Making the Best of Things

Some time ago I wrote an entry about how nifty people are because we have this incredible ability to take a bad situation and find something of value there. But no attribute is purely one-sided and I've been thinking lately about the flip side of this one. Unfortunately, our use of pure grit and wishful thinking to just make things work out is sometimes too successful and we find ourselves trapped in a cell of our own design somewhere we really don't want to be. The energy we need to just make the best of things is often less than the energy we need to change for the better. So, like the good little animals we are, we make the choice that requires less of us, and in the process we do ourselves damage.

I recently had a cold that took a tediously long time to resolve. I kept working during that time and just slogged through the days. While I was very aware of the feeling of my body working its way through the virus, underlying that I had a strong sense of general well-being and health. And, although I kept working while sick (don't try this at home, kids!), my body just felt strong and vibrant and I didn't feel too stressed out about the work. This experience was in stark contrast to how I felt when I used to get sick at my last job, where my body felt badly used and every virus made me feel beaten down. I point out the difference because I wasn't really unhappy at my last job, and, if I hadn't injured myself badly at one point, I might still be there today. In a job that I drifted into without any particular direction, a job that physically exhausted me to the point where I changed my other habits to accommodate my exhaustion, a job that didn't speak to me or challenge me, a job doing something I frankly thought was a waste, a job where I would come back from one vacation only to begin the countdown to the next one. Why did I stay there so long? I could give you a hundred reasons, but they all boil down to: It's where I was and I needed to find a way not just to be comfortable with it, but also to incorporate it fully into my own story, to make peace with being there, to care about it.

What is difficult is that it always seems so clear in hindsight, that choice we ought to have made long ago. I had a yoga instructor who would occasionally raise his hands to the sky, "Seventeen years!!" he'd cry, referring to his 17 years as a celibate monk. "Why?" he'd ask. I am thinking of this now because I just had another birthday which was the occasion of looking at the joy that is my life today, the places I would like to go with my life in the future that I am working towards, and at the same time looking back and asking that same question. "Why? Why on earth did I waste so much time?"

Yes, I know what you're thinking. You're getting all yogic on me and thinking about how we have to live in the now, and our pasts are what created us, blah blah blah. Whatever. And all kidding aside, I get that. I do. (Mostly.) But I think where I'm going with this is, how do we make the time that we waste less? When we fall into that trap of making the best of things, how do we know when we're doing it right? And how do we know when we're just trying to make our story end a little better by editing it a little?

When I was a kid, I thought that every book was somehow sacred. If I began reading a book, in order to show respect to the author and his or her work and experience, I had to finish it. It didn't really matter if I liked it or thought it was good, my duty was clear. Finish the damn book. I was well into adulthood before I broke that habit. I think as we get older we get less tolerant of wasting time. Or at least of wasting time with something that isn't fun or of value.

Lately in order to help figure this out for myself I've been just beginning to use a new tool that came from an odd place. A few weeks ago I decided to take the test to become a certified group fitness instructor. The process I went through will have to be saved for another day's tale, but one little piece of the information jumped out and made its way into my psyche in a way that I don't think was intended. In creating an appropriate class we were taught to ask 5 questions about the exercises we choose. The first question is, "What is the purpose of this exercise?" At first I wasn't very interested in the question, or in any of the others for that matter. In yoga, as far as I'm concerned, the purpose of the exercise is just to get all the parts of ourselves focused in one place and time so that we can really pay attention carefully. For this class, we were talking about purposes that involved specific muscles and bones and heart rates and body fat percentage; it just wasn't all that interesting to me. But I kept finding the question resonating around my brain. "What is the purpose of this exercise?" And I realized that using that question might be a good way to begin weeding out those things that simply aren't functional in my life, but that I have been making the best of anyway. The second question: "Is it doing that effectively?" Huh. Well, that's actually a really good question. Because if it's not, then why am I here?

