Yoga Night

There is much written about women and the relationships that women share. Before I even begin this post, I would like to say, this is not a judgement of men and their friendships or men and their relationships with women. I am not a man.... I would not know what the bond between men means to them. And relationships between men and women are without saying, the subject of most of the world's literature and songs. But they are not what this post is all about. This post is about women and their friends, their mothers, their daughters.

Women sustain each other. I know we have a reputation for being catty, gossipy, even cruel. And for some women, sometimes, it is true. But the greater truth is that we enrich each others' lives. It is Wednesday - yoga night - and so I tend to be a bit more philosophical... but I also tend to have come home from time with a circle of women. Biologically speaking, women are the nurturers. Not always true, of course, but true for most. We are emotional. Empathetic. But also thinkers and dreamers and doers. We provide a safe place for one another to discuss just about anything - concern or desire - without judgement. We gather strength from each other with support and understanding and common ground. It does not matter if we are best friends or new acquaintances. We get it. We support each other. We laugh and cry and laugh again in the same conversation. We leave each other feeling uplifted and understood.

I have a small daughter, Sometimes I feel I am too tough on her. Tough on her in the way that is called "mother love" in Chinese. Tough on her because she will need to be strong - someday she will be the keeper of her family. But underneath she will be loving and kind and generous and empathetic. She will need to instinctively anticipate the needs of others. She will need to find a way to fulfill her own dreams too. There is a Chinese proverb that states women hold up half the sky. And of course, it is true. I have lead a privileged life. I have been cherished and loved and educated and encouraged. The books I have been reading lately detail the lives of women far less fortunate - those in Afghanistan, China, Pakistan, India, Viet Nam - places were women are often undervalued or abused and exploited. Their stories are filled with terror unimaginable to most Western women. And yet what strikes me is their need to reach out to other women. No matter what their circumstance, no matter how sad their tale, they reach out to other women.

So to my mother, my daughter, my mother-in-law, my best friend, my old friend, my former boss, and the woman I met yesterday in the grocery store... thank you. We need each other. We hold each other up. We tell each other that an idea is great, that our kids will be okay that we did that crazy thing once too. We raise money for schools and Haiti and soccer clubs. We buy each others' breads and cookies and chocolates and quilts. We drink tea and coffee and wine. We walk. We do yoga. We laugh. We cry. We notice each other's hair. We may not remember each other's birthdays, but we remember the anniversary of a parent's death. We see the artist, the the creator, the humanitarian in each other. We hear the thing that isn't quite right in each others' voices. We look at each other's wedding albums and sigh and exclaim like the pictures were from yesterday. We wait in front of the school in all kinds of weather. We talk about the origin of the food we eat, the careers we have, the education our kids are getting, the state of the economy, the health of a family member, the lump we found, the thing we discovered under the seat of our car. And we understand that it is all relevant. We listen and tell each other that something is great. That something will be okay. That we will see each other through and laugh on the other side. No - we will find the humor all the way through.

And late at night, from far away, we will have girls' night with our oldest friend... over email... because it is all we can do... but the laugher will still be loud and the feeling will still be the same.

Passport, please.

If you have only two pennies left in the world,

buy a loaf of bread with one and a lily with the other.

- Chinese Proverb

I must state clearly, again, for the record, that I must not die without ever having lived in Italy. My mother called me yesterday to read a postcard I had written during my first Italian affair. I was about 23 and travelling with a close friend. We landed in Paris without a plan, took a night train to Turino and embarked on an adventure in a tiny Fiat with her Italian cousin and a friend that took us to Montecarlo, Alassio, Verona, Venice, Florence and Rome. We departed again from Paris. The postcard described, in highly romanticized detail, our journey and concluded with the line, "We have decided we need no men. Italy will be our lover."

I emailed my friend, (now married and living in Jerusalem) that line and she responded, appropriately, "Wow! We were Thelma and Louise on Shakespeare."

