What is Your Space Jam?

(for my lovely friend Nicole, who gets and gathers precious things, for whom I am so grateful on the cusp of a very special birthday)

I had a totally different post geared up for today, a whiny little post that whinged about being allergic to the dermabond used in my surgery (I am) and how medical issues make you feel like Sisyphus moving the rock up the hill (they do) and how there is something that feels really, really good about indulging in grousing (it does).

Weeks (months, years) have passed that have left me feeling unmoored, conflicted, vibrant in my skin yet uncomfortable in my skin. Simultaneously glittery and scattered, the glittery overriding the scattered until the scattered snuck in and grouted glittery's floor with stickiness. I've recognized the looming presence of things not dealt with and fought against things I haven't wanted to put aside. Treading water in this space has meant one thing to me: giving up one thing I love and appreciate for another.

I have a number of friends who are in this space at exactly this same time, this washy nebula of options and decisions and meaning making. We are all moving through the deciphering of importance and juggle, how to create something in our lives that compels us, makes a difference, brings us joy, lights up our brains with crazy chemicals, flutters our stomachs, makes us want to lean. in. hard.

And then I finally watched this video that has been floating around on the facebook. I don't know why I didn't watch it before and I don't know why I watched it today. All I know is that the arrow hit just the sweet spot in my heart and it all opened up. I have to make decisions to do something awesome. Yes, I have one wild and precious life. Too short to waste on things that are boring and easy.

Life is not dull, people.

What if there really were two paths?

I'd want to be on the one that leads to awesome.

The Final Countdown

Thanks to the omnipresent Let's Dance IV in our house,  I've had Europe's The Final Countdown blasting in my brain non-stop. That means turning over at night only to have that godforesaken song click on like one of those damn musical birthday cards that screeches the Star Wars theme every time you shuffle it trying to clear off the cluttered table top.

But as I lie here waiting for the Lorazepam to kick in, I'm giggling at that song for all of its schmaltzy lyrics. I'm finally on the final countdown,  damn it. One last surgery starting tomorrow morning. No more anxiety dreams about procedures not being done or bad outcomes. One last time under the knife (I hope ). If I were really out there,  I'd post up photos of the crazy writing all over my body. One boob says "this size" while the other has "fat" to mark the spot that needs a little filing in. Whorls and swirls describe various spaces to consider and different procedures to be done.
The map of my body looks like an aboriginal painting, a naked solstice parader's cloaking for a wild ride through Seattle, like God took a big marker to an ikea easel after eating mushrooms. I'm the prototype Eve on second iteration, VanGogh's starry night traced on his lover's skin with a drunken finger, a Spirograph gone out of its frame.

Damn, this Lorazepam is good.

What I will wake up to tomorrow?  Who really knows. My nurse tells me it will take months for my body to completely heal. No yoga for four weeks,  swelling for long after. This is not the body you are looking for all filed with fluid to make it all work.

But it's the last of these. And while I'll be grateful that is over, I'm so much more grateful for the chance to be made this whole again.

So wish me dreams of starry skies and warm embraces and my surgeon a steady hand tomorrow.

Love to you all.

Distance

Today my mind has been tangled up thinking about distance. Distance between people, large expanses of spaces, what proximity means for relationships, how that expectation is mitigated (or complicated) by technology, time and intention.

Distance is a funny thing.

What keeps coming to my mind is my children's martial arts training and the practice of defense blocks. Fists outstretched to arms length, knuckles touching...to practice this work, you first frame yourself in space with the other person so that you are able to give appropriate berth to the action, but also not drift too far away. If you drift too far away, you get none of the benefit of the contact. If you are too close, your movements and work get too entangled to be effective. The master reminds you, "distance!" so you know to reframe your space, correct your proximity, realize where you are and what the relating to another is about.

Sometimes the refreshing of space is good.

Incomprehensible

I don't think this image will ever be erased from my mind. A young mother leaning over the body of her small child, caressing his face as he lay there dead. The child was perfect and angelic in the stillness, the acceptance on the mother's face, her hand at her throat. I sat reading the article of 250 people dead at the end of a siege of a school in Beslan, Russia, tears streaming down my face, my own small boy in my arms. It was completely incomprehensible, this idea of losing a child in such a brutal, horrible way.

