Category Archives: apropos of nothing

24 truths

The truth is there’s nothing so beautiful today as the rain falling like a song on simmering stacks of leaves, which tomorrow will rustle under my feet and float around, lifeless; nothing so beautiful as a roiling October sky, no wishes, no tomorrow, just this moment and the sugar maples flaming at the roadside as I pass, too fast. They burn so beautiful for such a short time.

The truth is, I wanted to stop that moment. Freeze-frame. Snap.

The truth is that I wish I could be more honest on this blog, more raw. I see beauty in raw things. I want to look at things even if they scare me. Or especially if they do.

The truth is that I have a “disability” that people can’t see, but when people know about it, then I have to work twice as hard to prove what I am, to prove what I can be. And sometimes it doesn’t work, anyway–the proving, I mean.

The truth is, I’m constantly balancing between the fear of saying too much and the fear of not being heard.

The truth is, I lean back against trees and gather strength that way.

The truth is, I’m a modern-day mystic.

The truth is, I read Tarot cards not by memorizing but by looking at the story that the pictures make. And they make a different picture every time, and I don’t believe that it’s an oracle as much as a set of situations and questions, to which you apply intuition.

The truth is when I lay the cards out I think about chaos theory, the fact that if I’d shuffled differently, different cards would appear each time, but that it doesn’t matter anyway. It’s all in what you make of the symbols and stories.

Symbols and stories, language condensed. I’m free-writing and I’m stuck somewhere between poetry and prose.

The truth is that I’m actually very shy, even though I fake a good friendly. If I’m not pretending polite-nice-to-meet-you-graciousness, I’m self-enclosed, and then people think I’m snobbish. Not everyone, just some people. And I try not to care.

The truth is I think love hurts. I mean sometimes I love people so much that it hurts. A physical hurt, a butterfly stomach, a racing heart. A lump in the throat. An ache.

The truth is I push people away without meaning or wanting to.

The truth is that I want to be more than what I am, whether or not that makes sense. I mean I want to be a better person. I read a lot of books that are supposed to make me better, work to cultivate self-acceptance. Cultivation is a funny thing. You have to care for a garden of things that nourish you, even if it’s hard as hell. Especially if it’s hard as hell.

Every book asks me to define my true values, but first I need to figure out how to get through the day. The day is endless, sometimes. Sometimes I write until five in the morning. The quiet time is beautiful. Sacred, a gem. The dark is so lovely, better than silk sheets and the finest coffee.

The truth is that I sit closest to the door in every class and I leave first because I don’t want to fall into the trap of getting close to people. And I know how sad that sounds, but really I don’t mind being solitary. Days alone without answering the phone. Mixing essential oils, wondering if I could make signature scents for people and sell them online because …

The truth is I really have very little. I mean, enough to live on, and support from those around me. I get by, I eat, I get to enjoy nice things like movies and the occasional lunch at this little Greek restaurant I love (lettuce stained mildly maroon from the beets, perfect, all crisp and rich with feta). But I can’t do as much as some people can or else I screw up medically because of that disability I mentioned.

The truth is I feel all alienated at school because everyone else works full time, and I don’t, and if you can’t explain a disability then you have to accept looking lazy.

“Disability,” really it seems the wrong word. “Difficulty,” I like better, or “road block with detour.”

The truth is I eat a lot of noodles not just because they’re cheap and I’m the (truthfully) below-poverty-level kind of poor, but also because I just happen to love experimenting with spices, which I always have done ever since I was in India where the air everywhere is thick with unfamiliar spices; the scent of curry in the very walls of that flat in New Delhi where I slept sweating, where two girls and I swapped continually the bed by the fan, because no matter how dark and thick the night, we were all zapping with the 12-hour time difference, laughing & delirious with travel exhaustion.

The truth is sometimes I think I’d like to live in a little mountain town in northern India, Punjab maybe, and have fresh goat’s milk in the morning, and wake up to roosters like I did that long summer in Dharamsala, and learn to heckle over prices without seeming so American. Because sometimes going away just sounds so nice. Stepping outside of the ideas they have of who you are, yourself and others.

The truth is I couldn’t move to India now and 96 percent of the reason for that is because I couldn’t leave my dogs. These loyal creatures who stand beside us. Sometimes I think I love them more than people.

The truth is that I actually do care a whole hell of a lot what people think, but I do the best I can not to show it. I worry that I talk too much in class, but I can’t shut up anyway, and then I go home and worry all night about each aspect of each thing I said, because the truth is I’m really fucking neurotic.

Yep, I said it: the truth is, I’m neurotic and I eat chocolate when I’m nervous, and sometimes all the sadness is so crazy all at once that I can look down at it, like it’s all a movie or some mad God’s ultimate divine joke, and then I see the irony in it.

And things become funny, like seeing the same people in the same waiting room at the same doctor’s office for years on end; seeing them so often that you share diagnoses and discuss the merits of various treatments; seeing them so often that some of them drive you crazy, like this one man who pontificates on his life to the point where I close my eyes and daydream about a different life, in Paris or India or maybe somewhere else I’ve never been or seen.