If Italy was to be my lover, I am not quite sure how to personify China. But my fantasy since our last trip there is to go back. The fantasy takes several forms. One is just to go back. To be able to visit frequently enough that it feels, if not like a second home, than a place that is not foreign. I have always wanted this for Cate, for obvious reasons, but as time passes, I want it for all of us. We have been drawn in by the ancient history standing silently and graciously behind its modern development. Drawn in by the food, the sounds, the smells, the encompassing feeling of being alive and alert and aware. My second fantasy is to return for my 40th birthday as a volunteer for Half the Sky or perhaps our own agency and to work in an orphanage for a couple of weeks. My last is to actually just move there. Not forever. Maybe just a year. Maybe two. We keep our Fly Creek home, of course. This is always our base. But I go and teach. The kids learn the language and absorb the world. I could write a book about our experiences. Steve... well... he is the stumbling block in this fantasy... it is hard to work in a time zone completely the opposite of one's own. And of course, I know any of these scenarios, although ultimately rewarding, would be fraught with difficulties and challenges, all part of the adventure... At the very least, we will return when Cate is older to show her the place of her birth. And I wonder what it will mean to her then... this one great trip in isolation, but that is for another post.

Last year, at about this same time, I believed for a day or a week that we could actually move to Belize for a year. Winter was wearing thin. How hard could it be? I researched house rentals and teaching jobs. Alex was 100% on board. I saw him, barefoot and happy. I saw Cate on the beach, fresh mango juice dribbling from her chin. We decorated the house from top to bottom with tissue paper flowers and a palm trees constructed from poster board and grocery bags. We bought coconuts and pineapples. We names the geckos that would most certainly be peeking at us through our thatched roof. Steve seemed on board... but maybe only for a few months, okay, maybe two months, really one month, and the beach shack had to have high speed wireless Internet that met American, not tropical place, definitions of "high speed". Two weeks was probably more realistic, and as Steve pointed out, he and Cate hate to be hot. That is better left to my little son and me. My barefoot dreams began to crumble. Our long lunches in the sandy floored "Shark Bar" in San Pedro drifted out to sea. But we left the decorations up for months, popped in Jimmy Buffet's greatest hits and turned the volume up as high as it would go.

I usually make Valentine's Day all about Italy. Red wine. Cheese. Bread. Opera. Frank Sinatra... but this year, it falls on the first day of Chinese New Year... Cold, cold beer or warm coke. Firecrackers, Longlife noodles. Dumplings. Dragons. On Friday night, I am preparing a tropical meal - Tropical Supper Salad. Shrimp. Mangos. Rum Drinks. Steel drums. I wish I could say, it's just February... but it is just me... seduced by the world... eating bread while I breathe in the scent of the lilies on the kitchen counter, my children happily crafting the scenery of our next adventure, my husband shaking the local cocktails...

What Next?

In eighteen months my children will both be in school, full time. My days of being a stay-at-home mother are coming to a rapid end. It is time for me to figure out what I am going to do next in my career.

So far, my career has been tied closely to writing and education. That probably won't change, although I would like to change the scope, although I do have some other ideas...

For this post, I think I will just list them all here - get them on paper, so-to-speak. They are in no particular order, although I have ordered them in my brain. I just wish volunteering was a career because I am really great at raising my hand at meetings and saying, "I can do that!" And I almost always get the job.

1. Open an eclectic takeout lunch place.

2. Become an adoption social worker.

3. Teach English in China.

4. Get a masters in teaching ESL or linguistics and become an ESL teacher.

5. Earn a MFA in creative writing and use it to write and to teach at the college level and in the community.

6. Go back to teaching high school English.

7. Try to make it as a freelance writer.

8. Start buying lottery tickets... either to fund the volunteer career or the MFA.

Advice and opinions are welcome.

Super Bowl Sunday

I am not watching the Super Bowl. Since Alex started school, I have the perfect excuse of needing to be home to put the kids to bed on time. Impossible then to watch a game that does not start until 6:30 p.m. It it the perfect guise because there is something about my brain that cannot stand the sound of sports on T.V. The announcers. The cheering. The buzzers and bells. I just can't stand it. And because I grew up in a small town with no high school football team and went to a college that never had a decent football team, I don't get football either.

