Flashback

This weekend I started my 500 hour part 1 training of Yoga Therapy. I was hemming and hawing a bit on it because I was not sure I really could bite off this training and still have the downtime I needed to create, write, be present to myself and my family, and continue my deepening in SourcePoint Therapy. But then I flipped the logic on its head. I decided to go for it, and use the training for my own self care and deepening of being an educator that can support people healing themselves.

During the training we learned more ways to heighten our interior awareness of our bodies and how they function in the world. We began to peak into our patterns and habits and see others patterns and habits with deep love and reverence and support one another on the way toward freedom by inhabiting our bodies. More fully, more readily, and with more function and freedom, a steady ease. As I worked through the various sessions in somayoga I had a moment where I recalled driving on Cretin Ave. in St. Paul, the sun was shining, the clouds fluffy and perfectly floating in the deep blueness of the sky, and I realized with such reverence and awe how lucky I was to be alive, in this body at this time with this life. I was freaking in love with my life, with my body in all its glory and with all its imperfections, they were part of my beauty instead of something I needed to fix or heal or get rid of in order to be happy....it was blissful. I was blissed out. And I caught myself being blissed out sitting at one of the red lights on Cretin Ave and Hwy 94. And people I was wildly happy, and no major event was happening I was driving from here to there. That was it. I was on my way. I gratefully was able to witness this moment about myself. Take a snapshot of it, tuck it away. And I remember feeling like this is a glimpse of how some live all the time and bravely wondering could I? Today I recalled that moment and was blissed out knowing it existed.

Photo by Elizabeth Sullivan

As I was having this remembering...I had this beautifully written piece What the dying really regret... sent to me, and then came home from training to this piece in my newsfeed from Momastery...

For so many years, while I lost my hair, I kept telling myself, you will be happy again when you have hair. Or imagine myself and how happy I would be when I did have hair. And a faint whisper would say, but maybe you need to be happy now even without hair. And a fainter whisper said, maybe you need to love your body as it is, and let it bloom again. And a fainter whisper yet, said maybe you need to stop ignoring your body, as it calls out to you, screams at you to listen, to pause, to pay attention, to be in it. Really in this body, not a spirit floating above it, not a mind revving its engine, running it, but a full body experiencing this world, this life as it is now. One of the beliefs I was raised with was that we get one life, and that brings us to the afterlife, which is either Heaven or Hell or purgatory. This thought filled me with fear. With the belief that I had to get it right or else...and the or else was frightening. Thank God, I no longer believe this! Right now is heaven. Right now is what there is, and there is love and abundance if we chose it, and we are energy and energy changes but it does not go away. Isn't that a possibility? That we transform, and what we do now informs what we will do if we come around again, but the next time we come around might look similar or vastly different, but it will never be the same beauty as now in this moment in this life in this body. This is a curiosity I am playing with and an invitation I am exploring as I become more embodied and more in love with this amazing physical tool I have to experience this stunning world! Love wins. Always.

"It would be something like 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' Also, stay open to whatever life presents you with, because it will teach you something if you'll let it. It's about keeping an unbiased heart and mind. A lot of it is forming an unconditional friendship with yourself as you begin to see all the stuff you've been running away from."    -Pema Chodron

quietly...

I have taken to writing shyly, Karen Maezen Miller. It started by a casual invitation to her FB followers for some good old fashion letter writing. I took the leap and she wrote back. I wrote her a second time. (I appreciate her vision, her voice, her subtle awareness and acute sensitivity.) The other day it was her birthday so I wrote to her and said, "Happy day! On this day and each. Thank you for sharing your gifts, voice and sight with the world."
She replied, "Ah the world gave them to me and so I return with gratitude."
"Lovely. A now of gratitude, " my autocorrect at work when I meant a bow, but now works I write her.
"Always works," she replies.