I don't have any kind of final wisdom on the matter. I am sure that 10 years from now there will still be things I look back on and think, "Why oh why did I waste that time?" But I think being more mindful of asking those questions at the outset and really paying attention to the answers might help make that wasted time less.

Packing the 10 Essentials

My last blog entry got me thinking, so if the warmth of hospitality is one of the essential human elements I'd like to have for my own and take with me on the trip, what are the other nine, to continue the metaphor? I'm not sure (and you know I'll be trying to figure it out), but I have some thoughts about my next desired element on the list.

When I was a child I was smart but not kind; as a result, I valued intelligence over kindness, probably because I wanted to be loved for what I was. As an adult, I am still smart, but I hope I have acquired kindness, so now I value kindness over intelligence, perhaps still because I want to be loved for what I have become. I am still the child I was; I can see the same traits I was born with in myself today. But I want to know that I can grow layers, get larger, be better, move outwards.

In reading another woman's recent blog entry describing the bumbling and arrogant attempts by a man to impress her, I could hear and understand her angry and disgusted perspective on the story even as beneath it I could hear another possible variation, one where a lonely man in his attempt to connect with a beautiful and desirable young woman blows himself up, makes himself more than what he is. If you hear that story, you have to wonder (I have to wonder) is this such a terrible thing, worthy of disdain? What I always come back to is that the only thing I can possibly learn from observing someone else's behavior and actions doesn't have anything to do with them and their motivations and inner life, but rather with myself and my own choices. Who do I want to be? And I believe I want to be someone who gives people the benefit of the doubt. And even if someone is really and truly a complete and irredeemable asshole, what does that actually have to do with me and my life, except for me to know that I don't want to be one? I don't know that person's story, but if I want to give myself some room to move in my own story I need to allow it for him as well.

I have spent a lot of time and energy in my life making pronouncements for myself, that then become my rules to live by. I am this, I am not that, I like this, I don't like that. I have decided that in my personal practice I will try this: Instead of saying "I do not like cucumbers," to say instead, "Any time I have tried them, I have not liked cucumbers." This does not necessarily indicate a willingness on my part to go forth from now on eating cucumbers and loving them. However, I realize that I frequently don't leave myself any room around the edges of these pronouncements about myself to, I don't know, move a little. My method is completely appropriate for a science lab: I have observed this behavior/preference/whatever in response to this stimulus in the past and therefore can predict it happening again in the future. It sounds reasonable. But I know from my own experience that I have learned and changed-my behavior, my preferences, my interests, my desires.

I suspect cucumbers will not make an appearance on my table, but who knows what may?

Where were we going again?

I caught up with my father by phone today and got reports on how some of my younger relatives are doing in their lives. You know how we all have those funny little habits of speech? Well, I lost count of how many times the word "successful" was used by him, followed by a description of the work being done by the person in question. I wonder if I am described the same way in other phone conversations with these other relatives, despite the meandering path of my career such as it is. Is "successful" a circle that includes me?

Several years ago I had an odd realization. I have always wondered why, despite being serious of heart and disciplined in my focus, I never really have much of a direction at all. There's no inner compass telling me where to go next. Then I sat down one day and really tried to boil down the essence of what I value into some kind of statement of purpose. I came up with these:

I want to dance beautifully.
I want to love and be loved deeply.
I want to know god.

Um. Okay. Not a lot to work with in terms of, you know, an actual goal. And I don't think it would really go over that well in that spot on your resume where you talk about how much you want to work as part of a team. But this week I did realize that there are places in my life where I have reached a destination of sorts, something strongly intended by me and striven for.

I am a naturally shy person, an introvert. As a child I would have told you I didn't like people much; as an adult what I know is that I like them just fine, I'm just scared of them. I learned early on that it would ease my passage through this world to develop some social skills and I have labored mightily to accomplish this. What I originally did for my own survival I continued to do out of love, realizing that the fear I felt was felt by others as well and that I could help ease their passage, too. I was volunteering last week, picking out new people at a club and wandering over to introduce myself, answer questions, offer warmth and guidance. One man thanked me and said I had the gift of hospitality. Aah! My destination! Because I don't have that gift. But I have felt it in others, valued it and recognized its worth, and chosen to make mine by hard work what some have been born to.

