I eyed the bookshelf, resting by the dumpster in my friend’s alley. Attempting to mentally maintain its proportions, I turned to my little Saturn sedan. I cocked my head to the right, puckered my lips and wrinkled up my nose, doing some internal measuring. With a sudden determination, I popped my trunk, pushed down my backseats, pulled my front seats all the way forward and began praying as I slid the bookshelf into my car.
I am not sure how that friggen thing fit into my car or how I was still able to close the trunk, but somehow it worked. I thanked my friend for the bookshelf and skedaddled to Hobby Lobby for sandpaper and paint.
And that’s how it all started.
Next thing I knew, I needed a power sander. My life was not going to be complete until I had a power sander. I went to the De-Pot and bought paint stripper, goggles, facemask, and two varieties of power sanders.
By the time I arrived back at my house from my manly-De-Pot trip, I had also acquired two bookshelves, a dresser and a half a dozen turquoise wine glasses from a sketchy-ass garage sale down the street from my house. I lugged everything back in Leonard (the little Saturn that could) and set all the furniture up in my garage.
I began diligently stripping, peeling, scratching, scraping, scrubbing and rubbing finish off of each piece of furniture. Slowly but surely, the ugly, old finish would come off – usually not without a fight, and sometimes only after a commitment to a few processes of repeating the abrasive stripping process.
Once the finish is off, the fun part begins – the plugging in and turning on of the power sanders. This is the preparation for a fresh, new start – once the ugly old finish has finally been let go of, you have to get down to the pure bare rawness of the most organic state. Once you’ve smoothed out the rough edges, softened the surface and prepared the pores to take in something new, then you can decide what color you want to stain the wood. I chose purple.
My ol’ pal Sarah came over the other day to try out my newfound hobby. She stripped a bookshelf while I sanded the dresser. Then she sanded the bookshelf while I stained the dresser. We both worked mostly without talking, as it’s sort of hard to hear each other when you a) are talking into a mask covering your mouth and nose and b) when two power sanders are on.
Each time Sarah completed a step, she would pull back her goggles and drop her mask beneath her chin. “This is fun!” she’d say, stepping back to survey her work and wipe her forehead with her arm. I’d smile, then nod, realizing she wouldn’t know if I was smiling or not.
“I know!” I pushed my goggles to my forehead and stacked my mask on top of it. “It’s such an empowering feeling to know that I’m giving these pieces a new life.”
I love looking at a piece of furniture and seeing beyond its tired exterior. Watching the paint stripper bubble up underneath all of the old crusty finish with the scraping tool in hand and just waiting… patiently… for the right time to begin peeling off the old never gets old. I don’t even mind when a little flick of the stripper flies onto my skin. Sure, it hurts like a sonofabitch on my flesh – but making a transformation isn’t always rainbows and unicorns. And once I finish and take off my mask to take a big exhale, it feels like the dresser/bookshelf/chair is taking a deep breath with me. Grateful to have space around it, even though it is raw and tender.
That’s where I am in my life. I’ve finally worn through the old finish and am slowly peeling off the layers. I can take a deep breath through every pore of my body and it feels so good. There is space all around my heart and I’m ready to begin the process of refining this raw space, this vulnerable space, this powerful seed space of my radical growth. Who knows what I’ll pull in – when I’m ready. I’m sure it will be something as rich, regal, and out of the ordinary as purple.
I walk away from my garage exhausted, filthy and smelly but feeling sweetly powerful. I’ve never been one to just walk away from a relationship, a job, anything without giving it a second chance, a third chance – a million chances to be everything I wanted it to be, hoped it would be… knew it could be. It’s been both a blessing and a curse, I suppose, never knowing if I would be able to inspire those around me or simply wear myself out with hopefulness.
I’m giving these pieces another chance – and feeling safe in that I can do the same thing for myself.
As Kenny Rogers has always said, “You gotta know when to hold’m, know when to fold’m, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” But I’d like to make an addition – you also gotta know when to power sand.
You also gotta know when to strip, but that’s a loaded comment and applicable on many different levels. That’s a whole other blog.
Four years ago yesterday, my friend Matty very unexpectedly passed away.
