This Moment To Be Free

During most of my formative years until he earned his PhD when I was around 10 or 11, there was always Dad at one end of the dining room table writing away amid stacks of yellow pads and books and index cards, and Mom at the other end of the table diligently, lovingly typing his handwritten words from yellow pad to onion skin. She was good, by the way, swiftly changing cartridges to correct mistakes, fingers flying, or so it seemed to me, across the now old fashioned keys.

So, Doctor of Philosophy. I knew Dad’s field was Public Health, but for whatever reason, in my little kid brain, the doctorate he was working on was literally of Philosophy. And when he spoke to me and my brother about the virtues of getting a PhD, how important it was, how it would bring us freedom and enjoyable work, and other good things, I envisioned myself with a PhD — literally, in Philosophy.

I remember vividly one time crossing Second Avenue holding my Dad’s hand and skipping along saying “I am going to get a PhD in Philosophy!”. I am not sure I know what Philosophy was at the time. But what I did know was that my Dad was a philosopher, and that my Dad knew Everything. Just ask him, he knows…and in fact, to little kid me, he did know, and it was delightful to hear the answers…

Once when we were on a city bus going up to the Cloisters I asked him about God. Is there a God, Daddy? What or who is God? And while I do not remember his answer, I do remember that he answered my questions and conveyed warmth and certainty and I remember feeling proud that there was an answer and Daddy knew it.

So to me, that was a Doctor of Philosophy – someone who wrote a lot on yellow pads and read for hours twisting his hair into twirls and little knots. Someone who had all the answers and was not afraid to share them.

Of course, as I grew older and started to come up with some answers of my own, and many of these answers were different from my father’s, and he was not happy with the different answers and did not like to hear them…I grew sad and angry and disillusioned…and then, rather than fight, after awhile I grew by turns rebellious, or quiet.

And yet, inside, although I never did care much for reading philosophers, I somehow became a bit of a philosopher. Over time I have learned some things and gained a bit of wisdom, and have inherited from Dad to be sure, a particular quirky way of thinking about things and mulling things over and expressing them in an unusual light…over time, I have become a philosopher and over time I have become a lot like my dad. And this blog is giving me a chance to express my philosophy.

My cat Tiger is always doing yoga. For instance, I just gave him a few treats and noticed that when he crouched to eat them his little elbows were right by his chest, pointing straight up to the ceiling, shoulders pulled back, feet together — he was in perfect cobra pose. And every morning when he comes to greet me, before receiving pets or rubbing noses, he does a very lovely downward dog (downward cat?) stretch as his way of saying “hi, here I am!”.

Sometimes I see Tiger sitting in the sunshine, or on the bathroom floor with one leg up behind his shoulder giving his undersides a little bath and I wish I could be so flexible! This morning, I was so inspired by watching him and his sister, Princess Bunny, stretch that I pulled out my yoga mat then and there and did a sun salutation. (And of course, once the mat was out the two cats took the opportunity to sit on it and bite it, and crawl under it, and bite it some more, and otherwise enjoy the new play-surface provided for their amusement).

From my cats I learn that any time is a good time to feel good in my body – it is always nice to stretch – I can stretch any where and any time, yoga is not just reserved for special times when I am in class dressed in my stretch pants! Yoga is all the time, any time I want to do a forward bend to shake out my neck and stretch my lower back, or take a big reach up to the sky to stretch my belly. Any time is a good time to take a deep breath and enjoy the sunshine.

Also from my cats I have learned to enjoy a little nap, a rest, whenever the surface is soft and the sun is warm…and that there is wonder in just looking out the window. And, Bunny especially reminds me to enjoy all my meals with gusto. Cats are natural yogis — they have it all down, and are always centered, self-accepting and often pretty blissful, too. So, although I am grateful to my yoga teachers and very happy to have them, for the best yogic gurus, I recommend cats!

I have been a quilter for over 20 years — I started right after college when my mom gave me a sewing machine as a graduation present and I started cutting and piecing everything in sight. I followed the bliss I found with my new machine to Haystack School of Crafts in Maine where I spent a happy August learning how to dye my own fabric. I continued on with a BFA at Colorado State and then spent many years back in New York making strip-quilted bed coverings and pillows and wall hangings and even selling a few at craft fairs and on commission. Most recently I hosted a group of women I dubbed Fiberchix (begun when two friends asked me to teach them how to quilt and then more friends showed up with knitting, crochet, embroidery, and baked goods, lots of baked goods) and until I started grad school, we met regularly to stitch and not bitch.