Another compliment came my way this week, and again it was in an area that is not natural to me. As I collected and held close to me these acknowledgments, I realized that this is where I measure my success. I think about hiking and the 10 essentials you are supposed to have with you everywhere you go, no matter how long the intended hike, how many people accompany you, how perfect the weather. I believe my inner compass is less focused on where I am going and what to do when I get there, and instead points me towards the person I want to be as I travel and the tools I need for the journey. If I hone my 10 essentials, it won't matter any more what else I have or don't have, where I've been, where I might go, where I can't go; I am making myself my destination and I want the journey to be joyous and satisfying, successful for everyone making the trip.

First, Do No Harm

There are some things I just don't talk about much. Religion and spirituality fall into that category. I write about some of my beliefs here, where I am an anonymous author with an anonymous audience, but with friends and family, I don't bring it up much. I have a variety of reasons for that: I think it's personal; having grown up in Bible-belt Christianity, I am protective of my own brand of spirituality, and not interested in a battle over belief; I also believe that it is important to be respectful of other beliefs, so I keep mine to myself where I think it belongs.

At the same time, I struggle with that line of respect, both in the realm of religion and in all those other delicate human matters. Yoga is part of my spirituality; the moral and ethical tenets are part of my practice. I've spoken of many of them here in this blog, but never of ahimsa, non-harming. Ahimsa is the first of the yamas, the ethical constraints. It feels like an easy one to get a handle on, so it's often used as an example, and I have heard it so frequently that I remember it easily, where sometimes I have to struggle to come up with the others on the list. By drawing a line of respect, I am trying not to do harm to others. It makes sense to me to do this. But is there a point where I draw that line in too close, boxing myself in so that I am doing harm to myself by denying myself? Or allowing others to do harm to me by not speaking up? There is no tradition in yoga of turning the other cheek, so there is no reason for me to expose myself to harm from others as I quietly respect them. I also wonder whether by drawing that line I am in fact separating myself from them, creating an us and a them, out of fear of what their response might be. Am I fooling myself thinking that I am respecting "them", protecting "them" from harm done by me, when in fact I am making a little safe space for me, so as not to be harmed myself? How often have we said, "Well, I didn't want to tell you, because I knew you'd be upset." Who is being protected there?

And how do we define harm anyway? Where and when do we begin to do harm? Does it only count if it's intentional? Can it be balanced out by good acts? I had a friend in college with a melodramatic turn of mind (or, I don't know, maybe we all had that back then). She believed that by our very existence we were doing harm, and that we were morally obligated to remove ourselves from life. We had this conversation over iced coffee in her dorm room and I never had the sense that she planned to follow through on this noble goal. But she's right in a sense; we all do harm in all kinds of ways, large and small, recognized and unrecognized. If we see that in ourselves there is every possibility that we will live in a kind of paralysis, unable to take a step for fear of the harm we might do.

For me, there is no easy way to wrap this up and answer my own questions, but I have a few thoughts that help to show me the way. In yoga there is a concept of samskara, or mental grooves, ruts that have been worn in our thinking and in our doing. Yesterday, I boiled some eggs. One cracked and spilled out some of the white; the water boiled over and left a huge mess on the stove and the burner. I cleaned up what I could at the time, but the burner was hot so I left that for later. Later, I had forgotten about it so I put some water on to boil. The nasty smell in the house reminded me of the mess, and now the burner's hot again so I still can't clean it. Still later, my partner and I had a whole discussion about it as we were putting water on to boil again. I told her what I had done, we talked about avoiding that burner, I moved another pot out of the way so I could use a different burner, she walked out of the room and I stopped paying attention. In that moment, I slid into habit, putting the kettle back on that same nasty burner. It only took a split second of inattention for me to lose my focus and my intention.