This distaste for the Super Bowl did not stop me from eating nearly an entire bag of chips and a pint of onion dip today - on my own. I could have stopped the train wreck in the grocery store by simply not buying it. I knew Steve would not be here - he actually wants to watch the Super Bowl and found his way to a friend's house to watch it on a T.V. far bigger and more modern than our 20-year-old set. But I could not stop myself and tossed them in among the grapes and yogurt and apples.Worse yet, I bought the bag on my way to yoga, came home after yoga and cracked it open immediately, lightly assuring myself I was just giving Cate a little treat. (Cate covets chips - covets them). And I started delicately with a few chips on a tiny plate and a spoonful of dip. Then I taped the bag, tucked it behind some boxes and shoved the dip to the back of the refrigerator. They were satisfying with green jasmine tea, but not satisfying enough. I washed it all down with some vegetable soup.

Cate and I, left to our own devices, made valentines. But it wasn't long before I dug behind the boxes, carefully removed the tape, tunneled through the refrigerator and was back at it again... still with my little plate. By mid-afternoon, I had abandoned the plate and ate straight from the bag. By late afternoon, as I contemplated where I might get takeout that was not pizza (I knew I would have to wait hours for that), I began washing the heavenly duo down with red wine. By 5, I admitted defeat, congratulated myself for saving the money I would have spent on healthy takeout with a $2 bag of chips and a $1.50 tub of dip, took my last swing of wine and ate a handful of grapes for good measure.

And I guess the game hadn't even started yet?

I Have Measured Out My Life with Coffeespoons

I often joke (dark humor, really) that over the past six years of staying at home, I have earned my Ph.D. in laundry. One of the not so glamorous aspects of the life of a stay-at-home mother is the eternal housework. It is the most unsatisfying form of work. Often people have made remarks like, "Don't you just feel good when it is done?" and the answer is, "No." When you share a space with two small children (thank goodness, I have a neat and orderly spouse), there is never that sense of accomplishment because one of them has just spilled juice on the freshly mopped floor and is peeling off their third pair of pants of the day because they are wet. The other one is in the bathroom, aiming for the tiny trash can instead of the porcelain bowl, just to see if it can be done. Housework overwhelms me. It has taken me six years to reach the conclusion that I need to put it in its place. My life is about more than washed, neatly folded AND put away towels. And so I have taken to the road.

Cate goes to preschool two mornings each week. In the past, I would have dropped her off and rushed home to ... you guessed it... clean the house. But I resolved to do that no more. For the price of preschool, I could hire one amazing woman to clean two mornings each week, leaving me to educate my own daughter. But, alas, Cate loves preschool too much and so I have done the next best thing - when she is at school, I stay away from home. On Tuesdays, I go to yoga and run errands, and maybe even read the newspaper or a book with the time I have left. On Thursdays, I take my laptop and set up shop in the local coffee shop. There are a few regulars who maintain office space for the price of a cup of coffee and I have now become one of them.

The shop is busy. It is impossible to sit there for 2.5 hours without seeing at least a quarter of everyone I know. I no longer need the local paper. I know what happened at the school board meeting, who found the Winter Carnival medallion, who is getting married or having a baby, what the village trustees decided. It is broadcast live, all around me. I enjoy a morning conversation with the man who teaches fencing and makes his own sushi. I love it when a friend stops by. I like reading the blogs of people's kids. I enjoy people telling me what I should be reading, or asking why I haven't written about something. This morning I picked up a great opening line from someone who insisted he still had one story about his life that I had not heard...: "Well, there were these two girls. One is dead and the other is a rabbi..." The rest he saved for another day. As he himself said, you can't make this stuff up.

As far as writing goes, the coffee shop is good fodder for nearly everything - current events, politics, history, character studies, gossip columns, romance, tragedy. You name it. It is all discussed at tiny tables and standing in line.

I love this small town life. I love that I can't actually write most of what I hear in its true-to-life, better than fiction form... the town is too small. Everyone would recognize themselves and each other. But the snippets of conversation are better than any brainstorming session.

Most importantly, I go home happy. The same stuff that was on the floor when I left is still there, but chances are great that even had I stayed home to clean it, Cate would have quickly moved the blocks back to the center of the floor. The neatly folded blanket would immediately be spread back out on the couch. And when I do tackle the pile of laundry still waiting by the basement door, I wonder, just what happened with those two girls - the one who is dead and the other who is a rabbi. Suddenly folding the towels isn't quite so mundane.