In the past few years since I got my Master’s in public health, held various challenging management positions in health care, got married, sold my apartment, moved house, and adopted two kittens, I have hardly touched my sewing machine. I still have a sizable fabric collection, however, and a couple of quilts in my mind waiting to be born through the work of my hands.

What I like most about making a quilt is the physical experience, the meditative quality of choosing fabric; enjoying the way it looks and how it feels, and then taking all the pieces and pinning them into a pleasing arrangement of color and pattern — I find rewarding the experience of taking bits of nothing, old clothes or linens, small scraps, and turning all the parts into something beautiful and useful. A warm cover for a bed, a comforting wrap for a child, a pillow, a gift. So, on the physical level, literally — patches!

On another level, I imagine that after six months, this blog will end up being a little quilt of all the musings I have thought and written about while I was enjoying my sabbatical time. Right now, I find I think in patches and pieces, I live in strips, exploring yoga, writing, cooking, sewing and anything else that pulls me. I am taking all my disparate interests and combining them in a patchwork to fill my life with color and beauty and texture. So, in that sense, after six months, my life will reveal itself to be a quilt of all the interests I have gravitated toward and loved during a period when I could do anything with my time. And, in time I want to find a way to quilt together all the pieces of my life, all my interests and passions, into a livelihood that fully expresses who I am, and which brings something of value to others. I will not mind if the work-life I come to build for myself is built like a quilt, in patches that all together create a life that covers and comforts and warms me and the people I may teach, entertain, lead and serve…

And on the most abstract level, this blog will literally be mindpatches — dispatches from my mind. Sometimes I feel that I am musing and thinking and wondering and pondering all the time. I remembered the other day that my childhood ambition was to be a philospher (more about that in another post). I really do feel like these posts, these writings are coming out of my brain through my fingers in much the same way that a quilt takes shape under my hands when I sew on the machine…and in fact, this blog-quilt and a tangible, cloth quilt have much in common — my nimble fingers move on keyboard or guide fabric past a flashing needle, and out scrolls…something…a page of writing, or a multi-pieced design.

So, soon I will take my sewing machine into the little shop where the owners will work their cleaning and repairing magic. I will set up my machine on the old table that I painted blue. I will pull down some fabric and pull up a chair – and once I have done enough yoga to regain the energy I need to do the physical work of sewing and piecing and pinning and cutting and ironing, I will set to work once again, perhaps making a quilt for my nephew, or maybe something for my friends’ new baby, or curtains for our new apartment and cushions for our new chairs.

And in time, over the next few months, I will begin to recognize a pattern in my days and weeks. I will notice the dominant themes and colors of my days and begin to think of how I can pin together all the different things I love to do and imagine how I can present these skills and passions in their best light. It is my desire to find a way to attach the pieces in as seamless a manner as possible and create a foundation for my own right livelihood. Perhaps I will even find some new Fiberchix who want to learn to make quilts and I will start a class. I am looking forward to seeing how everything unfolds!

I thought about calling this post “what we give when we give love” in homage to Raymond Carver — although, since I read the New Yorker essay about him and his editor, I realize that Raymond Carver was actually a completely different writer than the one I read back in Fort Collins in the late 80′s. What we were reading as such spare and acetic prose was actually the post-carved up Carver heavily edited…and in some senses that made him very miserable, although it also made him money. And there we have another instance of depression resulting from not truly doing what your spirit wants, and so it leaves…But I digress.

As I was doing the dishes yesterday morning, and thinking about my weekend with my in-laws, I realized that part of my struggle with them, and theirs, I believe, with me is that we give love in different ways. By this I mean that when we represent love symbolically in material terms – which most of us do – we do this in very different and even diametrically opposed ways.

