Finally having returned to morning practice, I’ve moved back into my body – with the nudging aches and unexpected pains. With the roundness and the wrinkles. I’m making the required effort of moving with ease now. I’ve settled into my fears and found them – tolerable. I mean: what’s the alternative? The world keeps turning,…
What We Do for a Living
I’m beginning to wonder if teaching isn’t really the oldest – and most indispensable – profession any way?
Here is how you slip a stick into a termite hole, little one: you need protein.
This is how you fold a palm leaf to make a safe bed: sleep well.
Watch me dance, hear me sing. Let’s run: this feels good.
Tending New Growth
considering grace: a word that means so many things it’s more like an ambiance than a word. The mouth opens and closes like an embrace. There is a kind of taking in, in the pronunciation itself. Exhale. Receive – while you give. You can’t help it.
In Depth
When I began I had considered myself as being in a liminal state. But what I’ve come to realize is that there is no other state of being. There is no good reason to think of life as a series of stasis points with periods of growth – or with periods of decay – between them.
Walking Away from It All
I’ve hiked for days once before. And I stopped caring whether my socks matched. I stopped looking at every hill as something to be gauged and conquered. I put one foot in front of the other and kept an eye out for grouse in heather.
What we leave behind us after a long journey is one thing, what we take with us is also important.
A Practice of Kindness
Shel, what were you thinking? Every pregnant woman should read this as a lesson in the difference between indulgence and kindness. And how no matter what she does she’ll get the blame for her children’s egoism and wind up an old stump – and be expected to be happy.
Show me a #%&!! happy stump.
But I digress.
Talismans and Scapegoats
Maybe the first step to taking responsibility is actually externalizing the problem: why am I using this person (or rooster) to punish myself?
Today I’m appreciating the synchronicity. “My students are driving me crazy,” I think. Like they have the time to bother with that. The energy to spare.
Keeping it Simple and Strange
The local charities are overrun with secondhand fast-fashion right now. So I will stick the boxes in the attic. And if after a year or so, I have not missed them, I’ll try to find a simple solution for my excess – one that doesn’t make someone else my sin-eater.
Searching for the Sacred
The following year, another production with Gregorian chanting and candles. I fainted again. No wonder I connected the theater with the sacred long before I had read about Artaud or Grotowski and the other people looking for the sacred in the storytelling space.
If I Compare a Summer’s Day
If comparison is a fundamental human – in fact, primate – activity, then how do I want to employ it? If I have learned anything from E.’s overflowing toolboxes, there is an appropriate tool for every job, but not every tool is appropriate for the job. What’s to compare?
Following the Desire
And just as creating a good novel is as much a matter of prudent editing as is it good writing, perhaps cultivating joy is as much about removing judgement and criticism as it nurturing beauty.
Healing as Praxis
The 26th leg av the Camino. Today our lovely guide asks us to put our intention on “healing” today. And I meet with another point of internal resistance. One which takes me completely by surprise. I was listening to a podcast the other day about trauma. The interviewee’s position was that people who have insecurities…
At the Edge of the Woods
All this while, away from the woods, I’ve been planning a garden. Planning. While sitting in this little room. It makes sense really. What is a garden but an attempt to tame nature? To stave off death – or at least create an illusion of control over it.
Reaching a Crest
But just as we reached the crest on that first climb, a second appeared. Then a third. Eventually, I just stopped anticipating, and put one foot in front of the other.
When we finally got to the top, it was knee-deep with snow.
So, you see, failure is definitely just a point of view.
Tipping the Balance
The 23rd leg of the Camino. I don’t want to walk the dog around the block. I don’t want to do dishes. I don’t want to write. Working from home, I’ve lost the habit of balance. I find myself sitting in front of the computer 13 hours a day. Not having to pack up for…
What We Do With Our Lives
How many times have I thought that I needed to go back and study medicine? Become a gardener, a carpenter – someone to be stuck on a desert island with.
And here we are, now: socially distanced. Each of us feeling a bit like an island. And each of us looking at what we valued in the work done by the people in our communities.
Accepting Kindness
Receiving a gift as an act of kindness requires faith. It also requires risk, and an acceptance of the unknown.
Accepting kindness from strangers well – without suspicion – is a gift in itself.
A Dialogue with Difference
I suppose it hits every generation, too – when the pendulum swings, or the tide turns – and what you knew is only familiar now. You are an immigrant in your own country:
