Cat-Walking from Child's Pose

I lay in child's pose this morning feeling my breath enter my hips that were tight from sleep and lack of exercise these past few days. With the start of school my running and yoga schedule have yet to settle into their new routine. Feeling my spirit floating above my physical body I willed it to come back in, as I came into crescent lunge and returned to child's pose this time sinking a little deeper, feeling my breath circulate into my legs out of my contracted spine. And flashes of walking and my childhood catwalk came to me, the call to write flooded me and with a few more yoga poses I rose and begin to type as a recent post of Pema Chodron floated in my consciousness.

Maybe the only enemy is that we don’t like the way reality is now and therefore wish it would go away fast. But what we find as practitioners is that nothing ever goes away until it has taught us what we need to know.

–Pema Chodron, When Things Fall Apart

***

I sat up in the hospital bed nursing Seamus, the pediatrician on-call entered, rubbing her hands enthusiastically with the foaming soap as she asked how I was doing, and introduced herself. I asked my midwife to note on my chart that no I did not have cancer and yes I was ok, even though pregnancy had left me nearly bald, with only a few strands of dark hair on the top of my head, the strands of hope that one day my locks would return. Bob, my teacher of SourcePoint Therapy and Healer and friend, suggested I shave my head when it was happening, but I couldn't bring myself to do it I was so attached to having hair. In hindsight, I think it would have helped me get over it quicker. But here and now that no longer matters. What it shows me is how much I struggled to accept my reality that I was losing hair. That pregnancy and hormones and sleepless nights and many moves was taking a toll on my physical body that I thought I could continue to ignore. 

The pediatrician began looking over Seamus from head to toe, checking his reflexes and listening to his sweet heartbeat that earlier I had heard through the intermittent monitoring the midwife was required to do. What was once audible in the hospital room was now only heard through her stethoscope, and what was once felt on the inside of me was now felt against my chest as I nursed him on the outside. She turned to look at me, my head wrapped in a turban, and asked, "Are you ok?" Her eyes scrutinizing my body from head to toe. The unasked question lurking beneath the ok.
"Yes," I replied with shaky confidence.
She said, "Is your cancer prognosis good?"
Had she not read my chart? Keenly aware of the power of a doctor's words on a person's psyche and reality when it came to healing, I wondered. The one scenario I hoped would not bring itself into reality was being played out, like through my fear I had called it forth. I curled myself around my now nursing newborn son, to shield my heart from her, and try to shield her medical stare as she assessed what was happening in this baby's postpartum mother. I faltered and glanced up as I wiggled his body flush with my stomach for a better latch. "No, I am good. No cancer," wincing as he clamped down setting off the post birth contractions again deep in my uterus. "It's alopecia." At least that was the western term they named unexplained hair loss. I was yet to unearth my low ferratin levels, extremely low, those iron stores hidden beneath my ok hemoglobin. I was yet to realize my Vitamin D deemed ok by western standards of medicine was borderline low and that these two culprits can play key role in fatigue, hair loss etc. I was also yet to admit that I was hard on myself, harder than I would wish on any one else. And I was yet to realize how much stress I carried within my thoughts and body and daily reality.

Doctors I would seek counsel from would offer generously are you stressed and I would reply no, not me. I was so stressed I hadn't realized what not being stressed felt like. On some levels, I had grown up in an environment of stress and anger. It felt like a natural backdrop to being. To existing. I asked if she had read my chart as the information was in there.  The doctor apologized, blushed and excused herself. I was relieved she was not someone I would need to see again as she was only a ped on-call and returned my focus to Seamus long sweet sweeping sucks from chin to jawline letting me know he was properly attached. Wishing I could make my hair grow like his sucks made my milk let down. I thought of Medusa's snakes emerging wildly and quickly out of her head. Not knowing how much compassion I would need to nurture for this to happen to my scalp. Wondering how much worse it could possibly become at the four month marker when I typically had a shedding and knowing there was nothing left to shed. Also wondering what I could do to shift this reality and feeling lost in the pool of my emotions that flooded me post birth.