And like that I learned a deep lesson. A lesson I first heard when I listened to Annie Lamott speak of on C-Span books nine years ago. I laid in our bed in Santa Clara nursing my first born son, watching her speak to a crowd of people in Washington DC, she said, "We all have brilliant ideas, stories, thoughts on faith and life and world, only I listen to them and write them down." She cajoled her audience to pay attention. To respond to the muse. At the time I longed for that spaciousness to do just as she said, pay attention, respond with writing, gift it to the world. It is only now nine years later, that I feel its urgency pressing down on me like an apple press, squeezing the juice out of its autumn harvest. I am trying to suck the marrow out of the growing awareness I am building through sitting meditation, writing practice, SourcePoint Therapy Meditation, yoga, and the deep reservoir of faith I was gifted with as a child that grew through my Catholicism and my studies with the Jesuit priests and Salesian nuns. Yes, I suddenly feel the swell of a dam breaking and the currents rushing out into the flow of the river. And so I write. I write to record and understand how to be fully alive in the present.

There was a time I could not write because I felt it catapulted me too far into the past and I lamented that past, it drained me. Now I trust it will come each day and every day like manna from heaven. No need to horde things and stuff, no need to stock up for what may be, and just like that there is absolute freedom and grace in being. I read my boys an entry that Glennon Doyle Melton wrote on Momastery about Church and it really made me realize how much hoarding comes from being scared, and lonely and tired. I was all those things as we moved us and our stuff and learned to live with less. But I worried during that time that we might need more. So I moved boxes, boxes that had not been opened in quite some time and now I am purging those boxes and my 100 year old basement of cinderblocks looks beautifully empty. Really empty. And the grace of dancing in the emptiness makes me full again. My boys replied that they are all of those things often, tried, scared and lonely. This makes me pause. Growing up while fun is work. A dance between fullness and emptiness. My second boy asks if I am friends with that writer, chiming in thoughtfully that I ought to be.

I watch my 5 year old and 7 year old compose pictures and art with abandon, and do well to encourage them. I watch my 9 year old love to print and cursive and play with fonts, and recognize the art form of calligraphy in him--something that with activities is being squelched. How do I nourish their call to create? Allow space for them to head the muse within?

I went to bed last night after a day of composing and writing and recalled my love of running downhill at my cabin, a steep hill that spilled into the lake. Our shoreline was weedy, with spots of sand and clarity, and the steps unevenly grooved and ridged. But that is the place I first learned the brilliance of letting myself fly, of letting my legs tumble feet over feet and soar down at full strength and speed playing with my balance. Landing on the dock with echoing thuds sometimes continuing to run until I jumped right into the lake, other times stopping short at the edge, plopping down on my belly and hanging my head over the dock hands plunged up to my elbows in water, smelling the algae watching the fish beneath the surface as the sunlight streamed into the cloudy water below given half hidden views to all the life that existed beneath the dock, underneath that steep hill, floating up to the surface. I learned on that hill how to run without holding myself back on the declines, how to let gravity do its thing; we must go down to go up, the beginning glimpses into flight.

When I ran down hill as a kid I loved the feeling of my hair flying free in the wind like feathers--I imagined. Locks whipping in my face. Or the weight of my pony tail bobbing behind me like a horse's tail. As I lost my hair in the height of motherhood, when women grow thick hair and lose less, I felt the failure in this. A betrayal of my body. I felt the confusion and the anger, and the helplessness, and instead of wanting to be seen, I longed to hide. To hide under hats, and behind emotions, I willed myself to not be fully seen. It is only recent that I have begun to find my stature again. My composure. It is at a time when I do not long to have another baby. My babies feel like they are all here. I loved being pregnant otherwise, but the thought of the hormonal rollercoaster sends me into a fetal position. And while I am choosing to no longer have kids, I feel the weight of that too, but not how I would imagine I will when peri-menopause sets in or later when menopause comes--and biologically the option is stripped from me.