I think the tenets of yoga are really about helping us keep the focus, to stay attentive, and not about right and wrong answers. If we accept that we are equally so small a part of the whole as to be insignificant, and at the same time so expansive that we contain everything there is, then we have both no power at all to do harm or to be harmed and at the same time all the power there is.

I have a tattoo on my shoulder of a fan with butterflies and a lacewing flying out. I rarely talk about the symbolism of the design and what it means to me; to most people, it's just a pretty thing. When I was a child, I felt a connection bordering on the absurd with people, with objects, with animals, and particularly with insects. I had a hard time separating myself. I would rage and cry when my friends killed ants, I created little bug hospitals with sugar water for bees who had strayed too far and bits of cloth for dying moths, and no insect could be killed in the house if I had anything to say about it. I felt a particular connection with lacewings. Gradually, I learned to separate myself, to harden myself, but as an adult I look back with nostalgia for my better impulses. My tattoo is a reminder to me to care, to keep caring. I can't know what my life or my actions will mean to anyone. All I can do is live the life, send out my actions into the unknown, but with care. T.S. Eliot wrote, "For us there is only the trying. The rest is not our business." The trying is where we have to live.

There goes the sun

I don't really have time for this post. I am busy with other things. But this post has to do with Solstice so writing it now is timely. Sometimes, the time determines itself regardless of what you have planned for it.

Time has been on my mind lately. I took a walk on Solstice to let myself feel what Solstice is out there. What's happening around me on the day that both celebrates the strength of the sun, while seeing it into its decline?

Oddly (or not) I've been very aware of my own strength lately while seeing ahead to my own decline. I feel physically/mentally/emotionally better and stronger and more full of juice than ever before in my life. At the same time, I have never before been so aware of my age and of the passage of time, feeling a kind of frantic need to pack in as much as possible all at once. The heightened awareness has been kind of annoying to me actually and I suspect maybe to my friends and loved ones as well. (No need to chime in! Really!)

As I walked I realized suddenly that not only is the planet in Solstice, but I am in my own Solstice as well. That realization brought me quite a bit of peace. The sun comes up and the sun goes down, but oh, we enjoy it so much when it's at its height! There's no point in worrying about the fall because we know it will come but it's not here yet. Solstice is what it is, for me, for the sun, for the planet. We don't get a do over for the springtime, and the fall will come when it comes.

I found another happy note in my ponderings on the seasons: My name is Autumn for a reason. As much as I fear the end of summer, I have an inkling the best is yet to come. But for now, I will revel in the sunshine.

Honoring the Ancestors

Today I got together with 2 dear friends and celebrated Beltane, or May Day, together. We were a little low energy and it was raining so we changed our original plans a little. Indoors instead of outdoors, short and sweet. Because we were all so low in energy we decided it would be a nice addition to give each other the May Day gift of telling one another what we appreciate about each other. We are very different women who came together by chance, but over the years we have formed one of those bonds that you always hope will be a part of your life, a friendship where anything goes, where we can always speak the truth to one another. They each let me know that what they most appreciate about me is my direct communication, my willingness to be open about my life and my feelings, come what may, and that by doing that I have let them in on a perspective they did not realize existed.

They echoed what several folks told me at my teacher training. ***WARNING: Now I should warn anyone under the age of 18 that our culture takes a dim view of the combination of sex and truthfulness, and I plan to talk about both here. So, if you're under 18 you should go do something else, not read this, and let us grownups keep our fantasies that we can control your experience as children. Thanks.*** One of the items I packed for my month in Costa Rica was my vibrator. When my partner realized I was taking it along she asked, "What will you say if they search your luggage and find it?" "I'll tell them I'm going to be away from home with no sex for a month! I've got to have something to entertain myself with." During the course of that month, sex was a big topic of conversation and I was very open about my own arrangements, that I had brought my vibrator and was unwilling to go without masturbating for a month, that I had more than one relationship, that pain and power were part of my sexual identity. Near the end of the month one woman made a point of pulling me aside to tell me she was both surprised and appreciative of my honesty, because it opened her mind to a different perspective.