I met Matty one summer, a friend of a friend’s brother who sat at the bar during happy hour of the restaurant I was working at. He was cute and fun to be around and thought I was, too – so obviously we were fast friends.
Sometimes Matty would ask to wear my thumb ring on his left ring finger, so we could pretend we were married. He was in love with my little sister and was always asking me if he could ask her out. I would pretend to get angry and slap his shoulder, saying “She’s sixteen, Matty!”
“Come on, Elle,” he’d say, twisting my thumb ring on his own finger. “I just want to take her out and hold her hand.”
Once, when Matty was having a bad day, I picked him up at his house after work. He got in my car, smelling of the best cologne. He always smelled so good. Anyway, we went to iHop or something like that and he drank coffee to sober up and I ate hashbrowns with Chalula. When the check came, he looked at me and told me he didn’t want to go home. Not yet.
We decided to get a hotel room, not for any sort of funny business, but just for a change of scenery. Matty pretended we were an out-of-town couple, on the road for a cross-country roadtrip to wherever-we-wanted. The hotel clerk raised his eyebrow at me when I stumbled at the question of Matty’s last name.
Up in the room, we watched movies and History Channel documentaries, jumped quietly on the beds, alternately singing Head Automatica and making animal noises at each other. We played Truth or Dare with all truths, laying upside down on the bed and confessing secrets to each other and the ceiling.
“What if I never find love?” Matty asked me.
“What do you mean, ‘what-if-I-never-find-love?’”
“What if I never get married or have a girlfriend or fall in love?” Matty was always worried about that. Maybe that’s why he loved pretending like my thumb ring was his wedding ring.
“That’s not all that love is, my sweets. Seriously, you know it’s not, right?” I readjusted the pillows so I could look at him. “What do you think this is right now? This is love, Matty. Look around you. Look at the people in your life – your friends, your family – you are surrounded by love. Don’t underestimate the power of love just because you don’t have a girlfriend. Don’t dismiss this love because it’s not the love you’re imagining.”
Matty looked steadily back at me, through his long eyelashes and quiet eyes. I can still remember each of the random freckles on his face, as if even they were listening intently to me.
“I love you, Matty. Please know that. And you can keep searching for love in a million different places, but never forget that I will always love you. The love that surrounds you now is always there – you’re never alone and you’re never not loved.” We fell asleep holding hands; not in a romantic way, rather as a reminder that we were there for each other.
The year or so before Matty passed away, we didn’t see much of each other. But in the middle of the night sometimes, I would get random text messages saying “I love you” and phone calls with long, silly voicemails telling me how much he missed my awesome hair. I like to think that it was the moments when he was worrying about finding love that he would remember me and be reminded…
The day after I heard the news, I was working at Bed Bath and my Butthole (I hated that place). My co-workers were completely unsupportive and my boss had even told me she may not be able to find coverage for me later that week so that I could go to the funeral. I was pissed, near-tears, and working at the ridiculously long-lined Customer Service desk, dealing with irritated customers and their busted blenders.
One man came to the counter for a refund. I fumbled around with the register, getting more and more frustrated at all the wrong buttons I was pushing.
“How’s your day?” he asked, completely aware that I was not in a good mood.
“Pretty awful, to tell you the truth,” I replied through my teeth, not looking up from the return receipts.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” I could feel him looking at me, formulating his next thought. “Why’s that?”
Getting annoyed at both the register and this guy for asking me so many questions, I gritted my teeth and tried to be civil. I was surprised when I heard myself share. “Well, actually, my buddy died two days ago and no one here cares enough to cover my shift to go to the funeral.”
“Oh, shit…” I finally looked up from the receipts and the register and made eye contact with the fellow. He looked at me with genuine kindness and concern. “I am so sorry. How did it happen?”
I found myself sharing more of the story with this man, so thankful for someone who cared. The line began to grow behind him but I was in no rush. Dozens and dozens of customers had come to my counter already that day but no one had connected with me, no one had shown compassion to me, no one had genuinely wished me a nice afternoon – no one gave a shit. And so neither did I.
But this guy – this guy recognized I needed a little love and needed to be seen. He told me about losing his two-year-old daughter over the holidays the year before to Leukemia.