My attention now shifts to the long locks of hair I notice on women. I saw a girl yesterday with hair down to her lower back, splayed out, blond. Hair I have never had, bleach blond, nor that long. Hair I used to gaze on with envy, but now look at in amazement, and I notice I have shifted. I am healing. This past summer I felt the presence of the Mother Mary come close to me, she has danced with me since I was a child. Coming in and out of intimacy and in different forms from the Black Madonna to Our Lady of Guadalupe, and this time she came to me in her virgin blue robes and I felt her presence behind me inviting me to shed literally my old belief systems and grow compassion. As I felt this significant shift within myself I saw image of hair pouring out of my scalp like long locks of compassion, like a river overflowing with love and the heaviness of old beliefs leave me. As soon as I became aware of being in this vision like a tranced meditation she left me, but the visceral feeling of that moment remains and when I notice myself falling into old thought patterns I do well to reconnect to that gift of Mary coming to me. Strega Nona made spaghetti like the compassionate hair I saw in my vision, never stopping spilling into the room around the house and out the door into the towns people feeding them. Rapunzel's hair brought freedom. What does my hair bring?

I lay in bed last night, reading Traveling with Pomegranates by Sue Monk Kidd, and vow never to let the voice of the muse go ignored anymore. I have spent too many years, hearing her voice and shushing her. But only after learning this lesson one final time, the night before I hear the voice, and told myself I would remember the inspiration in the morning. Only to wake and recall a figment of it; something about spiraling toward myself again, and nothing more. And, so as I lay in bed tonight and the muse comes to me, about listening to the small interior voice, that gives me scents of story on a trail, I listen. I rise, and follow its scent on the winds, and I write. A new practice, to replace the old habit. To give voice to what the world gives me, and run downhill again with abandon.

Fall-en Goals

With the advent of fall we rearranged our rooms. With this rearrangement, came a reshifting of goals. There is something about the start of school that brings both sorrow and resolve. The languid days of summer with swimming punctuating our days gives way to flurry of pencil sharpening and uniform preps for the first day of school post labor day. 

With this surge of organizational activity I feel the urge to cleanse our house of stuff, of dormant idleness, and really an urge to move. I've moved many falls since I have been an adult so when the season of fall becomes apparent I get that itch. Instead of moving this year though, I decided to move rooms. And by rooms, every bedroom but the babies was involved. My sweet husband tolerated it, although did not feel the urge to do this. Finn's room became Kieran's room and my office. Our room became Finn and Liam's room. Liam and Ki Ki's room became ours. Did you follow that? Lots of beds were taken apart, reassembled and then taken apart again when the positioning in the room was not just so. 

During all this dusty upheaval came our kitchen farm table from the kitchen to my office/third's bedroom, where I resolved to get busy with my fall writing projects. 

Zen Desk-September light streaming in.

My nighttime view as I write...One of my sweets!

I need goals. I need the space to achieve those goals. And, I wanted to start my own schooling with the commencement of my boys schooling. The following is in no particular order, but is numbered for sanities sake--don't numbers look nice?!

1. Writing in my notebook...make this a daily meditation. When it is not daily do not get frustrated and feel all is lost, only reopen it and write. As you once wisely said: "Your notebook will not judge you it is always there waiting for you." 
2. Pull out past notebooks and start to piece together the hair book...daunting but necessary dragon to slay in order to move onward.
3. Write some shorter feature essays or short stories to send out to magazines.
4. Write some more posts for Outside.
5. Write daily poems--or at least weekly.
6. Recommit to the Nest!
7. Read good books. Good reading makes for good writing.

Then life happened to me and all my above goals gave way to real life.

Wild thing... you make my heart sing...you make everything...

Wild thing...I think I love you

Doulaing for a friend who's baby would have an intricately short life, reluctantly companioning my dog, Emma, through her sickness, Peter traveling oodles (thank God he is back again), and launching Yoga Calm classes at my boys school accompanied by six stitches in my achilles, and my zen office/third's bedroom now looks like this!

Real Life Zen Desk.

