sweet darkness

this morning i took a yoga class. i brought my new "thirsty" mat--part of my christmas spoils--to a not-yet-explored studio.

yoga reminds me of church. you walk into the building, and you can feel a sense of belonging along with a longing to belong. it is often a room full of women chatting quietly, asking about children, pets, injuries, relationships. veterans and newcomers are clearly distinguishable.

the mats were crammed into the u-shaped room. it was possible to sit in the same room and not be able to see three quarters of the people sharing the same space. the teacher roved freely, stepping on and across mats, encouraging people by name. she could have said, "good job margaret, very nice tara" and few people would have known whether there actually was a tara or a margaret in the room. but the personal touch was enticing--you want her to learn your name and pair it with praise for your mermaid, your camel, or your pigeon pose.

"smile in downward dog", she suggested, "it's aesthetically pleasing". the room erupted in unstifleable laughter and snorts. i couldn't muster one: chortles of approval are not my forte.

"do not identify with your tight hamstrings. you are not your tight hamstrings". what a relief.

the philosophy of self-acceptance in yoga still surprises me. in a standing split, i remembered ballet: the contrasting black swan to the sunny freedom flight of yoga. self-love is alien in that world of stiff tulle, bloody toes, and forced frontiers. i know because i marinated in it for a good ten years. in yoga, i am still surprised to be told not to push myself, to lower my leg, to relax my face, to let go. i might have better harnessed my mind/body connection as a dancer had someone reminded me to breathe.

"send the breath to the place that hurts"

this is like chasing a drop of oil in a pan of water. when you summon the breath like a legion of mercenaries, the pain will split into two, multiply and be fruitful. it will vacate the space visited by the breath, only to dilate in another part of the body. in essence, you are chasing pain with the breath. and each time you catch it before it retreats, the mind meets a new sensation.

meeting the pain or discomfort is empowering.

left to float undetected in the body, pain is like an intruder hiding in a dark house, waiting to strike before you flip on the lights. yoga is like tearing back the shower curtain to see what lurks behind. and often, it's nothing more than the mind's expectation of danger, aka fear. i could actually see the pain as i sent my breath to alleviate it. it looked like a bright yellow comic word balloon. the edges were jagged, sometimes they glowed red or orange. then it was like an amoeba the size of my hand.

our yogic tour guide had an air of cool indifference. her posture, instructive tone and arbitrary laughter at things unfunny suggested how little she gave a shit about what anybody thought. i am not your friend. i am your teacher. i will leave you in an excruciating position for thirty more breaths and lose count along the way. got it.

her toenails were a dusty pinot noir. her forename is spiked with an apostraphe, suggesting that she is "of" or "from" a land called ana. i imagine she was visiting for the day, from a narnia-like place, tolerating mortals for a living. she put me out to pasture for three minutes at the end of class (my favorite position, the death pose, shavasana) before dinging her sacred bell three times. each ding grappled with my overwhelming urge to take a very long nap.

she seemed to appear and disappear in different corners of the room. post shavasana, she was at my ten o'clock, perched in the corner and consuming minimal space. it was time for a poem. it came from a collection called "house of belonging" by david whyte. title and flesh as follows:


Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

~ David Whyte ~

pollock

when i was in...oh, i think it was...4th or 5th grade...a self-described "art docent" came down from on high ("on high" meaning her large, cranberry spice glade plug-ins-scented house) to teach ~us kids~ about art.

we were herded into a "multi-purpose" classroom with no windows and carpet the color of hamburger helper to stare at poster prints of matisse, van gogh (juicier details of the man's life not included) degas, picasso, and other greats who have unwittingly created a raison d'être for people they'll never meet and probably would object to being associated with. nevertheless, we were charged with creating mediocre imitation krab kopies of what these geniuses had mastered and introduced to humankind. the art docent played enya for us--to inspire us--and flitted about the room in her williams sonoma apron replete with vertical chambre stripes. she spoke in a minnie mouse voice, cajoling the boys into drawing tutus and encouraging them not to break the ballpoint pens and drink the ink. similar invitations were made not to stow beads up nostrils or ingest chalk pastels.

the day that we re-enacted the madness of jackson pollock, several students forgot to bring their token "painter's smock" aka their dad's old work shirt. these forgetters were not exempted from flipping paint and being the involuntary canvas for students with less than perfect aim. in practice, the whole thing looked like a fitting platform for a Tide commercial. thirty-two 9 year-olds were handed buckets of black industrial paint and a thick paint brush with flimsy bristles. the "canvas" was a broad roll of butcher paper, laid flat on the grass outside the classroom.

