paper towels, trying to salvage anything I could. I was completely exhausted and I hadn't left the States yet.
On arrival in San Jose, the capitol of Costa Rica, I went through customs and out where I had been directed by my travel agent to meet my driver. My flight was a couple of hours late and I was worried about this next connection. Out in the heat, I searched the crowd for a sign with my name on it. Up and down I went, the whole length of the concourse searching every piece of cardboard held aloft. My name wasn't there. A strange man approached me and asked me if he could help. I explained the situation and he helped me look for my name. I didn't have the phone number for the car company or for the travel agent, but he used his cell phone to track down the agent and spoke briefly with her in Spanish. When he got off the phone, he explained that she didn't know where my driver was and I was on my own for transportation. By an interesting coincidence, he himself was a professional driver and with a little schedule finagling would be able to take me to Nosara. (I know what you're thinking, but, shhhh...just wait and we can talk about that later.)
I've forgotten now, a couple of years later, exactly how long I had been awake by this time. One of my flights was a red eye, I had a delay and a layover, and now I was looking at a 5-6 hour drive to the coast. I went with the stranger to his car after he had a couple more conversations on his cell phone. He didn't speak much English and I spoke no Spanish. I tried hard to stay awake and make conversation; he tried hard to entertain me with information about the countryside. He offered to stop for dinner but we both laughed at the thought, realizing at the same time that I'd just snooze on the table. He warned me that once we were on the peninsula the roads weren't paved and we might have to leave his car and rent a jeep. The thought of any more delays made me want to weep, so I just refused to think about it. As it turned out, we didn't need a jeep, but once we were on those roads I had no trouble at all staying awake, bouncing from pothole to pothole.
We finally reached Nosara and the hotel that would be my home for the next month. He gave me his card and told me to call him if I needed anything. I gave him his fee and half again for a tip and all of my gratitude. It was late at night, I had been up for more than 24 hours with nothing to eat but cashews and graham crackers. I checked in at the front desk, was shown to my room and opened the door on...a roomful of ants. Big ones, little ones, red ones, black ones. All over the room. I was too tired to have whooping hysterics so I just sat on the bed and cried. I wanted nothing more than to run back out and find my stranger, tell him to "take me back, take me back! I just want to go home. Please just take me home." Instead, I cried. I called my partner using the hotel phone and damn the expense. And I went to sleep.
Why would anyone travel? Here's a postcard from the rest of that trip, one particular memory of many: It's night and I've spent sunset alone at the beach. You can't call what I've been doing "swimming", it's more like making love with the ocean, playfully. It's warm and pouring rain. I'm padding home in my pink flip flops, splashed with mud up to my thighs, in just my bathing suit and multi-colored sarong, room key tied to one corner and a flashlight in my hand. The fireflies aren't out tonight; it's raining too hard. When a bike or car goes by, the driver and I wave to one another, or call out " 'noches!" When I get back to my room, I'll shower, shake out my bedding to check for scorpions (my roommate and I have a ritual for this, calling out, "Scorpion! O-oh, scorpion!") and set my alarm for 5 AM for my early morning yoga class. Sometime tomorrow I will go to the local ice cream stand, peruse all of the flavors for the day and get what I always get, one scoop of coffee and one scoop of chocolate chip.
Have I ever known a feeling like this? Do I even have the vocabulary for it? I can only make snapshots with my words. The pictures would show the kindness of strangers, on which I have often depended without regret. The quick response to my own intuition. The little gifts to myself, the contentment in my own skin. And finally the proof of my own indomitability. I do not need to become strong and flexible; I am strong and flexible, and here is the proof for myself. Travel is an easy way to prove it to myself, over and over again.
I don't think travel is necessary though to find the proof. Sometimes the tests find us. But sometimes we have to go looking for them. Remember the fairy tales, the ones with the impossible task to complete by morning? Our hero's despair in the face of it? But then he or she begins, and help comes. Inertia can be hard to overcome. I know because I love nothing more than to just be left alone to sit and read. I would sit and read my life away given half a chance. But if I do that then I can't believe in myself, and I need to believe in myself. If life doesn't give me an impossible task, then I have to give it to myself, somehow, find the adventure I can have, the monster I can slay, so I can know myself. More importantly, so I can trust myself, and trust that help will come in the form of the stranger, in the form of my own willingness to stay put until my impossible task becomes just, well, my life and I'm just living it, triumphantly.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
Monday, January 12, 2009
Staying Awake
I sat with my sweetie a few months back watching Young @ Heart, a lovely documentary about a choir of oldsters who sing modern music, and realized–I don't have the slightest idea what I'll want to do when I grow up.
This is shocking news to me since I am a big planner. (You might refer to my earlier post about list-making in case you doubt me.) I have little plans for the day, the week, the month, bigger plans for the future. A 5 year plan, a 10 year plan, a plan for retirement. But while watching that movie, I had the thought for the first time: I'm doing an awful lot of planning for a person I haven't met yet. A total stranger, who might not appreciate my input, thanks very much. I imagine her at 75 saying back to me now, "I know how much you've scrimped and saved and planned so that I can go on a world cruise, but I'm really much too busy with my accordion quartet to take the time now. Sorry."