I remember walking the morning Seamus was born, 9 months and 13 days into being pregnant with him, a light mist fell and I wore Peter's chartreuse colored Patagonia rain jacket the only thing that would fit around my expanse, and a white hat. I walked the streets of my neighborhood up and down and felt myself filtering between the sublime world of here and the majestical world of how things become; transform into life. I imagined how God may have felt as he built the world each day out of something into form, how the blueprint for human health was informing my child's being and becoming and how connected I felt to it within me and around me pregnant. I felt the crescent moon waxing beneath my belly and the pull of its tide for him to be born growing stronger as I walked and the contractions, the surges picked up pace, until I returned home, knowing deeply within that this would be the last morning I would know my baby as I knew him, cloaked in darkness absorbing the world through sound and taste and emotions moving through me to him, and the sound of my heartbeat and its rhythms against his feet that now pressed up under my rib cage and the breath patterns I was consciously and unconsciously passing his way.

The midst and the colors of the world seen through the light April rain bridged the world of form emerging and I felt calm and blessed to know intimately the power of motherhood, the power of the great mother that informs our world if we only pay attention, take heed. Know that each moment there is  a present playing out and storyline of past and future unfurling with thought and action and breath. From my studies of SourcePoint Therapy I have heard this definition of karma form Padmasambhava, " If you want to know your past life, look into your present conditions. If you want to know your future life, look into your present actions."  Someone said to me that an embryo needs karma to come into form. It has me thinking about all that comes into place to make us come into being. It deepens my desire to learn more about the mystery that unfolds through conception and pregnancy and birth. To bring health to the now, and to how we live is a calling I feel deeply. I only fully grasped this call in me from my own health journey to live better to fully embody this body, this soul, this calling into the deeper call to be joyous and loving--moving away from the small scared sense of self into the larger S of Self.

What do our injuries, our dis-eases wake us up to? What do they stand to call our attention toward? Is it for more suffering--I think we can fall into that thought and nurse it, but I think it is to awaken that deep sense of wonder of reverence. Do we need disease and suffering and injury for this to happen? I would like to think no. We are living in a time where we can get weighed down by the fear, suffering and anger present in the world. I by no means am suggesting to ignore that, but to be aware of it and to call ourselves toward love, toward healing and wholeness is a practice and one that takes dedication and energy and perseverance. Considering what the great mother energy of the world is asking of us is no small feat, but something we can heed and nurture.

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.

We Need to Walk Before We Can Fly

I am walking more and more these gorgeous fall days that are stretching summer into the narrowing path toward winter. I find these slower paces a way to catch up to myself, really feel my body's movement patterns and habits, and bring awareness to the miracle of walking. I find myself contemplating, if our wings grow out of the soft spot behind our heart and attach further down at the highest point of our sacrum, it is there that I think our walking pattern emerges, shoulder connecting to opposite hip through that place of wing attachment. An x marks the spot so to speak. Front and back body connected so that my stride is fully supported by my glutes and my abdominal rectus muscles making my connection from earth to sky one of tall alignment, not of collapse. Feeling my spine pivot at the four places it curves naturally as my body takes its steps.

My walks bring me downhill toward the Mississippi River, into my stomping grounds as a child, my old neighborhood. It is here, I am told F. Scott Fitzgerald got his inspiration for the Great Gatsby. My yard connected with my neighbor's parcels of land was once the site of the Crosby Mansion. An estate that once sat prominently on the majestic land, but a vision of grandeur that could not sustain itself past Crosby's life. Wealth evaporated when he died. It makes me wonder about legacy and the role of material wealth in legacy. Material wealth is not what I have dedicated my life toward. When I enter the neighborhood set one block from the Mississippi, my whole body calms, my breath returns to me like I imagine it entered me as a newborn as I figured out my patterns of breathing and the rhythms of the house, and listened to the spirits of the trees, and the magic of the flowers in the gardens around me...the scent of lilacs wafting into my open window in the back of the house.

The power of scent so strong that two years ago when I ran my first ten miles post Seamus' birth, and I found myself with my neighbor, a track star in college, Michelle, encouraging me on as my body wanted to collapse in on itself from lack of strength and stamina, we took to the Summit Ave trails into Lilac ally and the mere scent of those flowers grabbed hold of me and I began to sob. Full on tears. Michelle turned to me to ask what was wrong and all I could conjure up at the time was that these were the flowers of my childhood, flowers I could pick and tuck into my hair behind my ear, and sit in my sundresses on our porch and pose for a Polaroid my sister, Anne, snapped of me.
At the time the longing for my hair, longing for my physical beauty. A longing so visceral and deep it took hold of me in those lilac arches. I cringed at the way my beauty faded, or what I told myself had faded with the shedding of each strand of hair; strand by strand; baby by baby--worsening at my four month postpartum mark, this time leaving me quite nearly bald. I wondered out loud to Michelle how my husband could ever think of me as pretty or beautiful or even sexy, like in my hair loss I had not only failed myself but him as well. He never complained about my looks--which even writing that now I still find hard to believe. Did he secretly speak to his brother about it? No, I just can't imagine, perhaps this is the silver lining of Irish denial, it can be so thick that the obvious can go without complaint or focus. But was I focused on it and focused on it in loops of what if it never comes back, what if I am always bald?