“It’s hard to lose someone you love,” he said, putting his refund receipt back into his wallet and standing there, in no hurry to leave me. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thank you so much for talking to me,” I sputtered, feeling my eyes fill up with tears. “It really means a lot.”
He reached across the counter and took my hand, like a half-handshake, half-embrace. “Thank you for talking to me.”
And then I remembered – love is all around. It shows up in different ways, across different faces and radiating from different eyes. When love leaves one place, it subsequently shows up in hundreds more, like refracted light bouncing off broken glass. And in the darkest of places, love shines even more brilliantly. I didn’t get any act of love or support from my co-workers like I had hoped for, but the random act of love and kindness that a stranger shared with me was much more powerful, potent and real than I could have asked for.
Matty inadvertently taught me the most important and undeniable quality of love – that it’s more than just finding a husband or wife and settling down and having babies. That love is truly an incredible feat, an unstoppable act and an undying connection to those around you who never really leave.
Still, to this exact breath, I very intentionally carry him in an unwavering piece of my heart. My thumb ring continues to be a sort of “wedding ring” in my mind – a remembrance that I am always connected by love and through love to the people I love most.
After taking three yoga classes in one week for the first time in my life, I knew I wanted to be a yoga teacher. I called everyone I knew to tell them my huge revelation. The overwhelming response from nearly everyone: “Of course you are. That’s perfect for you!”
This made me furious. If it was so obvious to everyone, then why hadn’t anyone suggested it to me sooner!? It would have saved me from all the heartache of not being accepted into the music program in college, all the mindless years working retail and waiting tables…
I am one of those yoga teachers who went from first serious yoga class to teacher training in t-minus three weeks. It was truly love at first Tadasana – and after my humble two and a half years of the yoga-schtick, I happily boast somewhere around 800 hours of yoga trainings.
I suppose when you find something you truly love, there’s no denying it. What was that quote I had on my teabag the other day? Oh, right – “Where there is love, there is no question.” Good words to live by.
Whether or not you actually want to teach yoga isn’t the important part of a teacher training. The self-esteem, confidence and public speaking skills students acquire are inspiring, to say the least…
I could go on and on about how much yoga has changed my life, blah blah blah. But I think we both know that your experience would be completely different from mine… and that’s why I encourage you to dive in…
My first thought: “Would someone let that mouse out of the plastic bag?”
My second thought: “Wait, what the hell?”
I looked at my clock. 5:07am. Squinting into the pre-dawn lit space of my room, I searched for the origin of the scuttling sound. A blurry shadow came out from behind my window’s blinds and the pitter-patter momentarily ceased.
Stinkin’ miller moths, I thought, getting quietly out of bed so as not to wake my visiting cousin, passed out on the opposite side of the mattress. I stood at the foot of my bed and stared inquisitively at the ceiling above me. Without my glasses, I could barely make out the little moth’s shape.
I opened my bedroom door and visually invited the moth to exit stage left. He did not seem interested, so I assumed he had fallen asleep. I hoped that meant maybe I could, too, so I crawled back into bed and relaxed back under my comforter.
Moments later, the rat-a-tatting began again. Stifling an audible sigh, I cracked open my eyes and used my index fingers to pull the outer edges of my eyelids towards my temples to increase my vision. I finally got a visual confirmation on the location of the moth. He was no longer throwing himself into the glow of the window, rather into where the increasing light was reflecting off my glossy white ceiling.
Tap. F-f-f-flutter tap. Tap tap. Tap.
I rolled back out of bed and in a haze, grabbed one of my yoga bolsters. I stood on my tiptoes, trying unsuccessfully to herd the moth out of my room.
My cousin shifted in bed. “What are you dooooooooing??” she asked, peering at me in my favorite up-to-the-belly-button underwear and men’s tank top, waving a bolster over my head in silence at 5:21am.
“Moth,” I replied, giggling at my own absurdity. “He’s not even going for the source of light. He’s just throwing himself at the reflection on the ceiling.”
There are a million poetic references of leading a moth to the flame. This is not one of them: When I was in high school, we had one particularly moth-infested spring at my parents’ house. We would sit in darkness at night with candles lit near bowls of soapy water. The reflection of the flame on the bubbles would lure the moth near until it would splash down into the water and eventually drown in a mirage of its own desire.