When I was growing up, giving food meant giving love. Immediately upon entering our home or that of any of my aunts or either grandmother, a guest was offered a cup of tea or coffee, or a drink, something to nosh on until the meal and then after the meal there was candy in a dish, nuts on the coffee table, a bowl of fruit, “a coffee”. I remember that my dear aunt Pearl gave so much of this brand of love, and in such abundance that as a young teenager concerned with my weight, I once cried on my way to her house knowing that my skirt would be too tight upon departure.

Even now, I cannot have a guest come over without feeling remiss if I do not offer tea or at least a glass of water as soon as they arrive. And when I feed my cats, or make a healthy, beautiful dinner for my husband and myself I do not feel that I am just providing a meal, I feel that I am creating a big bowl of love to feed and nurture our bodies and our souls.

Conversely, I really could care less about what I call “stuff”. I never have really cared to possess much and I routinely cull my possessions for what I can give away when I start to feel that our environment has become too cluttered. This is not a virtue, but I wear out my coats and shoes, until they are perhaps too threadbare and worn. I have ancient TV sets, one of which needs to be hit on the head, as it were, in order for it to function properly, and my plates and cups are mismatched and haphazard. I do have lovely silverware — still housed in its wooden box with the velvet lining — it was my grandmother’s and my parents saved it and gave it to me when I left home — I should polish it more. Although the house is clean and smells nice (we love incense) I have a tendency to put my feet on the coffee table, and to let cat hair accumulate on the green chair where they like to sit.

However, when I do prepare my bowls of love for my husband and me and guests to eat, the reason why I am able to cook this food in wonderful, beautiful Le Creuset cookware is because my in-laws have a tendency to express love in material form (the cookware were variously anniversary and Christmas gifts over the past year). They express love via the giving to themselves and those they love of stuff — beautiful and expensive and elegant stuff – and lots of it. I must admit that I have had a tendency to disparage folks who care too much about things as materialists, not understanding why they might care to have these things. I always thought it was kind of shallow to want new stuff when used would do just fine and I know that I inherited this opinion from my own folks, and immigrant grandparents who were incredibly thrifty and made do with what they could find — although as I said, offering the nicest food…

So, I was reflecting on this as I was washing my dishes, by hand, albeit with expensive natural dish soap, in our rambly old Brooklyn apartment. I was thinking of my mother in law and her beautiful modern kitchen and careful paint job and carefully chosen cookware, plates, and so forth. Our biggest, our seminal, our archetypal fight, last winter, was in part a result of the clash of our values — she felt hurt that I did not respect her furniture and her stuff and I was at first shocked that I was perceived as having been disrespectful when I was just being as casual as I understood one could be around family and then felt hurt in turn that her “stuff” was more important to her than making me feel relaxed and welcome in her home.

I have since come to know her better, know more about her childhood, and now it has become clear that to a person who loves beauty and who had very little of it growing up, to a person who craved love and has much inside to give, and had very little opportunity to give of herself and much less to deeply receive love until she was in her 30′s…to this person whose dream has been to have a beautiful home and beautiful clothes and beautiful family to lavish her things upon — and because I see that she is generous with her family and loved ones with what she has — to her, my apparent lack of appreciation for her possessions must have felt akin to physical pain. I doubt I will ever feel the same way about my things, but now I understand…

So, I was reflecting upon all this and thinking about how I had felt a bit hurt that when I was in their home this past weekend no one offered me a cup of tea, that I had to ask for tea…good lord, I felt, ask for tea? Where is the love when one must request tea, when it is not offered? And a chair…I was not offered a chair…how can they not have noticed I was standing up while they were sitting down? And then I thought — these things, tea, food, a chair — to my husband’s family these things do not mean love. Although they always serve good food, and take us to the nicest restaurants, it is not a given to them that food is love anymore than it is a given to me and mine that material possessions are love. And as soon as I asked, I was cheerfully given tea and a seat and a smile…so…and a lot of all this is cultural…

And of course none of these things are love at all…what is love, what is truly love is what we all feel in common for our beloved Rob. We all love this man — their son, my husband. And he is truly a lovable fellow. So great is the power of his loveability and our love for him, that we are all willing to come together and find a way to be family to each other as best we can…so it is really my husband’s heart and his capacity to love and our desire to be part of his warmth and generosity of spirit that has caused people with very different images of love and opposite backgrounds and values to come together and give each other hugs and send each other email…and try so hard to get along…so maybe that is really love…the intangible, the counter intuitive, the unquantifiable…the painful, the difficult, the real.