That ten mile run set the pace for a deep release, I felt a healing wash over me as I cried and ran and cried and Michelle encouraged me onward. We ran through lilac ally into the open trails of the boulevard ducking pine boughs and shielded from the sun by the branches of old Oaks and Maples rooted into the green earth, while our feet kicked up the dust of the worn single track trail from runners. We turned left onto Fairview Ave, the last mile of the ten, and streetlight by streetlight we made our way to the finish, the coffee shop at Randolph and Fairview. Here other runners would meet for post run chat and a deep cup of coffee--mine usually being whole milk hot chocolate. Triumphant and emotionally tapped we arrived.

Michelle who is also a family doctor who delivers babies really healed a part of me I hadn't known was lost to me until that scent of a multitude of lilac bushes in full bloom that only happens once a year in June came at me in full force. Those same lilac bushes of lavender and white and dark grape color lined my childhood backyard. Our line for drying clothes were shrouded by them scenting our sheets for those sweet three weeks in June. In winter they outlined themselves like Narnia a winter wonderland, some of their branches finely pointed and when outlined with fresh wet snow reminded me of a winter ice queen's nails. I could get lost in those branches for hours when it snowed. Buried in the magic of each unique snowflake, under the wide expanse of blue sky and huge hanging clouds-- soggy with condensation letting each drop of water fall out of them and be transformed into crystals that would bless the earth. I would lay down in the fresh snow and make snow angels feeling the wide expanse of my wings in the snow carefully sitting up trying not to press too far into the place where I sat so as to disturb the imprint of the winter winged being I would leave behind me. Working to jump out leaving no markings. Sometimes this worked; regardless always an exercise in careful movement.


As I continued my walk, I came past the house I grew up in, and without thought my feet went straight to the "catwalk" as it was referred to in my school aged days. I left the quiet streets I was walking I followed the stones up the hill that blocked this part of the neighborhood off from the busier part of the world, cutting through the Plunketts yard and then into Mrs Brooks, who I happened to see coming down her staircase from her garage, older now, but recognizable. At 39 I flushed being caught cutting through. I paused and explained myself. She laughed and smiled, "Yes, I remember you, this used to be the unofficial cat walk of course you can cut through. Just say hi when you do if I see you." She was struggling to get her suitcase down the stairs, I offered to help. She declined. So I waited my turn for her Brady Bunch styled staircase and then leapt those stairs two at a time landing myself in the ally. Once in the ally I paused to make sure I was about to cut across the sidewalk of the Queenens old yard and back down the hill to the other side of the neighborhood. Landing on Mount Curve Blvd I began the walk I did every day for years up Stanford to my elementary school, where my kids now attend, and I walked past it to the house we now call home in Tangletown.

Back at home this morning as the sunshine pours in all our windows and it feels more like August than almost October, I find Seamus calling for Peter as I finish my morning coffee. I walk up the stairs to meet him. He glances at the People magazine our neighbor, Mrs Lanagren, bequeaths to me after she reads them, and asks "Who is that?"I glance at the curved wooden banister where unopened mail sits and atop of it the recent magazine with Joan Lunden on the cover smiling brilliantly, confidently, I think, even, with her bald head. She wears a touch of makeup and earrings and diamond rings and the cover says she is fighting cancer. I explain she lost her hair, but now it is growing back to Seamus. Feeling the truth of this in my own bones as I hold him around his waist kneeling on the steps to be lower than he is; I am not wearing my wig and my hair is wild and bedheady. "Is that a girl?" he asks. Yes it is...and then as he lays down on the landing and I hold his feet I recount a story to him. "When I was pregnant with you, I lost my hair and now it is growing back."

Silently I worried he would not love me when he was born and saw his mother with very little hair. I am riveted back to that feeling of embarrassment I held as I thought about giving birth in the hospital and what would the nurses and doctor think of me? I worried that they would presume cancer. I worried that I would be judged for not being able to grow hair like I did babies, beautifully and brilliantly. I worried that when my newborn son gazed up at me and I down at him, he would cringe, maybe even be sad he had chosen a mom who had no hair. The worry so huge and looming that during a meditation I was deeply, soothed, when I realized "This baby already loves you deeply, and nothing can change that." While this quieted that fear then, on our landing with my "baby" now three, I recall that current and I tell him about it and he laughs his mischievous smile. He teases me, "I don't love you." And I reply, "Yes you do," and we chorus that way for a few moments before I tickle his stomach causing him to giggle and pull his arms resting beneath his head out to block my hands. I gallop over him up the rest of the stairs back to my studio to write.

Grateful I am not fighting or learning how to heal from cancer, and grateful for the awareness to be grateful for my autoimmune disease that has begin to reveal to me the deep need to love myself. The deep call to love oneself because from there all else flows. And, the deep realization how much of our beauty is rooted inside the soul, emanating out through our heart space flowing out our arms, into the currents of our palms, how we move in the world. Our mind, it is just that, our mind, thoughts floating trying to make sense of things, and sometimes taking us down paths away from the current moment. The practice of meditation helps train the mind and the body to sit and stay, like a puppy mastering a command I am growing into my adult size dog so to speak.

As I write this three of my boys are playing banker with the fisher price cash register I had growing up and their notebooks are out drawing and a pretend cell phone rings and they talk to their boss about driving some place. The sunlight comes through the window casting its rays on my right hand as my left hand stays in the shadow of the day yet to emerge from the positioning of the sun in the sky, but day I know will come. Sometimes I am in deep awe at the beauty of this ordinary moment and too often I am asleep to its beauty falling into the dullness of the day: of the morning routines of breakfast, dressing and making beds (or really encouraging others to make their bed), that I fall out of the amazement of our pure existence. The breathing of the earth that gives rise to life and patterning as I know it in this moment. I watch as my boys navigate the folded and unfolded piles of clean laundry to continue their play within my presence. Ducking through the laundry room to their rooms and back again to the other side of the laundry room where the studio exists. Some mornings lately I wake and do my practice of giving thanks for the day and for each of my boys and husband and myself and I marvel at the collective breathing happening under our roof at the same time, and know I will miss it when they are launched and gone, but that is not now, and now is all we have. And I know this as I marvel at the fact that humans can walk on two feet and wonder how we can use our wings to fly.

Chronic Tension

It is the height of summer and I'm in class teaching. We have come to the end of the 60 minutes of somayoga. The yogis are invited to enter into corpse pose, I invite them to sink a little deeper. To release more. To practice the muscle of letting go. Most are fit and in shape and used to working hard to bring tone and physical definition to their bodies, but in this class we are experimenting with how much tension we can release and still function.

Most know how to feel tight. Many know how to feel strength. I know I do. I do it with regular ease, I hold tension. Its an underlying current most of the time I have never realized resides in my body. I clutch. I hold in contraction. Tightness can be my norm; if unexamined. I realize this more this summer. It is such a contradiction to what summer calls for, being in full bloom. Open. Relaxed. Basking in the sunlight. Growing toward the sun. Being deeply rooted into the nutrients of the earth.

With this growing awareness, I have begun to play with how much tension I can release. How much awareness I can bring to my chronic tension. How much I can exhale and let go. While a certain amount of tension is helpful to have for daily activities, the unconscious chronic tension most of us hold as we stand, walk, run, even miraculously hold on to as we lie down is amazing. I can be lying down and my neck can act like it is still in an upright position. My hand can still be clutched like I carried grocery bags into the house and have yet to fully set them down, like their ghostly memory lingers onward.  Unless I slowly bring an internal light to my body and invite it to release.

art by David Hackney

Why do we hold unnecessary tension? I wonder if this chronic tension held in the body is some of the origins of unexamined anger or our hurried nature doing and doing. Does the exhale come when we be? The anger that lurks beneath the surface, and seeps or explodes out when the external pressures become too much, when the nervous system screams, "Stop! I have had enough!!!" I became aware at how much I no longer want to hold this excess tension, this harbored anger in my soma, my body, my system at the last advanced intensive I did in SourcePoint Therapy. A larger awareness washed over me while I had a session, and a long exhale followed of my entire system especially of my physical body that said, I am tired of that anger, I no longer want to know that current. And I felt it leave me. It has me aware, alert to its presence how much can I release, let go of, no longer harbor so that I can remain in full bloom?