But guess what, all it took was some realization that I was missing my writing. Missing the page. Missing showing up. And realizing that without writing and exercise I can not do anything else with grace and composure, it's a life line for me. And guess what, confessing to you that I was spinning in my sorrow about the previous paragraph helped! Once I got that out and heard the gentle reassuring voice that nothing is ever lost, it all comes out in it's own time I was able to unclench, open my notebook, sit at my cluttered farm desk with the seasonal-clothes-switch-out still begging me for my attention, and like Max be able to tell the baskets: "Be still! And tamed them with the magic trick"--not now I am writing!

"BE STILL!"

River Legs

I am sitting at our kitchen table writing while the entire house naps. It is raining outside again, overcast, sky filled by cloud coverage, no sun in sight. I feel as if I live in Seattle instead of Saint Paul. This summer has been filled with rain, only punctuated by sun. The drenched squelch of the Twin Cities is such a contrast to the forest fires and aridness of Santa Fe.

Reading Katie’s post about her awesome river trip brings back that sweet day last spring when Katie and Steve took our crew down the Rio Grande. We were so stoked that anyone would give such an offer! Katie and Steve were just the couple to do it too, they have the skill, knowledge, and experience of having young kids out on the river. I was psyched and ready to have our virgin voyage be with them. Our motley crew consisted of: Kieran who was 15 mos. old, and fiercely attached to his paci, Pippa nearing two, Finn and Liam 5 and 3 respectively, Baby Maisy still in Katie’s belly, while Baby Seamus was yet to be. We launched. It felt amazing to be on the river, sun high, wind breezing over us as Steve steered us gracefully down the river with such strength.

Readying to launch...Kieran in the flag swimsuit.

We picnicked on the bank for a break since Kieran was ready to launch himself into the Rio Grande, but only managed to launch his paci.

Our panic at his paci launch! “Paci overboard!” We yelled as we scrambled to save it without tipping the boat. Novice mistake to only bring one for him. That meant we couldn’t plug his whininess.

Pippa to the rescue! She graciously gave up her paci for the common good.

Only to rediscover and reclaim Kieran’s lost paci hours later down river, nothing short of a miracle.

Exposing our boys to “adventure and fresh-air,” seemed so easy to do in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Now I grapple with finding ways to “let the kids explore and be wild, and play outside and get dirty and not have every minute scheduled with Stuff and Things to Do,” like your dad cautioned. So far this summer we have had art camp, and baseball, and soccer, and swim lessons…and when Liam pushed back and told me he didn’t want any scheduled sports, he just wants to be four and play outside I heeded to his wise lead. Finn on the other hand seems to relish his practices and games. Am I losing him to this march of the sporting world? Where are the idle arroyo explorations? The leisurely hikes, (leisurely because the littles were in tow)?

Leisure break with the littles.

Or just playing in the red dirt building short-lived dams with buckets of precious water, watching stink bugs lift up their rear ends? It seems to be such a delicate balance, and one I strive to strike again before I am out! Thanks for this sweet reminder.

The Flash playing ball.

Ripped from the Nest(s)

A few days ago, I rode a snowmobile out of the mountains. It was just after 7 AM and across the valley, the Valhalla Range glowed orange in the new day. After two switchbacks, we left the sun behind and buzzed beneath Western red cedars that smelled moist and alive, like spring. The sky was scraped clear of clouds and a brilliant, unapologetic blue, and as we hurtled through the forest, I felt both fantastically grateful and a little bit sad. 

The ski season was officially over, and so was my stay at Snowwater, a ridiculously gorgeous wilderness lodge at 5,400 feet in the Bonnington Range nine miles outside of Nelson, British Columbia. For the past four days, I’d been holed up in the mountains with some of the raddest adventure women in Canada, skiing untracked powder, doing yoga, practicing silent meditation, and learning the basics of holistic nutrition. This was all part of the inaugural Cat Sass, a women’s-only “empowderment” retreat run by local ski guide and adventure entrepreneur Galena Pal. 