What is it that tirelessly draws them to anything that exudes or reflects light? Just like a moth to the flame – or, better yet, one who bumps up against a window in search of the freedom to fly closer and closer to the light – we all desire that union with love.
We seek and search for love in all things, but you can only bump up against so many mirrors of divine love’s reflection until you realize that there’s something more. If you are finding love in so many different places – love that looks the same, makes you feel the same – then there must be a wellspring of that love. All light is reflective of the greatest light; the sun. The trip to the sun is not an easy one. It is dangerous, hot and far, far away, especially for a moth. But by not limiting itself to just a lightbulb, just a candle or just a reflection, look at the infinite freedom the moth gives itself. How by seeing the light on a more broad scope, it can see all the millions of different places light can possibly be reflected from.
And look at how much less irritating it would be for us all.
Look, just because I love love, I crave love, I desire love, doesn’t mean I should repeatedly throw myself into the closest thing that appears to be love. It limits my expression, my ability to see love elsewhere.
I bang my head against walls because one-upon-a-time I saw love in this relationship or in that friendship or in that one pair of really great jeans and all I want is to feel that way again within that relationship/friendship/pair of jeans. But what if instead, I recognized the ability of that relationship to have reflected love, that my friendship was of love and that I experienced love when I slid into those jeans – and yet those experiences were not Love itself??
The light from the sunrise poured light into my room and the moth saw it reflected on the ceiling. But I saw instead darkness fading.
Love moves through everything. Bathes everything within it, like the golden glow of a sunrise. Infuses everything. But love is not just one person. Not just one home. Not just one opportunity. Love is a million sunrises, over and over again. And when the sun sets at night, just because you don’t feel its warmth pouring over you doesn’t mean that its light has gone out.
One Thursday night in October, I was manning the front desk at om time Boulder. Shannon came out from her class with a huge, heavy looking statue wrapped under her arm. Fascinated and still new to this whole “yoga” thing, I tried to stealthily sneak a peak at the figure;
A woman riding a tiger.
Ah. Okay. Of course it’s a woman riding a tiger.
Always addressing a hundred things at once, mid-conversation with another student, Shannon sharply shot a glance at me over her shoulder. I immediately pretended like I had not been staring at her tiger-riding woman with all the extra arms.
“You have to clean your altar tonight, Elle. Don’t forget. It’s the last night of Diwali.”
The look on my face must have been an oblivious blank stare.
“You do have an altar, right?”
Continued blank stare.
“Oh my gosh. Elle. Tonight. You HAVE to set up an altar. It’s all about setting a space for manifesting and change and moving forward.”
“Well,” I finally managed to stammer, “I just moved into the new house yesterday…”
“Perfect!” She slapped her free hand on the desk and smiled at me.
My new roommate texted me as soon as I got off work that night. “What are we doing tonight?? Wine??”
“Sure!” I replied. “But first I have to build an altar.”
I didn’t get a response back.
An hour later, I was frantically digging through half-unpacked boxes in my bedroom. Altar, altar, altar… what exactly DOES one put on an altar? I had no sacred little statues of women riding large jungle cats or holy incense to burn. But I did find a little table and a scarf that had a tag that read “Made in India”… this was surely a good start.
I found a sweet card my dad had written to me prior to my final musical performance in high school, a washcloth knitted by my nearly-blind great-grandmother when she was 92… and slowly but surely I felt my altar was picking up speed. I lit a tea-light and hummed a couple Om Namah Shivaya’s and felt wholly satisfied that I had effectively cultivated a sacred space in my new room. Everything else sat around it in a state of complete dishevelment and upheaval, but there was a bright feeling around that little space in the corner.
I came back to the front room after my anxious completion of altar-ification and wanted chips and salsa. The third roommate wanted pizza rolls, so her and I decided to take a field trip to the grocery store. I joked about how excited I was to actually be living IN Denver, where the grocery store was a mere three minute drive away. Out in the country where I had been living with my parents made it more difficult for late night junk food cravings, what with all the dirt roads and loose cattle meandering about past dark.