I mean, I think it might be incredible to shake up a life the way Buddhist monks shake up a mandala they’ve built so forever tediously from colored sand.

The truth is I think a lot of us are the same on the inside, but we can’t admit it to each other. We walk around in our personal bubbles of space and separate auras and then when we get home we burn with the personal, underneath sinew, deep inside; we feed it with cupcakes or wine, or else we exercise, or make art or music or poetry or whatever we find most beautiful.

The truth is I want to make something beautiful every day because it’s the best way there is to cope with all the truths inside that I haven’t told you, not even here, not even now.

associate, or glow alone

photo by Jess Morrow

a poem by Emily Dickinson

“How happy is the little stone
That rambles in the road alone,
And doesn’t care about careers,
And exigencies never fears;
Whose coat of elemental brown
A passing universe put on;
And independent as the sun,
Associates or glows alone,
Fulfilling absolute decree
In casual simplicity.”

(Emily Dickinson)

lessons from a mad poetry professor (yes, take the class)

A writing workshop in an academic setting can be a terribly stifling experience that pisses you off and muffles your voice. But it can also be cathartic, electrifying, life-changing. It’s a coin-toss. If you asked me, I’d say, yeah, take the class.

You might get a professor who changes your life, takes you under her wing. I did. Her name was Barbara Anderson.

I first met her in ENG 272 (Introduction to Poetry Writing). Sophomore year. I was working to get into law school.

Barb wrote Junk City, one of the best poetry books you could ever add to any shelf. I can’t link you to her website, because she doesn’t have one. She detests computers. She once asked me to “explain email” to her (I couldn’t).

Here’s how she explained her aversion to electronics: (I’ll have to paraphrase, but Barb’s raspy Brooklyn accent, and the way she used her words, is unforgettable.) “You know, I only tried writing a novel once. I tried doing it on the computer. Then I don’t know what happened, I had twenty pages and then it was gone. I have no idea. It disappeared. How could you write that way, it’s like your house burning down. So then I knew I wasn’t supposed to write fiction.”

She was fantastic, flighty, forgetful, and hilarious. She wore all black all the time, and her hair was an unbelievably thick mess of curly blonde, and she kept it blonde no matter how old she got. She was usually late and usually forgot things, which was why some students had issues with her. People seem to take issue with only the most fantastic souls.

Barb told me my poetry was good, and because she was brutally honest in workshops, I believed her.

I changed my major. I wrote a poem in celebration. (It was called “Fuck Pre-law,” and it wasn’t all that good.)

Her workshops were a jolt of electricity. I had written poems all my life, but never like this.

I remember printing off a final project one semester, an interconnected series of poems, and being so excited about it that my hands shook. I was a smoker back then; vividly, I remember sitting outside my dormitory on cold cement, smoking really fast and reading my manuscript over and over. It was damn good, and I knew it was damn good.

(I wish I’d appreciated then, how precious that feeling is, how rare.)

Barb explained postmodernism in this way: “It’s like late at night when you’re flipping through the TV channels. And you know, there’s the incredible steak knives, and then there’s a movie in Chinese, and then there’s Wheel of Fortune. Get it? Write your poems like that. Then there’s the news. I mean, anything is a poem. Like, on the news today, they kept saying Florida was hanging in the balance. That’s a poem.”

The epitome of right-brained-ness, she was known to get on a tangent during workshop, and keep going, and let us all out an hour late.

Once she gave each of us a typed page of random words, maybe 100 words on a page: apple, key, January, wrench, barmaid … etc. Random, unrelated. The assignment was to write a poem, and every time you got stuck, close your eyes and put your finger on the page, and start your next line or phrase with that word.

I still have those pages, and use them.

Working with Barb taught me that about 50 percent of what makes my writing work is all intuition, unintentional.  

In workshops, I learned things about my work that I would never have noticed reading on my own. Like the fact that I almost always put hands in poems–I mention hands, looking at my own hands, someone’s hands growing older and heavy-knuckled, a girl clutching a red bandanna in her tiny hand … I never did that on purpose. It was pointed out to me in Barb’s class. Themes, motifs, unintentional internal rhymes.

Our best work is usually unintended.

She was a painfully honest teacher, and I didn’t always think she was right, and I didn’t always make the changes she wanted me to.

Half the time, her criticism was more like comedy to my ears. As in, “No, this is the wrong poem. The real poem here is about your mom. This just … ugh, it just sounds like … someone’s funeral or something. Like a really boring guy, like his funeral.”

I worked with Barb for eight years.

Being a long-time student meant knowing the inside of her office intimately, her messy desk, the shelves of obscure poetry collections, slim paperback volumes.

Advising meetings were perilous. They could (and did) go like this one: I showed up. Barb was shuffling through papers on her desk. She chattered for a while about how she had a check for $75, and would you believe it (yes, I did), it had just disappeared. Then she wanted a snack but she was busy so she gave me some change and told me to go downstairs to the vending machines and get something. “Chocolate. No, not chocolate. Not sweet. Salty. Anything.”