Differences

You caught yourself musing over lines, strokes, differences on a predawn run the other day. The difference in three strokes. Three markings. Their directions can make a difference between a capitol A and a capitol Z. Each have three strokes. Yet the letters vary in placement, meaning, and usage greatly.You sit here at night as you write still considering this as you hear the West Seventh cross-country train sound its horn warning the city of its impending approach. A soundtrack that plays in the backdrop of your life. So many sounds that go unnoticed. This train zooms through here with urgency over tracks that are a mile away from your home in Saint Paul, and yet the train's whistle can instantaneously place you in the backyard of the rail yard at the Santa Fe Hotel where this train first came into your awareness. This train is one of the same trains that sits there, where you used to live. The pale yellow box car with the words Santa Fe painted on it in fading red letters. Yes, that box car you noted from your hotel window has passed you at the tracks in Saint Paul and you have sat in your car and watched, as your boys in the back seat delighted at the sight of so many cars, such a long train, passing before their eyes.

Today you swam in the Highland Pool for the first time without a swim cap, without a hair covering, in front of others. You battled and played with the sound track that floated through your mind with each stroke as you did lap after lap of 100's. I wonder what my spotty hair growth looks like to others. Should I have worn the swim cap? You extend your arm scooping water that is in front of you back as you swim. These thoughts like that faint whistle sounding off, a whistle that many nights goes unnoticed. You begin to sense and feel your body from the inside out. Letting the outside judgements float away. Let yourself know yourself from within. You watch. You play being the witness of your thoughts that the practice of yoga, of meditation, of running invite you to be with your life. You watch as your little self shrinks. The thoughts that can pull you down, thoughts that can make you sink without enough ability to catch your next inhale get pushed behind you with your next arm stroke and your feet flutter kick them away.

In between your training plan's laps you rest standing in the shallow end, head above water, playing with the plunge between watching others watch you and the self consciousness that comes from that, and you watching yourself as you moved through water, now standing tall to rest, letting the thoughts move through you. Pulling yourself back toward thoughts of love. Thoughts of  I am enough as I am.  This leads you into playful territory. Into playing with breathing on your left side of your freestyle and alternating your breath between arm cycles. Extending your exhale to naturally lengthen your inhale. Hair, no hair. Three strokes. Covering up. Not covering up. A. Z. Caring. Not caring. Playing with "both and ands" and shedding the "either or" mentality. Letting go of right and wrong thinking and allowing yourself to experiment, to play with cause and effects. Tomorrow you will run the annual trail race at Afton Alps, a 25k, and you've been there before, but this time it is different. And as you conclude this post, the whistle of the passing train sounds in the distance and you become aware again.

Lessons from the Dragon Mother

For the past few days, I’ve been spending what feels like every waking minute hunched over my computer, editing a video of three-year-old Pippa learning to ride her bike. This is my first time, and though it is time consuming and frustrating, like learning another language, it's also weirdly satisfying. I say weirdly because I'm not the most patient or present person when it comes to DIY, especially high-tech DIY (and anything involving speaker wires, hammers, or yardsticks). 

But as of this morning, after a 3.8 magnitude earthquake rumbled my writing loft, doing its best imitation of a furnace about to explode, and after I spent the next hour combing the web for reports of a quake, checking and double checking our boiler room for gas leaks, installing the carbon monoxide alarm that’s been languishing, forgotten, in our closet, I have a quasi-presentable little clip—set to music and not horrendously jittery—to show for my efforts. I taught myself how to do something. How novel. 

And how frivolous. 

That’s because, somewhere across town, right here in Santa Fe, a mother’s baby is dying of Tay-Sachs disease. If the story sounds familiar that’s because the mother, Emily Rapp, wrote an eloquent, devastating essay in Sunday’s New York Times. I began following Emily’s story last winter, after our mutual writer friend, Rob, introduced us on Facebook. She taught creative writing and had new baby and loved to hike, he told me. We should get together with our babies. We should be friends. 