On the way home from the grocery store, a man on a bicycle came flying out of an alley. I slammed on my brakes and narrowly missed him, my heart pounding and my hands shaking.
“Oh my GOD – that was no cattle…!” The roommate and I began giggling. “Man, seriously – I guess I’ll have to watch out for those crazy bike-riders out here….”
I gently began to accelerate again, and not fifteen feet down the road, another bicycle came flying out of nowhere from my right. I was barely back up to 15mph, and slammed on my brakes again – but hit his back tire with the driver’s side bumper of my car. As my car came to a halt, I watched his little body fly off his bike. I pulled my emergency brake, flipped on my hazard lights, opened my door, and held my breath. Staring in disbelief, I waited to see if he was moving. He moaned, my roommate cussed, and I said, “Are you… are you okay?”
“Si, si. I okay, I okay,” replied the slowly moving little body. I stood up out of my car.
“No, but seriously – are YOU okay? I mean, are you OKAY?” He picked himself up off of the ground and began brushing himself off. I walked over to him and grabbed his hand. “Are you alright?”
With his other hand, he began brushing across his body as if taking stock on all the parts. Everything seemed to still be accounted for, and he traced his hand over his face. “Oh my gah. Ohmygah ohmygah ohmygah…” He was shaking, and I pulled him in and hugged him.
“You scared the crap out of me, kiddo.” I realized we were both shaking.
“I sorry, I so so sorry,” the little Hispanic teenager kept repeating.
“YOU’re sorry! I just hit you with my CAR!!”
I kept trying to ask him questions, but between being so shaken up and having limited access to the language, he was having a hard time answering with detailed descriptions of how he was. He looked down at the mess of a bike, picked it up and tried to fix the obviously broken brakes. Frustrated, he tried to ask me if I knew how to fix the bike. I told him I didn’t, but that I was so glad he was okay.
Suddenly abashed, he glanced up at me. “My fall?”
“Um… yes, you fell.” I started to worry that maybe he had knocked himself slightly senseless.
He shook his head. “My fall?”
“My fault, I think he’s asking,” my roommate said.
“Si, my fault?” I took one more glance at his bike, and for the first time noticed the beer can with a bendy pink straw in the cup-holder, its contents splashed across the road.
Suddenly a little irritated, I replied, “Oh. Well, ya. Yes, you have to stop at the end of an alley to look both ways before you cross it. You have to pay attention when you’re biking in the dark!” I nodded down at the drink, wordlessly making my final point.
As we were loading his bike into the back of my car and gathering our new friend into the backseat to take him to his friends’ house where he was staying, the man who had been on the first bike I almost hit came back.
“Man, I’m so sorry if I scared you, pulling out in front of you like that. I should have been paying more attention…” he went on.
I was suddenly so thankful – had it not been for me slowing down out of surprise for him, I may have hit the second kid head on. Dead on. “You actually probably just saved this kid’s life,” I replied.
We dropped him off at his friends’ and made sure everyone was alright. The bike was broken, but he was okay, and we all agreed that’s all that really mattered.
Pay attention. You never know what’s going to jump out and knock you on your butt if you’re not looking both ways before you cross a juncture in your life – especially if you’re taking the one less travelled by. You know, the one in the yellowed wood and all… You can prepare yourself for change all you want, planning out exactly how you will complete it, taking every precaution into consideration – but sometimes the most unexpected can come out of nowhere and set you back. There is a certain turmoil and discomfort associated with any transition in life – the level of such pain and disarray will vary and you never know until it flat out hits you.
And in the mean time, the things that seem to set you back indefinitely as you move towards that new goal may actually be there to keep you on the right path. Don’t damn them until you study them, wonder why they have presented themselves to you, celebrate them for what other suffering they may be inhibiting you from encountering.
Life can come at you going a million miles an hour and hit you like a freight train. You can either be upset about what it destroyed around you or celebrate what you walked away with. When life shakes things up, it is really shaking things away from you. And as you sit in the midst of the mess, looking out at all the little pieces your life seems to have shattered into, you are given the blessed opportunity to take the things that matter. Pick up the pieces that are worth salvaging and let the others fall away.