I got Cheetos. When I came back with them, she opened the bag and said, “Oh my god, what is this? It smells disgusting. I’m not even hungry anymore.” She put it on one of her mountains of manuscripts, started talking to me about my poems and my future, and absentmindedly picked up the Cheetos and ate them, the whole bag.

The final project I worked on with Barb was my thesis, Landscapes, Dreamscapes. We conferenced over the phone. She kept talking in her circular way, pointing out patterns I’d not noticed, like that the whole collection read like a travel narrative, or that I mentioned the moon in every other poem, like clockwork.

The last piece of critique I ever received from her went something like, “But it’s great. Send it out places, like pick five places. I love all the moons. I really hate the title, it’s like … a bad freshman final project title. But it’s due, just submit it like this, it’s great. I love the roads and moons. You can change the title later. Definitely, you know, when you send it out, change the title.”

never been so proud

This post is a leap; a bit out of context with my blog. It sounds like social commentary, but really it’s personal, and something so beautiful I had to share it tonight.

(I’m a strong believer that writers need to write most of all when they feel drawn to do so. Seriously. That’s how you vocalize.)

So I’m going to tell you a little story about me and yoga and these amazing people I know. It’s a doozie, difficult to simplify, but I’ve made an honest effort.

Really this story boils down to values, and how living in alignment means making every decision, taking every step, according to your values. (Particularly timely, given the values theme this past week over at A Year With Myself.)

Throughout my twenties, the only meaningful and honest friendships I had were within the yoga community with which I was involved. (Let’s call the community … Big Yoga). I lived in Arizona. I walked from my white adobe rented house to a little studio up an ancient flight of stairs to a place where I always felt safe.

It was the studio where I met not just my first and most influential yoga instructors, but also a group of people who accepted and embraced me. I was introduced to “Big Yoga,” and the system’s simple (yet deeply complex) philosophy and practice changed my life. The friends I made were people who wanted to connected on a deeper level. We read books and talked philosophy and sometimes drank wine together.

Mostly though, in my twenties, I was isolated.

Even among my yoga friends, I felt somewhat an outsider. Most of the years I studied yoga, I was in the midst of an unhealthy relationship that led to a marriage that consumed my energy to the point that I couldn’t teach yoga anymore.

People tried to get close to me; some did. It was the people from yoga who never gave up on me, who never stopped trying.

I met teachers who helped shape my entire worldview; moreover, teachers who helped me to heal from much of my past. I didn’t tell them the stories I was working out as I moved through sequences of asana, into those deep hip openers that made the memories come & then the tears. For me, yoga has always been therapeutic. I’ve survived things that have gotten caught in my muscle tissue. I did a lot of personal healing via my involvement with Big Yoga.

I left Arizona without saying any goodbyes, desert fading with the sunset in my rear view mirror; I had my reasons.

I taught yoga for a while, but quit teaching for a number of reasons (a blog post unto itself), and my certification/label from Big Yoga simply lapsed.

As a student/practitioner, I chose to disengage with Big Yoga because of a growing sense (mine) of dogmatism among a majority of instructors. The dogma centered around a charismatic leader (I’ll call him … Mr. Charisma). I’d attended his workshops, worked to earn his particular Big Yoga certification, and had genuinely ingested his teachings.

Sadly, Big Yoga has been disgraced in ways that make me feel ashamed that I followed certain teachers for such a long time. It’s been revealed and confirmed that Mr. Charisma committed a number of ethical violations, some of which are personally triggering to me. Things that a person in a position of power shouldn’t ever do because you just fucking don’t. I’ve been really angry, and sad, and a bunch of stuff all at once.

Over the past several days, through following blogs like Yogadork, I’ve read about the allegations and cried and wondered what would happen to this beloved community. I knew that I had to sever any bonds I had left with Big Yoga, even those I held with teachers whom admire beyond words.

Finally coming to know myself and my own values has made me stronger than I was before. I value integrity very deeply. Integrity, and honesty. To think of some of my dearest teachers continuing to following the Charisma guy while I canceled their mailing lists and stopped setting aside money for workshops, broke my heart.

But something amazing is happening.

One by one, I am watching each teacher that saw me through the darkest times of the past decade, surrender their Big Yoga certifications, sever their ties with that tradition, and set out bravely on their own.

I have never seen such a true example of values guiding a group’s choices involving business, image, future, livelihood, and identity.

I’ve been reading blogs and watching their websites (my teachers) closely but silently, and have been amazed at this beautiful uprising of heroic leaders who refuse to ignore the allegations against their teacher. And it’s so beautiful. Actually, I’m crying right now while I write this because I am so proud of them. 

I have not always been one to carry the type of faith in humanity that it takes to be a yoga teacher, though I’ve surely tried.

I am a teacher though, of language, and of writing, and I think teaching is one of the most beautiful things you can do to be of service in this world.

Tonight, my faith in humanity is healed a little bit more as I watch with open eyes the application of values to life choices in those who’ve influenced me the most. 

And I have to say, I have never been so proud.

p.s. Some of them are here: #occupygrace