My own son was a year old at Beslan attack. My sweet boy, who I remember holding during wee hour feedings, whose sweet sleeping face reminded me so much of the dead child in the picture. In those moments I swear I could feel the presence of thousands of women across the world doing the same. In those early morning hours, you take comfort in knowing that you are part of something great, something deep in your motherhood, that there is a presence of other mothers that holds you in the newness of this child and of this experience. Of solidarity, of love, of difficulty, of care and compassion.

And in those moments, as now, it is incomprehensible that your child could be taken from you in such an act of violence, in such a horrific way.

It is also incomprehensible what it must feel like to sit and wait, knowing your child is dead, knowing his body lay not far away, wanting to see for yourself and to start to put order to the distortion. My mother described to me once what it was like to sit outside of the emergency room, knowing that my brother was dead and wanting more than anything to touch his skin just to make sure. The waiting, the longing and the disbelief were almost more than she could bear.

I don't really know how to wrap this up, honestly.  I just keep seeing that child from Beslan and the images of parents running to their children in Connecticut in my mind. And I think I need to just sit with the sadness of it all for awhile and then find some way to help untangle this vicious cycle of pain, violence and insanity that we are in.

Rob Brezsny offered some wisdom through my Facebook page this morning. It gave me a feeling of hope and ability to make change, even when feeling so helpless:

According to Jewish legend, there are in each generation 36 righteous humans who prevent the rest of us from being destroyed. Through their extraordinary good deeds and their love of the divine spark, they save the world over and over again. They're not famous saints, though. They go about their business anonymously, and no one knows how crucial they are to our well-being.

Might you be one of the 36? As a temporary experiment, act as if you are.

Beginning Again

This is dedicated to my girl, Chapman, because she kicks ass even in the middle of the storm. 

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It takes about 20 sessions of practice before your body falls naturally into the pattern of the asanas, or so my yoga teacher tells me gently as I stumble through poses, remembering four moves down the road that I'd forgotten a critical counter-pose or grounding stance.

What this reminds me is that it takes time for the muscles and neurons to remember work that you did long ago, that starting again simultaneously means reaching back and stepping forward. This metaphor is not lost on me every practice that I wobble through some poses and feel strong on others. But each day I notice new strength, each day I have to push myself to dig a little deeper, each day I wonder when it's going to be easy to do this work with the grace and agility I see all around me.

There have been a number of images stewing in my mind for awhile now. One is of a plastic ball made of interwoven black loops. The ball is a mass of contradicting tensions, you try to pull one loop and the others all resist. Work, children, relationships, love, finances, health, creativity, place, home...all so tightly interwoven that one cannot meaningfully shift without affecting all the rest. A few weeks ago I withdrew from a position I had applied for a few months earlier and the ball relaxed a bit. This week I moved truckloads of stuff out of our house and the ball relaxed a bit more. The kids are getting up 15 minutes earlier to have breakfast with me before work and I feel the ball shifting more. The chain reaction caused by letting one thing go has been tremendous.

Another image is of closing loops, finishing things that started long ago and need to come to a close. Next month I make my last and final journey to New Orleans for my final phase of reconstruction surgery. I've come to realize that this is it, that after this surgery I need to be done, that the space my body will occupy at that time is what it is, that it is time to just let it freaking be. I am thankful that this is coming to a close, thankful to turn the page on that particularly shitty chapter of my life and healing. Another loop to close will be making peace with what my body has been through in the past two years. That one will take longer, no doubt. This idea of closing loops comes from my dear friend Jenn who talks about eating the elephant one bite at a time. Yes, indeed, one bite at a time.

Finally, I have the image of D as a baby flash in front of my eyes from time to time. When we would travel with D as a baby, we would marvel at the most amazing leaps in growth he would make when we were away. It was as though leaving his regular environment and engaging with new surroundings would allow his mind and body to open up in remarkable ways.