And as a packrat, I truly believe it’s the only way a lot of us can learn. We become too attached to too much; attached to relationships that are detrimental to our emotional health, attached to jobs that drain us dry, attached to basements of stuff we haven’t been through in years. Sometimes it takes catastrophe to remind us of the things that are truly worth holding on to – like the friends that are there to comfort us as we mourn, the family that supports us as we try to keep our head above water, the memories – not the STUFF – that are always with us.
Transition isn’t easy. New beginnings aren’t easy. And it’s because letting go to the past is rough. It’s the hardest part. It’s letting go of the pain of being hit with an opportunity for a new beginning and finding that that which you previously held on to isn’t there to hold on to anymore.
It’s building a new sacred place in your life to move forward from now. And it’s adorned with things from your past that empower you. And it’s about learning from the thing that scattered everything else away.
And so, here I sit at my altar, watching the last of my tea lights this evening burn away. And I realize there are things here that no longer empower me. It’s time to let it go, because something has hit me and I’m lucky to still be as strong as I am.
I challenged myself to a month of eating gluten-free, vegan, processed sugar-free, caffeine-free and alcohol-free.
At first, I didn’t think I would be able to do it – I imagined myself gnawing on leaves and crying over spilt milk that I wouldn’t be able to drink.
Luckily, I have a phenomenal nutritionist, Ryah. If it hadn’t been for the afternoon she spent in my kitchen with me, showing me how to cook things I’d never even heard of before, I would be famished. Instead, I’m on day seven and feeling like a million bucks of energetic, non-gassy sassy lady.
My sister (the infamous eM) decided to join me in my eating-adventure. It makes it so much easier to cook when you have a friend to do it with… and when it’s someone that you can simultaneously have a ball with while barefoot in the kitchen and daydreaming about living on a tropical island someday, it makes it that much more fun.
I’m the first to admit that making a change in your diet is difficult (this coming from the girl who used to eat graham cracker sandwiches filled with chocolate frosting for breakfast and a handful of M&Ms with a glass of eggnog for dinner), but the amazing changes I’m already experiencing are eye-opening.
Eat healthy and see what happens. I dare you.
You could even come over to my house for dinner sometime.
Couple cooking notes: for the enchiladas, we added a spicy Spanish rice pilaf IN the enchiladas… for the mango salsa, we used champagne mangoes (holy crap, it was amazing) and also smooshed an avocado in with everything.
I remember the day I realized I was empowered to make my own decisions about the friends I keep. Well, I remember roughly the age and the general place I was in my life, anyway. I had just completed my teens, was set for my twenties and was sick of chasing friends around. I had sufficiently exhausted myself in making excuses for the way they were, the hurtful things they said and their lack of presence when I needed them.
My soft-spot is the undying belief in someone I love – no matter how infuriating, hurtful or abandoning that friend might be on the outside, if I have seen the brilliant light of their heart and sparkle in their eye at one point or another, I will absolutely refuse to ignore it. I will fight and coax and pray and beg for it to come back when it fizzles – and it is utterly exhausting. It’s like when you’re camping and the fire begins to die so you curl up around the smoking embers to protect it with the wall of your body and feed it dried grass and twigs and rub sticks together and blow and blow and blow until you collapse in fatigue, light-headed and sick from the smoke, feeling like a fool for having tried so hard on a lost cause.
Yup.
With the light of this realization glowing in my belly, I quit apologizing for things I didn’t do wrong. I stopped trying to make plans with friends who always flaked out on me and I stopped calling the friends who were such Negative Nancies. ”It’s time to take care of mySELF first,” I sang. ”I won’t let anyone else ever bring me down.”
Boundaries are healthy. In fact, I highly suggest investing in some boundaries in life. It helps identify the things in your life that you cannot live without, the things about your general well-being that you refuse to compromise and allows you to recognize what you will and will not do for the sake of a friendship.
With the inspiration of the few incredibly hard-headed, strong-willed and some might even call “bitchy” women friends I had, I decided to start standing up for my Self and my Heart. And then I let those friendships fade.