I think about when I turned 38 or so and suddenly realized that my 22-year-old self had made a decision for me that I was still living by. She was well intentioned but kind of a tight ass frankly, and she swore off alcohol, not because she had a problem with it, but because her rare encounters with it had convinced her that it simply was not worth the time and money. So for the next 16 years my knee jerk response to any offer was, "No thanks. I don't drink." That is fine, except that I had not given it any thought at all for 16 years. I had no idea whether I still felt that way or not. At 38, was I still someone who doesn't drink? As it turns out, I am, for the most part, but now I enjoy a very occasional girly drink, and about once every 10 years or so I like to go a little wild with friends for about 2 weeks. My 22-year-old self would not have guessed that about me, nor would she have given me space for it. Her opinions were a lot more, well, clearly defined, let's say, than mine are.
As I said, I am a planner, but I am also a planner who has frequently had the experience of plans gone astray. Once, during my travels, I met a woman in Austria who was also traveling. We hit it off, but I was going to Italy next and she was off to Germany. We agreed to meet in southern France on a particular day about a week later and travel a little together. (Just for everyone's information, I am talking about a time before cell phones.) I got on a train for Florence, I thought, but I arrived the next morning in Venice. I have written about this before. I was frustrated and angry and not sure what to do. I had a specific timeline to work with and I was in the wrong place! There was no way to force this situation to fit my plans so I had to be creative. I had to be flexible.
I cannot plan for every possible eventuality. And I cannot predict every choice I will make. I think I know myself and the shape of my life, the direction I want to go. I keep getting these little hints though that my life is actually the space between breaths. I need to stay awake for the breathing, so that I can enjoy this one breath right now, appreciate it and be ready. Be ready for the shift that happens inside that says, not that way, this way now. Be ready for the obstacle that shows up outside that says, not this way, that way now. Be ready for the lost luggage, the broken dish, the winning ticket, the surprise vacation, the broken arm, the long-lost relative, the new love, the change of heart, the move across country, the flooded basement, and maybe even be ready to take up the accordion when I grow up.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
This is shocking news to me since I am a big planner. (You might refer to my earlier post about list-making in case you doubt me.) I have little plans for the day, the week, the month, bigger plans for the future. A 5 year plan, a 10 year plan, a plan for retirement. But while watching that movie, I had the thought for the first time: I'm doing an awful lot of planning for a person I haven't met yet. A total stranger, who might not appreciate my input, thanks very much. I imagine her at 75 saying back to me now, "I know how much you've scrimped and saved and planned so that I can go on a world cruise, but I'm really much too busy with my accordion quartet to take the time now. Sorry."
I think about when I turned 38 or so and suddenly realized that my 22-year-old self had made a decision for me that I was still living by. She was well intentioned but kind of a tight ass frankly, and she swore off alcohol, not because she had a problem with it, but because her rare encounters with it had convinced her that it simply was not worth the time and money. So for the next 16 years my knee jerk response to any offer was, "No thanks. I don't drink." That is fine, except that I had not given it any thought at all for 16 years. I had no idea whether I still felt that way or not. At 38, was I still someone who doesn't drink? As it turns out, I am, for the most part, but now I enjoy a very occasional girly drink, and about once every 10 years or so I like to go a little wild with friends for about 2 weeks. My 22-year-old self would not have guessed that about me, nor would she have given me space for it. Her opinions were a lot more, well, clearly defined, let's say, than mine are.
As I said, I am a planner, but I am also a planner who has frequently had the experience of plans gone astray. Once, during my travels, I met a woman in Austria who was also traveling. We hit it off, but I was going to Italy next and she was off to Germany. We agreed to meet in southern France on a particular day about a week later and travel a little together. (Just for everyone's information, I am talking about a time before cell phones.) I got on a train for Florence, I thought, but I arrived the next morning in Venice. I have written about this before. I was frustrated and angry and not sure what to do. I had a specific timeline to work with and I was in the wrong place! There was no way to force this situation to fit my plans so I had to be creative. I had to be flexible.
I cannot plan for every possible eventuality. And I cannot predict every choice I will make. I think I know myself and the shape of my life, the direction I want to go. I keep getting these little hints though that my life is actually the space between breaths. I need to stay awake for the breathing, so that I can enjoy this one breath right now, appreciate it and be ready. Be ready for the shift that happens inside that says, not that way, this way now. Be ready for the obstacle that shows up outside that says, not this way, that way now. Be ready for the lost luggage, the broken dish, the winning ticket, the surprise vacation, the broken arm, the long-lost relative, the new love, the change of heart, the move across country, the flooded basement, and maybe even be ready to take up the accordion when I grow up.
copyright 2009 J. Autumn Needles
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