art, in the form of unintended consequences, ensued. the paper ended up relatively unscathed paintwise, with only a few deliberate drops here and there. mostly, it was the scene of a raucous and teacher-condoned kid crime. the canvas bore gaping holes where feet had perforated it and crumpled stamps where paint-drenched children had fallen and rolled like piggies in the mud. this being the last activity of the day, parents were rolling up in their pleasant worlds, lattes in hand, casually clad in vests and workout clothes to a battlefield of school children flipping, rolling, sloshing and conjuring pollock as they surreptitiously decorated the art docent with a few clumsy flips of the brush.

parents' jaws dropped, they rushed into the mayhem like soldiers on the frontline, a slow-mo "suuuuusie...nnnoooooooo!" bellowing from their horror-stricken mouths as they rushed to stop their kids' brand new school clothes from becoming prime candidates for goodwill. the finished product was a trove of pissed off pta members, a sheepish art docent, and 32 children with a new appreciation for modern art.

follow up to -spoons-

as a follow-up to my previous post "spoons" i am officially collecting aces (to coin my coincidences) now:

after writing about elegant emerald today, i ran into her at the checkstand at whole foods tonight. her long blonde mullet is gorgeous. yet another coincidence. tonight is the october FULL MOON--one that i've been looking forward to all month...and it tonight the sky is obscured by clouds and muck. nevertheless, it is doubly lucky because it is not only a full moon during harvest season, but it comes at the ripest moment in the witching month. click your heels, pull up your striped socks, pour another midnight margarita and make a double wish with double potency: there will be double returns.

oh! and another ace: i dreamt about a certain random personage from high school and, for the first time since graduation, i saw this personage at carlucci's this morning. i'm collecting these events and will, like a sleuth, lay them out on an evidence board at some point and connect all of the dots. for now, i'm just gleefully collecting aces.

emerald

i'm not one to wash dishes before i put them in the dishwasher. nor do i take the time to comb, let alone wash, my hair before i subject some poor, unsuspecting girl to my terrarium of a mop. blow-drying is a circus act that i reserve for overcast days when the mood strikes, and it rarely does. more often than not, i let it do an interpretive dance (aka "air dry") and wake up to one large, moldable dred lock. then i pick apart the front pieces, smoke them silly with a curling iron and hide the rest in a professionally disheveled bun. this is the kind of half-assery that defines my hair care routine.

so when i take myself to the hair vet to be thus tamed and de-clawed, i leave the heavy lifting to the person with the advantageous angles and 2200-volt, car wash-series blow-your-cheeks-back model blow dryer and round brush like a wac-a-mole mallet. then i have to stifle laughter when, after the 40th layer and fifth broken hair clip, the poor dear is sweetly swearing under her breath. that would be me, only the expletives would be audible and i'd be sweating like a wrestler. even the best intentions (starting at the base and moving my way up) often leads to a forced time-out, deep breaths, and lack of resolve to go the distance. that's when the elastic comes in and the hair goes up and i contemplate a buzz cut.

when i met emerald the salonista at landis aveda, i was in full-moon-calico-knotty-dred glory. this was my first visit with emerald--i was cheating on my usual veteran vet ruby, but i saw it as a harmless switch-up--the way one might try a new toothpaste. i wasn't expecting drastic differences. i mostly hoped to discover a worthy opponent for the sheer volume and gnar that is my hair.

emerald was wearing a *turban* that day, to hide her freshly-shorn, waist-length mullet...i didn't get to see it, but her description conjured images of my sister's abyssinian guinea pig. emerald had silver earrings like delicate moorish stencils and a jordanian boyfriend who recently moved to new york city to find himself. we talked about oprah. we talked about art galleries. and all the while, emerald gave me tips on how to brush my hair, how to smear 10-15 different serums in it to take it from a bozo to a bridget, and how to manipulate a curling iron.

throughout her tutorial on "tips and tricks" (read: hair 101) i listened attentively as if i really hadn't a clue how to manage my hereditary "broom straw, gnawed off the ends with my own teeth half crazed recently escaped from azkaban" look. i even assured her when i first sat down, that my current fuzz-a-thon was no indication of my capabilities with a brush and plenty of grease. but perhaps she thought it was just a cover up...a cry for help. so she kindly showed me how to hold and use a brush. how to position a blow dryer and trick my hair out with this multi-purpose multi-miracle invention called "the curling iron". i realized how i must have been like an eliza doolittle to her, a rough pebble in need of some preliminary polish...she couldn't imagine that i would know how to pull, yank and threaten my hair into submission and still go around letting my freak flag fly.

curly hair is one thing. some people celebrate it, others treat it like a shameful rash and offer tried-and-true remedies for such unfortunate genetics. emerald believed that no woman (or man) should leave the house without applying some kind of heated object to their hair. "the whole world would look better" she claimed. i thought of all the mornings that the heater in my car or the hot breath of the subway served as my impromptu drying source...

when we parted, my hair was big and weather-girlish. i expected this and feigned excitement at my new-found ability to brush and curl. emerald was beguiling, and she invited me to her sacred dances jingle-jangle shake your money maker classes on tuesday nights. i think i'll take her up on it...and i'll bring my incorrigible curls with me.

a poetry reading

William Ernest Henley's Life and Death (Echoes)

RAISE the generous gods for giving
In a world of wrath and strife,
With a little time for living,
Unto all the joy of life.