It’s been going really well, if you ask me. These boundaries that I built have allowed me to let go of some incredibly unhealthy relationships, both romantic and not. I have learned to take care of myself first (which is imperative before I begin to take care of anyone else). It has rebuilt my self-esteem as now I don’t sit around and wonder why I’m not worthy enough of this friend calling me back or what I did to deserve that friend being nasty to me. And in time, a few of those “bitchy” friends came back into my life and continue to this day to be my best friends.
But now… now comes the yoga.
With the creation of all these boundaries, I became a little overzealous. I wrapped up around the little flame of my heart so tightly because I was afraid that anyone who came too close would smother my fire – and now all I want to do is let the bright light of love burst out, pour forth and envelop everyone around me.
But it is hard. I didn’t realize those walls had grown so thick.
What happens when an old friend comes back to apologize? Or when someone new comes into my life and wants to share in my heart? How do I learn to not approach every friendship with impending fear of being hurt or abused… but still keep the boundary of my own heart secure? How can I live in a way that I can have a conversation with a stranger and not immediately become defensive of my heart?
Just yet another step towards learning to love Love. And love is love sufficient unto love – and you can figure out the rest.
<iframe title=”YouTube video player” width=”640″ height=”390″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/y86RuvgsV5w” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>One of the most difficult things for me to sustain in a consistent manner is a personal practice. You may (or not) be surprised to hear that it’s hard to get me to sit still. I’m the kind of monkey who is distracted my shiny things.
The second I finally get myself onto my mat, I see how dusty the spot is beneath my altar – until the next thing I know, I’ve moved all of my furniture to sweep my room. Then, while I’m at it, I might as well clean the bathroom, too. Once the bathroom’s clean, I may as well take a shower in the nice, clean shower. And once I’m clean, I’m sure not interested ingetting sweaty by practicing.
Good excuses, eh?
But when I do finally find myself on my mat, participating more fully with my breath and witnessing my thoughts as I improv the movements of my body, I find that I more often than not end up making myself laugh at my seriousness.
I mean, seriously – who practices trying to wrap their leg behind their head at home by themselves and never once cracks a smile?
Who wakes up in the morning and tries to touch their toes and never once smirks at how fantastic it is to have the availability of a million different ways to move the body and still let the breath play through the lungs?
When I first was trying to decide on my website address, I struggled with “Little Bluebirds.” I was afraid that if I made bluebirds my schtick that I would be committing to it – and I didn’t know if I wanted to end up with dozens of knickknack bluebird kitsch.
A friend of mine from high school stopped by my house the other day to give me little birdcage with a handmade porcelain bluebird that she sat in a nest of grass. She saw the birdcage and thought of me – so she MADE the little bluebird.
Shannon walked into the studio the other day with a sweet little bluebird paperweight. I let it rest in my lap when I drive back and forth from Denver to Boulder.
My friend (and blossoming Anjali Restorative teacher) Elaine gifted me a sweet statue of a girl with bluebirds resting on her outreached arms. It sits on my altar.
My momma gave me a bluebird pin that had been hers for years upon the completion of my third teacher training. I’ve lost it a zillion times in the past year – but it always finds its way back to me.
Joyce taught the MOST beautiful Anjali Restorative class themed on bluebirds on the last day of our Anjali teacher training – and I bawled for hours.
I’ve learned that through these genuine expressions of friendship and love that they’ve shared with me, it reaffirms the original little bluebird that was placed so deeply in my heart to begin with. It’s not that they are giving me gifts that I know they love me – it’s that they’ve been listening to the things that I’ve said, and that it’s made a little impression on them. That I can express the love that was shared with me to others is an incredible accomplishment – one that I continue to practice, time and time again. It’s not always easy to share openly, to love freely and to have passionate faith in love – but sweet dammit, I’m going to keep trying.
I’ve had a couple of friends now pass to me this poem by Charles Bukowski. Perhaps it’s time to share on…
There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I pour whiskey on him and inhale cigarette smoke and the whores and the bartenders and the grocery clerks never know that he’s in there.
there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay down, do you want to mess me up? you want to screw up the works? you want to blow my book sales in Europe?
there’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too clever, I only let him out at night sometimes when everybody’s asleep. I say, I know that you’re there, so don’t be sad. then I put him back, but he’s singing a little in there, I haven’t quite let him die and we sleep together like that with our secret pact
and it’s nice enough to make a man weep, but I don’t weep, do you?