Falling Snow

"Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, the snow in winter. If your mind isn't clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life." - Wu-men.

I drove home from yoga tonight enveloped in the most beautiful snow of winter. My little yoga clique and I left class and walked down the street for our post-yoga libation. The night air was cold. The tiny snow of bitter cold fell. We went inside and hugged the fire and chatted and laughed for an hour and then bundled up and braced ourselves for another dose of frigid air. But when we stepped outside, the extreme coldness had lifted. The wind had died, the streets slowly and silently filled with falling snow - the kind that falls as perfect crystals. The snow that proves each little drop of frozen water, on the winter's breeze, is truly unique. There is no setting I love more than the magic of a still main street in the falling snow.

Yoga night has become central to my life. In the class I attend, we practice yin yoga - a gentle form, but one that requires holding poses for several minutes, allowing the body to release. We "breathe into the stretch," which is supposed to encourage the body to release its hold and its tensions even more. And it works. But it also releases my mind. A minute into my class, lulled by the just perceptible southern accent of our soft spoken teacher, and I am present in the moment. My mind stops racing. Whatever craziness required to get to class is gone. And in the quiet, my thoughts soar. Although another goal of yoga is to stay focused in the present, my mind is writing. Words come into my mind and take shape and form and grow and begin to breathe. Sometimes they stay with me until I make it home and I get them down. Other times they are as fleeting as the breath on which they float. I leave class feeling fully alive.

I am not an athlete. I have never been. I don't experience the high of the sweaty exercise fiend. When sweaty, I just want to get home and shower. But in yoga, I have discovered the thrill of sticking with something, of seeing the improvements my body can make when I am dedicated. I feel the stretches deepening, my balance improving. And with those changes, my confidence grows. I can't help but carry those changes with me wherever my day goes.

I avoided yoga for years, fearful my lack of flexibility would make me a mockery. When I was about 15, my gym teacher told me I was the most inflexible person she had ever seen because I could not reach past my toes. Although I didn't realize it, I carried that criticism with me. I timidly began this yoga class only because it was called "Gentle Stretch" and only because I was forced by a friend. I apologized to the teacher before I even began for my lack of flexibility and half expected him to escort me to the door. Imagine my shock when a few weeks later, he commented on my flexibility. The 20 year-old remark dissolved in an instant and I suddenly had the courage to try more challenging classes.

I have bookmarked this experience as a reminder to let the criticism of others go. I am shocked, looking back at how I let this one careless remark form my own opinions of myself and my abilities. I wonder what other comments I have unknowingly filed away, allowing them to silently discourage me. I remind myself to carefully weigh the remarks I make to my children.

Over the years, I have had much encouragement to write - from teachers, my family, friends. But the voice I always hear is the one that reminds me how hard it is to be published, how hard it is to eek out a living, how very, very good you have to be. I have never believed I could be that good. But with my yoga experiences in tow, I have learned to keep practicing, to keep pushing forward, to release those unnecessary things that would keep me from living the best season of my life. And always - to keep breathing.

A Tribute to the Source

All of my life there has been something restless inside me. It settles when I am writing and only when I am writing. At times, it is quiet, but never still. I don't call myself a writer, although others do, although it is the only thing I have ever wanted to call myself. I have never had the guts, not even when I was working as a full time reporter. And so I think that is what this blog will be about - working up the courage to call myself a writer and to mean it. Lately, the restless something has started to roar and this time, I don't want to ignore it. I have plenty of distractions, but none of the overwhelming distraction of being 18 or 21 or even 30. I have come to the end of my excuses, or have decided if I am ever going to stop making excuses, this is my time. Often when I reach these times of restlessness, I read and reread T.S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. While some would argue otherwise, to me it has always been a call to action. And so it is only appropriate that I post it here in this first entry of my new blog.

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965). Prufrock and Other Observations. 1917.

1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.


LET us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.


In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.


The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.


And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.


In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.


And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?


And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?


And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin? . . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?…
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. . . . . .
And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.


And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”


And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.” . . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.


I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.