But my father was dying, and I was preoccupied with grieving and traveling—specifically, grieving and traveling with a five-month old in tow. By the time I got around to following up on Rob’s introduction, it was January, and Emily’s Facebook page had a worrisome tone. I scanned back a few days, weeks and then forward, trying to make sense of what I was reading. There were mentions of doctor appointments and missed milestones, encouraging comments from concerned friends. Then, in plain black type, came the diagnosis: Tay-Sachs disease. A rare, fatal, genetic disorder without treatment or cure. Shocking that something so shattering could be laid bare on the screen, seemingly innocuous and unadorned.

I sat at my computer on that Saturday morning, as the world outside frosted over, feeling stunned. I didn’t know Emily. I didn’t know her son, Ronan, but I knew this terrible, final, irrevocable thing about her. I felt as though I ought to know her better, now that I held this terrible news, even while I knew with unequivocal certainty that we would not go hiking or go out for tea afterwards and talk about our favorite writers or new books we loved. Our friendship was over before it began. But what I didn’t know is that I would think of Emily nearly every single day since then, and marvel at her strength and bravery as a mother and weep for her dark-haired one-year-old son who might not live to be three. 

But many days when I thought of her, it was with despair and fear for my own children, for their fragility and mine. How is it possible to keep them safe, to keep us all safe? Last fall when my father was dying, I saw for first time how life hangs in a delicate balance, a spider web of hope, good health, and possibility strung from the ceiling, tenuous and easily swept away. Every irrational fear that could worm its way into my brain did, lodged there like an unwelcome, intractable houseguest. I spent many months in a deep state of anxiety. I had known, of course, that everyone eventually dies. But I hadn’t really known it. And now that I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, worrying about it, dreading it. Emily’s story haunted me, a devastating reminder that it happens to anyone, everyone, all the time: to fathers who are not so very old and children who are far too young and to mothers who love them madly. 

All winter and spring, I read her essays and blog posts, and watched as she grappled with Ronan’s illness and her own unscripted role as a mother of, as The New York Times put it, “a child with no future.” Her writing was eloquent and unflinching—reading her stories, I could tell that the act of writing was essential to her, a way to save her own life even if she couldn’t save Ronan’s. There was nothing extraneous—every deliberate word seemed to propel her forward into a new uncertain world, her world, like hands fumbling for a light switch in a darkened room. One step, and then another—words on the page a lifeline from this moment to the next. I felt this, viscerally, absolutely, and was filled with admiration. 

And guilt. How could I write about running or eating peaches or teaching my three-year-old to ride a bike or my one-year-old to sit still in a raft like a seasoned river baby, when another mother, whose baby will never grow to ride a bike, was wrestling with the biggest question of all: How do I help my child live and die with grace and dignity? If I really thought about it, it seemed possible, and perhaps preferable, to stop writing altogether. 

But I didn’t. Emily inspired me. I kept muddling through, even when the hollowness of my own stories, the seeming inconsequential-ness of them, felt like a deliberate slap in the face to this Santa Fe mother whom I didn’t know but who had been generous and open enough to let me feel as though I did. 

Like most writers, I write to make sense of the world, and my own life. Sometimes when I’m very lucky, the world and my little slice of it overlap in serendipitous ways, and I remember again how important it is to always keep my heart and eyes open, that inspiration comes from remarkable places, and that everything leads us to a new place. When this happens, it feels as though we are pieces in a larger puzzle that is slowly forming, fitting itself together, revealing itself gradually, in increments, until we can see a new picture in its entirety. This is how it has felt reading Emily: uncomfortable, terrifying, tragic, humbling, illuminating.

Now, after reading "Notes from a Dragon Mom," I see my fear and self-doubt in a new light, with more patience, acceptance, and compassion. “Parenting, I’ve come to understand, is about loving my child today,” she writes. “Now. In fact, for any parent, anywhere, that’s all there is.” These words are a gift, and consolation, to us all, but at such an unbearable cost. 

So I will keep racing after Pippa as she wobbles around the basketball court on her pedal bike. I will hike on Tuesday mornings with Maisy on my back, up to the same ledgy overlook with all of Santa Fe sprawling out below me. I will spend ridiculous, untold hours editing scrappy little homemade movies, and I will keep writing, about raising my daughters to be fiercely alive, outdoors, in the wind and the sun, crashing their bikes and getting back on again. This is OK. This is more than OK. This is what I do today. This is how I live now. This is all there is. 