I rolled over in bed and buried my head under a pile of pillows, unsure of my whereabouts. The stomping that followed signaled the quick-approaching footsteps of my roommate/best-friend/heterosexual-life-partner Lara making her way from her back-of-the-house bedroom, across the kitchen and straight toward my room.
She cracked open my bedroom door. “Potterrrrr?” she whispered.
“Ah-yeah?” I gurgled, mostly not awake.
“Potter, the birds are pecking on my head.” This got my attention enough to prop myself almost-upright in my bed, nearly concerned that she was bringing a halo of wild birds into my room.
“Sorry?” I said, not so much apology as an inquiry.
“The birds are pecking on my head in my room! Potter, you don’t hear the woodpeckers?”
Just like that, we had new houseguests. I refer to them as the Knocking-birds.
Our landlady came over multiple times through the next few weeks, bringing all kinds of anti-Knocking-bird regalia. My sister sat with the electric air mattress pump, blowing up giant beach balls with big bullseyes all the way around. Once they were inflated, we tied iridescent streamers to the bottoms of each of them and went outside with the landlady to hang one up on each corner of the house. Over time, the collection of kitsch hanging from the roof came to include color-changing light-spheres, shiny garlands, blinking Christmas lights and even a motion-sensored owl that turns its head to give the evil eye to anything that crosses its path.
And still, every morning I would hear the cadence of Lara’s feet stamping across the kitchen floor and across to the back porch door to go outside and shout at the Knocking-birds.
At the front desk of the Boulder studio one day, I was laughing and telling a fellow teacher about how Lara had begun to throw leftover Christmas mints at the house to try to scare the Knocking-birds away. A customer with her daughter overheard and said, “Good luck with those woodpeckers.”
She walked up to the desk to purchase a new mat for her daughter (a Manduka, in case you were wondering). “We had a family of woodpeckers at our old house.” Apparently, when Knocking-birds find their nesting place, they will come back year after year. “Animal services took the birds and tried to relocate them far, far away and the next spring… tap tap tap. There they were again.”
Uh-oh, I thought. That’s not good.
Some people know exactly where their heart belongs – and it’s the place that they revisit time and time again.
For others, they’d rather be able to distance themselves from the cyclical visitors in life – bad relationships, old habits, health problems – and have them not come back year after year.
It’s an interesting cycle. You can pack up your problems and try to ship them to the other side of the world. You can hope and pray that they will find a new place to nest and new skies to fly through that are far, far away from the freedom of your own.
You never know when it will come back around. You can’t simply come up with a way to kill a Knocking-bird (it’s illegal; I checked). But where would the Yoga be in that anyway?
We are yogis – we find the balance in situations like this. Find ways to live with it but also ways to fortify the container of our life so that maybe we can become strong enough to finally keep those pests from taking up their residency in our hearts.
Until our house is Knocking-bird-proofed with new siding or stucco or something, our amazing landlady gave Lara the greatest consolation prize.
I received a very loud and excited voicemail from Lara while I was teaching class one evening.
“Paaaaahhhh-terrrrr!!!!!” she sang. “Ohmigosh, POTTER! I came home! And there was a box on the couch! And a note! Ohmigosh, POTTERRRRRR!!! Hurry home and see!”
I obviously had no idea what the heck was going on, but the second I walked in the front door it all became very apparent very quickly.
Lara stood in the kitchen with a giant SuperSoaker perched on her shoulder. She aimed, pumped and shot me right in the chest with a big surge of cold water.
It’s still pretty dangerous at our house, whether or not you are a Knocking-bird – there’s always a chance that something unexpected will hit you.
Next thing I knew, I needed a power sander. My life was not going to be complete until I had a power sander. I went to the De-Pot and bought paint stripper, goggles, facemask, and two varieties of power sanders.
My ol’ pal Sarah came over the other day to try out my newfound hobby. She stripped a bookshelf while I sanded the dresser. Then she sanded the bookshelf while I stained the dresser. We both worked mostly without talking, as it’s sort of hard to hear each other when you a) are talking into a mask covering your mouth and nose and b) when two power sanders are on.