My (fantastic, oncology-focused) therapist talks a lot about post-traumatic growth and how living through major life crises like losing your mother and having cancer can trigger positive shifts, perceptions, opportunities, connections and growth. It's a time where I feel like I need to recut the puzzle of my life, to bring in new ways of looking at things, to create the life that is compelling to live, to grow and shift perspectives, to answer the question "what are you going to do with your one precious life?" And like those periods of growth for my tiny boy, this time is counterbalanced with deep emotions and the need to sort and sift and figure while others have to be patient with you as you fuss and stretch and try to consolidate in this new space. It's learning to wobble on those shaky baby legs that, in time, become strong.

Blessing the Day

In the barrage of today's thankfulness, I read the following piece on my friend Meghan's Facebook feed. It captures, in so many ways, exactly how I feel today, one day away from celebrating a year from the last day that I sat in the chair, last day with chemicals coursing through my body in the hopes that I would be well for years to come.

One year down, five more to go before I can really breathe and think it's done. It feels like a small victory, but a victory nonetheless.

So much beauty in this piece. And so much thankfulness for each person who has brought me so far.


Marge Piercy
The Art of Blessing the Day
from THE ART OF BLESSING THE DAY

This is the blessing for rain after drought:
Come down, wash the air so it shimmers,
a perfumed shawl of lavender chiffon.
Let the parched leaves suckle and swell.
Enter my skin, wash me for the little
chrysalis of sleep rocked in your plashing.
In the morning the world is peeled to shining.

This is the blessing for sun after long rain:
Now everything shakes itself free and rises.
The trees are bright as pushcart ices.
Every last lily opens its satin thighs.
The bees dance and roll in pollen
and the cardinal at the top of the pine
sings at full throttle, fountaining.

This is the blessing for a ripe peach:
This is luck made round. Frost can nip
the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,
a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,
the burrowing worm that coils in rot can
blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.
Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.

This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.

This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let's not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.

The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,
the blessing for love returned, for friends'
return, for money received unexpected,
the blessing for the rising of the bread,
the sun, the oppressed. I am not sentimental
about old men mumbling the Hebrew by rote
with no more feeling than one says gesundheit.

But the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.

Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can't bless it, get ready to make it new.

Excerpted from The Art of Blessing the Day by Marge Piercy. Copyright� 1999 by Marge Piercy.

If it is available to you

At this shala, the heat meets you halfway up the stairs as you lug your heavy but really good mat up to practice. Slight fluttering of the "new girl at school" feeling creeps in. Walk in deposit belongings, move into the room and find your spot amongst the breathing, the movement, the work of each person stretching and delving deep into their own individual relationship to the work.

Today I grappled with the stop. I grappled with the embarrassment of not being able to do something well the first time. The bulletproof side of me that likes to show my best face was spitting mad. The mind of self doubt that ridicules me for not having practiced in the past eight years tried to sit on the mat with me far too many times. I would get a pose (elation!) then fall out of it (disappointment.). What came easy to me was delicious, what came hard was bitter. 

There is a phrase that you hear in yoga, "If it is available to you", that describes going deeper into a pose based on your body's readiness for the movement. It's a phrase that rings true for me in the journey of my personal life as well. It reminds me that I may not be ready for everything at once, that it's the testing of what is available that is important. That trying is the key, that accepting that it's not time is the reality.

I think about this "if" and I couple it with the "when". "If it's available to you" tells me to be kind to myself in the present moment, not to be frustrated and to turn away from things that are hard to move through. There is the now and there is the future, the "when it's available to you" that will come with sticking to it, be it the practice or the work of becoming that will pay off. It will be available to you at the right time.

Pushing through the awkwardness and disappointment and self-talk and sticking to it is how you get there. Not running away from it because it's not easy. Believing that it will be available to you is the key. And when you get there it will not be perfect, you may have moments of getting it and moments of falling out of it. Even in this new space, there will be more to accept in the "if" and a new set of challenges that will place you back in the future of the "when".

We are not static beings. Life is not linear. Our humanness is our becoming.