I have been thinking lately about the concept of ahimsa, nonviolence, literally the avoidance of violence. Ahimsa originally referred literally to killing or harming animals or people, and was then expanded upon by Ghandi to be a way of life. I have been thinking about it in a kind of global way, broadly and untraditionally defined since I am not a vegetarian, about the way I want to be in the world and how I want to live in relation to other people and especially the way I want to treat myself and my body.

One of the things I want to do in the next few months is to lose the extra weight I have been carrying around – maybe 15 or 20 pounds, mostly belly fat – that gets in the way when I try to do a seated full forward bend. For awhile it served me very well to have this fat — I needed to restore my nervous system and comfort and protect myself after a difficult and challenging time when I was way too anxious and stressed out and lost way too much weight. It was a counter balance, a pendulum swing after 20+ years of chronic dieting verging on mild anorexia (sometimes less mild than others) and it helped me feel strong and take up space in the world, literally and figuratively.

In the past, whenever I have dieted I have done so in a brutal way — violent to my self, my body and my soul. I have looked in the mirror and disparaged my reflection. I have limited my intake to only the least delightful foods and with not enough fat in my diet, my skin broke out and my nerves were frayed. So what I want to do in the next few months is find a way, above all, to practice ahimsa toward my body. To find a loving, kind and generous way, a gentle and nonviolent way, to help my body shed its protective and cozy layer of fat and find other ways to feel protected and cozy and strong and grounded in the world. And maybe I will discover, along the way that this fat is not in fact extra after all, I am open to that possibility. I am open to discovering that after 6 months of regular yoga, eating whole foods, high quality, gentle, network chiropractic, and much limited stress, that I am at the weight I am supposed to be at — but I am also open to letting the fat shift or become muscle and finding out that I can be a big, sturdy grounded woman without being sad and feeling uncomfortable everytime I try to do a full forward bend (one of the nicest yoga poses there are, and one I really, really miss being able to do with ease and pleasure!).

So, lots of yoga and running around every Tuesday afternoon with my nephew and taking walks and riding my bike more when it warms up should take care of the exercise need. Eating — hmmm, I love to eat. I will eat healthy, whole foods. I will try to limit portions and eat more frequent, small meals…but I am also acutely aware of the absurdity of the richest people in the world (I am one of these, although not one of the richest new yorkers!!) being madly obsessed with dieting while the poorest people will probably never have enough to eat. That is violence. And to neglect that fact, to take for granted the abundance of wonderful whole foods I have access to, and to limit myself to eating only “low cal” meager miserly meals is, in my opinion an act of painful hypocrisy, and would show a lack of gratitude. So, I will eat with gratitude, and work on practicing being gentle and nonviolent with the speed and amount of what I consume. Just try to be conscious and enjoy the abundance and be grateful for it, and try to avoid gluttony!

But the most challenging nonviolence I want to practice is not to push past sprains or pains during exercise, not to overdo the amount of exercise I take in a frenzy of “self-improvement”, and definitely to stop myself from saying mean and disparaging things to the vulnerable, sensitive human being I see in the mirror every day, or reflected unexpectedly in store windows.

Probably the most violence I have ever done is to myself is to be mean and unloving to me. And I do feel the old adage is true — that we cannot really fully love others until we fully love ourselves. Really giving love to oneself first of all is a life’s work, and not an easy job…and in the spirit of nonviolence, I very lovingly say to myself right now: don’t worry about getting it right, but when you find yourself saying something mean to yourself, keep breathing, take a deep breath, and find something nicer to say, or a kinder way to reframe the comment into constructive criticism.

That’s all…and hopefully, as is my intention, I want all the kindness I give to myself to overflow and become kindness I have in abundance to give and shower upon others. I want, as much as possible, to be patient, kind and calm. I wish to be the person in the room who emanates love and warmth and who makes other people feel safer, not anxious. Even when I don’t like someone or judge someone, I want to be able to avoid fighting and arguing — I want to find the good and if not the good, at least the hurt, lost, suffering human inside each of us. With some it is harder to do than others. When toward someone I feel rage, and of them, fear — it will take work, trying to see the lesson I need to learn from that person …But in general, with people who are just mean because in pain — those folks, including myself when I get that way – I can find a way to accept and even love (though maybe still not like very much at times, or like the way I feel around them, is probably more accurate!).