At whatever source we drink it,
Art or love or faith or wine,

In whatever terms we think it,
It is common and divine.

Praise the high gods, for in giving
This to man, and this alone,

They have made his chance of living
Shine the equal of their own.


VII

FILL a glass with golden wine,
And the while your lips are wet
Set their perfume unto mine,

And forget,
Every kiss we take and give
Leaves us less of life to live.

Yet again! Your whim and mine

In a happy while have met.
All your sweets to me resign,

Nor regret
That we press with every breath,
Sighed or singing, nearer death.

spoons

I realize this is the third blog post with a utensil as the title...which is purely coincidence and, coincidentally, frames the topic at hand:

at least 3-10 times per day (and often in my dreams as well, so tack on another 2-5) I encounter coincidences that, were they woven into a fantasy novel, would seem absurdly *convenient*. Out of the air magically falls a miracle and just like that, a crisis is averted. Money grows on trees and suddenly I have more than I imagine. I live in a Dickens novel, I often say. Not only because we (Charlie and I) have certain commonalities with regard to taxes, prison, and arbitrary confinement, but also because the aptly-named personae in my play and neatly braided coincidences permeate the literary fancies of daily life. I believe this is probably the case for most people, if they stopped to notice.

Many times I've had the idea and intention to start collecting these cosmic events like beercaps in jar--little memories of ghostly butterflies fluttering in a glass, reminding me of the seamless whimsy that punctuates the hours. Then I think, "So many have passed unrecorded, the vault is quite empty, why begin archiving little mysteries and miracles now?"

It's like the card game "spoons" where three or more players pass the cards around in a circle, each player holding four randomly distributed cards in his or her hands and doing his or her damnedest to corral four of a kind before stealthily snatching up a spoon from the center of the table. Much like musical chairs, the spoon supply is always enough for all but one, slow, unobservant player who either fails to lasso four of a kind first or fails to notice when the spoons are snatched by fellow players. Collecting the four of a kind depends on deciding (early on) which card to collect. Usually, if one begins with more than one kind in hand, that is the best card to collect. Yet, as we spoons players have discovered, there are rounds where you'll choose your card, and within seconds, you'll pass up three or even four of a kind of a different card. And so you think, should I have started collecting X card a long time ago? Is it too late to start collecting a different one now? Does my neighbor HAVE the card I originally sought to collect? And then, you notice that the spoons have been snatched, and the game is up. The point is, does winning depend on choosing the right card from the outset and then randomly being favored by the deck or does it depend on perseverence and conviction: you chose the jack and you stick with the jack despite the two or three aces that you willingly passed along?

So you never know what's coming down the pipe, but you either stick with the plan or get ready to roll if something better comes along...and in terms of collecting coincidences...the debate is whether to begin collecting them now (now that so many have been caught and released) or to keep letting them pass by because they aren't what I'm after anyhow? is it better to be the first to gather the lot or sufficient to avoid being caught without a spoon?

$billions$

a friend of mine is obsessed with money. and being rich. this friend is not rich, but he likes to talk about being rich and what he would do with his wads of cash and bonds and stocks and 508c6 offshore accounts in zurich and colombia. in an effort to lure me into his whirlpool of desire, he often asks me what i'd do with a billion dollars, right now. he asks me this question often because my answer is never the same.

right now, i would probably go to gallenson's and buy a gun. with that gun, i would shoot things. whatever i felt like. knock figuringes off a wall and down a laundry chute or blast holes through rusty coke cans...i would shoot my gun on the salt flats or in my grandma's backyard. i think she'd borrow it and the neighbors over the back fence could cross "dog food" off of their monthly expenses (and probably add "lawyer").

i'd buy two guns. a big one and a small one, like a glock. i say glock because that is the only gun i have ever pulled the trigger on, and i enjoyed it far more than i thought i would. the big one would be a rifle. and maybe i'd buy a third to slip in my purse or wear on my thigh...one with a pearly handle.

with my guns in tow, i'd buy an airstream trailor traveling van thing--the ones that look like giant vintage toasters. i'd decorate the interior with lickable wallpaper and visit every state in the union, including hawaii because i'd have the damn thing shipped, overnight. i'd probably skip west virginia, unless i had plenty of ammo.

i would do nothing charitable with my new-found wealth. i would hoard it, and never tell my friends or family where my new pet cheetah came from or invite orphans to stay at my gaudy ranch. i'd spend it all in a year and then eBay every last knick knack i purchased along the way. drink myself into a stupor and then enlighten myself with lunch guests like tina turner.