I am humbled when I hear that because I know that I still have so far to go in becoming completely open, completely honest. The kudos to me for what I have done so far just continue to remind me that I have so much more to do in becoming transparent. And this is the difficulty for me-how to become transparent, to allow people to see me completely, while being respectful, doing no harm to others, giving people space to draw away from what may frighten them.

Two nights before our May Day celebration, my sweetie and I watched Milk...finally. Honestly, I had avoided the movie a little because I knew how it ended and I did not want to mourn the loss again. But in watching it, I mostly found myself remembering my early days of coming out as a lesbian, and my discovery of my community, the history of those who had become my people. My ancestors. I thought about the changes my partner and I have seen; 19 years ago we couldn't hold hands on the street without fear unless we were in the gay part of town. Now we do it almost without thought. And it is because of people who had the courage to allow themselves to be seen.

When you begin to come out, you realize that the archetypal coming out story is a myth in some ways, because it's always spoken of in the singular as though you do it once and you are done. The truth is you do it almost constantly, over and over again. After a while it gets exhausting and you just want to go live your life and forget about it.

Lately I have been seeing little reminders all around me though about why it is important to keep doing it. Our culture seems to have a strong desire to put everything and everyone into one big easily defined box. When that happens, there is a pervading feeling that anyone who falls out of the box deserves whatever bad thing happens to them, and that it only happens to a few fringe people anyway, so why should we care? And for the ones who know they don't live in the box it can be terrifying and lonely.

Now I have no interest at all in writing details about my sex life here. Despite the warning above, this is not a "Dear Diary, last night I had such a great time..." kind of blog. The stories are true and personal, but not private, and while they probably tell you a lot about what I think and feel and believe as a human being, they don't tell you much about how I live my mundane everyday life. But part of what I think and feel and believe as a human being has a great deal to do with my sexuality and I don't want to erase that from my writing, presenting the sanitized Disney version of my life. Any child who has read "The Little Mermaid" and then watched the Disney version has the right to fury over the betrayal of truth. We keep trying to force everything into the box, especially for the kids, because we want them to believe that somehow all the confusions of youth smooth out and fall easily into line as we grow up, and everyone has a happy ending.

We also have methods in place to reinforce the box, to prop up the illusion of sameness. Every time I go to the doctor and check the box "single" I erase myself a little. It is a lie and there is no place for the truth of the web of relationships I live and love in on the form. I can explain and protest all I want, but the form remains implacable and unchanged, recording my life on paper as something it is not.

That experience makes me even more aware of the accomplishments of the people who came before me. My family values family ties and family history strongly, and my mother has often exhorted me to remember and honor them in making my life choices. I don't think she realizes that when she says that I tend to think not as much of my blood relations who made my physical existence possible, but of the people I discovered along the way written down in history, who lived their lives so honestly and visibly that they managed to be recorded that way for me to find and follow. Somehow they managed to check the box "other" to show me and others a way out of the box. To let us know that we can live and breathe there and be happy.

I began writing this post many months ago and, at the time, I thought it was connected with the yogic principle of satya, truthfulness. After watching Milk, I returned to my writing with the feeling that I was actually writing about ishvara pranidhana, surrender to the Lord. The Lord in yoga is understood as a pure divine awareness, as Stephen Cope puts it in The Wisdom of Yoga "...the Witness behind the Witness." Cope understands the concept of the Lord as being almost a gravitational force that draws us in, and in yoga we work to align ourselves with it, the idea being that we can't resist gravity anyway so if we can be aware of it and align with it, we can let go of resistance.