So, it is that the morning has flowed (not flown) by — rest, sunshine streaming through the window, wholesome whole food breakfast, the companionship of two mischievous and loving, lovable cats, the splash of their drinking fountain in the background, the hum of appliances, cozy pajamas and rumpled bedding…a delightful, relaxing, side-street, off the main avenues, backyard-facing, urban morning. Sigh. And many errands yet on my to do list…tra la la…and yoga class later, and a lovely dinner with my Sweetie…Amen, and thank you to me who brought me here and the Great Spirit and his Wife, the Mother of All, who make it all possible.

I had not realized, although I had an inkling, how deeply my identity has been tied up in what I do. Even with a job I found intensely frustrating, I identified myself as doing that job. And with that job – which involved supervising and mentoring and was technically a senior management position – came a feeling of authority and identity and location. And, I was busy and when not busy too tired to do much other than a couple dinners a week with friends and the occasional yoga class and otherwise sitting at home in front of the tv with Rob eating the least complicated food I/we could find.

So, the space I have now to be, rather than only do is wonderful – and I am experiencing growing pains now – I just realized this – as I expand to fill this space with being, with who am I and what I need and want each day – rather than a prescribed routine of doing that kept me too busy to feel and too busy to think and too busy to play and create, but which did locate me on the map of identity and gave me a title and a salary and a chair to sit in each day between 9:30 and 6, and a set of things to do once I sat down…

So, I am now feeling incredibly fortunate to be having this experience and pretty scared also. What if I can’t let go and relax and groove in the way I envisioned when I decided to follow my inner voice and take the time off? What if I do finally relax into this and never want to come out? How will I earn my keep once my sabbatical is over in 6 months? And now that I have all this empty space to fill with myself, what do I do about the part of me that worries and thinks too much and chatters loudly about “what if”?

This is not a new problem – everyone I have ever heard of who has embarked on a similar journey has faced the chattering mind coming up against the Great Stillness. I am not special – this is not new, just that it is new for me, that’s all.

So here I am, here I am — time to eat toast with avocado, drink tea, and watch a rerun of The Waltons before I do my ablutions and go out into the very cold winter world for body work and yoga and shopping for the nicest vegetables I can find for dinner. Maybe buy a teapot, a britta filter, a new colander since ours is rusted. Also must immediately clean the cat box and change the kitty litter.

So prosaic – daily tasks and consumption and entertainment and body care. And also the amazing good fortune of being able to do any of this – to have a warm place to live and food to eat and a tv and spending money – how incredibly amazing and unusual on this planet where most people do not have enough of any of the basics. If all I ever do for 6 months is learn to be truly grateful for just having enough – then ok.

And all the while I just feel myself expand and stretch into this new space, this open space – the mystery of who I am when I don’t have a job title telling me. What I like about me, what I want to change, need to work on, need to just accept. Will the chatter quiet down? Will I become boring – am I already boring? That is the thing with writing a blog – I felt moved to write but — who cares except me?

But isn’t that the point — I am now pretty much only interesting and useful to myself and I am hoping that will be enough and be ok for a little while – for 6 months…

…and part of the “scared” feeling and the worry is fear — fear I have not felt in a long while – fear that goes along with the strong desire to build a life for myself based on my own skills and gifts and what I can dream of and create – and which requires “putting myself out there” and marketing and reaching out and saying “hey, world, here I am and this is what I do, and this is how much it costs to do this with me, or learn this from me, or eat what I cooked, or buy this piece of art or craft”. And see what comes back. And risk rejection. And risk success. I have heard successful creative people say that they love the fear, and when they feel it they know they are alive and doing something new and real – but I am not one of those lovers of feeling fear. So this is the fear of the next step that I know I need to take in my life, and which I have been afraid to take and not been at all sure how to take it, so that is part of what is going on too. And I will find out to what degree I am able to “feel the fear and do it anyway” as they say. (Or what I end up “doing” if not?)

But today I need to relax and expand and let go of having to impress myself or anyone else with what I do. Foremost, I need to learn to be ok with being…