Echo

At your suggestion I dove into Poser. And, while I am only on the second chapter, I can already see how it mirrors my own life, living back at home amongst concentric circles of complicated family and friend relationships. Rallying against the liberal, know what’s best for your child by ingesting organic only foods child-rearing, following a code of mommy ethics that cloaked in freedom harbor restrictions. And I feel myself wonder, how did you know not to move back east once you and Steve began having babies? What innate wisdom did you acquire that I lack(ed)? Deep breath. It feels too surreal like an echo of my current life, and I am only on Chapter Two, do I brave the rest?

Peter is traveling again amongst the mountain ranges of Utah verses in the back country of Canada showing clients the wind farms that are already built and that will be built. And I find I am struggling with my old friend, anger. She seems to come out in the morning and at night when my resources or time is limited. She comes in the form of having to ask my kids repeatedly to do something. “Please get your pajamas on. Please get your pajamas on. Please get your pajamas on. Please don’t make me ask again. I am getting angry. Please will you get your pajamas on???” Boiling point hit, voice rises. Boys respond. I feel horrible. Outcome achieved but at a price.


So I ask how can I break this pattern and create a healthier one…as I write this the only thing that pops into my mind is trying to take the rush out of things and add humor—ok so that is two things. But come on, what else do you implore when you are well, imploring? When the echo of your requests rings so loud you can almost transport yourself to a canyon you're hiking and the sound of your voice reverberates off the walls.

Picture from our New Year's Day Hike 2011 with our families just outside of Santa Fe, NM

So my plea tonight? Resources please…how do you request something when the first request goes unnoticed by your child and your exhaustion at the situation is hitting a boiling point? Resources please!

In the Tangle

Life is crazy at our house right now. Steve’s getting ready to go backcountry skiing in British Columbia for 10 days, and P. is in her third week of a hitting craze—by far the longest one she’s had since M. was born seven months ago. It seems she’s smacking, jabbing, scratching, or pinching her baby sister every chance she gets. We’re on the defensive, unable to sit still for more than a few seconds, trying to anticipate the unpredictable, block her blows, and maintain some semblance of normalcy. But what’s normal when your terrible two-and-half-year old has turned into a snarling little wolverine? 

I’m the younger sister, so P’s aggression—however “developmentally normal” it might be—hits a nerve like a clumsy dentist with a drill. In my effort to protect tiny, unfailingly cheerful M., I lose my cool more often than I should. If P is hitting to get our attention, then I’m playing right into her game. 

parenthood: just trying to go with the flow

We’ve tried time-outs and apologies, distraction and one-on-one time and positive reinforcement for her good behavior. But it all feels a bit desperate and scattershot. We don’t have a strategy or a system. So I’ve been inhaling books from the library, pawing through Zen self-help bibles on my shelf, and polling my friends for ideas. 

I’m cribbing to find the best advice, solutions, and words of wisdom. I know there’s no magic bullet—Zen teachers would say that I already have the answers inside of me; if so, you can come out now!—but I need to create a cheat sheet for discipline in our house, a personal philosophy that I can stick on the fridge to cool me down when the moment gets hot. 

Got anything to add to this list?

15 Mantras for Compassionate Discipline *

1. This too shall pass. 

2. Discipline is love. Discipline is teaching. 

3. Model the behavior you want. 

4. Stay calm and carry on. Use a calm voice and a clear response.

5. Trust your intuition: “You will always know what you need to know when you need to know it.” —Karen Maezen Miller

6. Praise more than you criticize. Ask for what you want, not want you don’t want. 

7. Talk. We can’t read each other’s minds or feelings. 

8. Accept each other without judgment. Don’t label. Children aren’t bad; their behavior is.

9. Let them know you believe in their inherent goodness and their ability to get control and act kindly. 

10. Help them feel capable and proud. 

11. Model empathy: “It’s awfully difficult sometimes not to get what you want/to make decisions/it feels terrible to get so upset”. We are all human and make mistakes. 

12. Time outs lose impact if used too often. Try a mommy quiet chair instead; tell them you're so upset, you need to catch your breath and think about what to do.

13. Look at what’s motivating misbehavior: hungry, tired, sick, frustrated?

14. Discipline --- self discipline. 

15. Compassionate limits -- self-control

(With thanks to the indispensable Discipline: The Brazelton Way and Momma Zen for some of the smarts above.)