I think initially it can be confusing, all this talk of resistance and surrender in connection with real life. Because aren't I being resistant by being so stubborn and contrary about forcing the truth of my life out into the sight of others? And can't I surrender by just being quiet and going along with the status quo? The problem with that is that it is not the Box we need to surrender to, but the Lord. The Box is something that is constantly created and shored up by fearful people trying to control, understand and quantify something too big to control, understand and quantify. People like Harvey Milk understood that we need to surrender to the truth of our own lives, live them out in the open and transparently, understanding and accepting that there will be consequences we can't control, but that surrendering to that larger force behind us requires this of us. We can become the ancestors, showing a way out of despair for those who can't find the right box to check, until finally we can all understand that there is no box.

You thought I was going to talk about sex, didn't you? I am. There is no separate box for sex. I am always talking about it, because it is always in my life. Not dirty, not secret, not scary, not separate. Just life.

Take me for granted

I have a confession to make. I'm not a crafts-y person. When I was little my great-grandmothers taught me how to cut out pieces for quilts, and I even did a little piecework of my own. A very little. I always got frustrated because inevitably I would lose track of which side the seam needed to be on. Teaching me how to knit resulted in a knot of yarn. Crocheting with my grandmother was more successful; I wound up with 8 inches of afghan to keep me warm on cold nights. My mother decided one year it was time for me to learn how to use the sewing machine so we went together, picked out the pattern and material, and I made a shirt. A whole shirt this time certainly but it wasn't a pleasant experience.

Nevertheless, my partner and I decided that it would be good to learn (again!) how to knit, and to knit with friends. Last night found us, needles in hand, working away. (I showed off my one knitting accomplishment: a whole sweater! Granted, it took me a year, living in a cold flat in Scotland, in the company of my flatmates who were also knitting, without the distraction of a tv or a computer, but it is a sweater!) Every time I pick up one of these womanly tasks, I feel that thread through time linking me back to my experiences with the women of my family. A girl growing up in Texas is expected to learn certain skills, even if she learns them badly, and I had multiple generations of women conspiring to teach me.

Earlier this weekend my aunt had called and left a message on my voicemail. She was glad to hear that I was planning to make a trip to Texas soon because my grandmother is in the last stages of kidney failure and will likely need to go on dialysis soon. I called and spoke with her in person later. She mentioned that my great aunt and uncle are trying to sell their home so they can move into an assisted living facility in Georgia, closer to their kids. She laughed talking about the garage sale they had, trying to clear out the clutter of decades, and how they were stubborn and immovable on their prices. I felt saddened by all the news but hardly devastated. None of this comes as a surprise. We are all aging; things are changing. We had a cat once who died of kidney failure; as deaths go, this is not a terrible one for my grandmother to face. We are all always in the process of losing one another.

We knitted last night and it came back to me quickly, as did the boredom of the task. Luckily I had good company and we laughed and talked together for a good couple of hours. As I worked, though, I would hear occasionally resonating through my mind, "My grandmother is dying." I thought of the generations of family I have lost already, my first great-grand dying when I was in fourth grade. I remember my second death in fifth grade as well because I finally had a year of perfect attendance, except for the day I missed for the funeral of my great-grandmother. My grandmother, my great aunt and uncle, they are the last of this generation for me, the threads of my experience unraveling behind me, coming a little closer to my own undoing from the pattern.

This morning the alarm came hard and brittle, jolting me into my day. As I ate breakfast I found myself weeping into my GrapeNuts, thinking of the woman who held me as a baby and who has loved me for 42 years for nothing more spectacular than my existence on the planet. I have felt frustrated before by this unconditional love, wanting to be loved for what I have made of myself since birth, feeling unseen and unrecognized for the things that I value beyond my mere existence. But I begin now to feel the value of these people who are woven so closely into my reality that I don't question them, I can struggle and flail all I want, go away and come back, and they are still just there; I can take them for granted.

I hope there are people in my life to whom I have given this gift, that I have knit my stitches straight and true in my attachments so that I can be relied upon, wound myself fully into my life to be taken for granted as part of the fabric of the whole. The stitching together of people is impermanent and fragile. It never lasts and it is also the only thing worth doing.