Galena is 27 and has worked at some of the best backcountry ski lodges in British Columbia, where 99.9 percent of the guests are men. Desperate to change that, she invented Cat Sass and enlisted the help of her friends to teach yoga and nutrition, pamper us with spa treatments and massages, and guide us down some of the sickest lines we’d ski all winter (well, in my case, some of the only lines I’d ski all winter). 

loading up Snocat, leaving spring behind 

Crazily enough, I’d been on the fence about going. Driving out of Santa Fe before dawn last Friday, my two girls at home sleeping in their cribs, I’d chanted to myself “You can do this, You can do this.” For 9 months I’d felt trapped and antsy in the baby bubble, desperate for some room to roam. Now that I was finally breaking out—just me and my breast pump!—I felt like I was being torn from my baby, and she from me. I wasn't sure I wanted to go.  

But then I boarded the plane to Salt Lake City and there were no tiny children clinging to me and I could actually read a magazine—two!—and the fog lifted from my brain and I had six or so creative thoughts in a row, one of which was This is pretty great. And then I got on the next flight to Spokane and I might have actually dozed off, and no one was yammering at me, and I was officially GONE! Outta there. All the anxiety and pointless fretting and gloomy what-ifs had vanished, and in their place: sweet freedom!

freshies

Many hours later I was on a SnoCat rumbling up the road to Snowwater, with a bunch of Canadian women. We were still strangers to each other, so I didn’t know that one of them was a former expert downhill mountain biker who’d crashed so many times, and so hard, she now suffered from constant migraines, or one had helped invent a sport called noboarding (that’s snowboarding without bindings) or that one was an avid sport climber and artist and another was a former champion swimmer-turned-holistic nutritionist. All I knew is that they had the exotic look of inveterate mountain women, with their beat-up fur-trimmed Sorels, thick Peruvian sweaters, scuffed Hunter wellies, Quebecois accents, and dark, wild-woman hair that hadn’t seen sun for months. I idolized them immediately. 

The only other time I’d done a women’s only trip was an avalanche course seven years ago. One whole element—men—had been removed from the equation, and in its place bloomed a nurturing sense of girl-power, completely void of competitive machismo. Cat Sass felt the same, right off the bat: uncomplicated, easy. We were here, with each other, and could be exactly who we were, with no pretense or posturing. 

we wore avy beacons to keep us safe

First and foremost, we were skiers, and we dropped steep lines, stacking our tracks in curvy figure 8s next to Maria’s, our lead guide and co-owner of Snowwater. To keep from triggering avalanches, we skied one at a time, so there was no frenzied rushing or trying to be the first to the bottom. Is there anything more annoying than trying to keep up with someone the backcountry, especially when that someone is your husband or boyfriend? Didn’t think so. Hurrying takes you out of your body and into your head, where mental static interrupts the flow and nothing feels quite right. 

We spent one morning in silence, sitting in meditation, eating breakfast, and then snowshoeing to the top of meadow where we gathered in a circle. Earlier, we’d written on small scraps of paper our wishes or intentions, fears and desires, anything that had come to us during sitting meditation that we wanted to send off into the universe. Galena carried a small metal tin, and we lit our papers one at a time and watched them smolder and released them with the smoke into the mountain air. It felt good to let go and say a small prayer to the fearless writer and mother and adventurer I want to be. 

 

The night before we left, we put on silly wigs and danced like crazy around the dining room. We were celebrating the ahi tuna we'd had for dinner, April's 32nd birthday and the baby boy in her belly, and four perfect days cocooned in the mountains, the deafening racket of real life muted, if only for a little while. That morning in yoga, I'd done a headstand for the first time. I'd forgotten what it feels like to focus so intently on learning something new, undistracted by tiny clinging babies and screeching toddlers and deadlines like thunderheads on the horizon, and just be present. Here and now. 

Snowwater had become my new nest, and I didn’t want to leave, but if I had to go, surely I could figure out ways to bring Cat Sass home with me. I climbed onto the snowmobile and held on for the ride.