Things Go Right Slowly

...and wrong very quickly.

Nothing out of the ordinary is wrong. No need for extra worry. I'm just thinking out loud here.

One mistake I make is thinking that I have to do a project all the way to the end in one sitting. That's possible with tasks that aren't complicated. I can unload the dishwasher all at one time, after all. But "write a book," "garden," "knit" -even "read a book" -these are not things that can be done in one fell swoop generally.

But here's the thing. Sometimes that thinking keeps me from starting. If I can't get the whole thing finished, I hear myself decide to wait until there's a big enough block of time to get it done. Which of course never happens.

Reframing this, however, I know that sometimes NOT finishing a book is part of the joy. (I do sometimes stay up all night to finish a book, I admit.) It's like a little treat waiting for me at the end of the day. I need to think of more tasks like that.

Get Fit Slowly
Get Financially Secure Slowly
Create the Home You Envision Slowly
Write Slowly (but slightly more steadily)
Create (knit, sew) Slowly
Garden Slowly


It doesn't all have to be frantic. Just intentional.

Living Gently On Purpose

Several threads of truth are relevant here. First, I want things to be gentle for the people around me. I even used the word "gentle" in my mission statement, as it applies to social change and its effects on the very poorest people on the planet. I work hard to create gentle pathways toward success for the people I work with. I want to be gentle to animals and toward the planet.

But I am seriously tough on (mean to?) myself, and more than -or different from- the "negative self-talk" thing we all know about -although I am a master at that, too. I mean that I won't accept gentle change. I feel like I have to lean in and do everything HARD -and if I can't or won't, that's a failure.

And... somehow I have this idea that a high-adventure life is more valuable than a quiet, gentle life. To complicate matters, though, I would never agree that Emily Dickinson, with her quiet life, was less valuable than Sir Edmund Hillary trekking around on mountains. Kind of the contrary, actually. It's just that the rules are different for me, you see ;) I ought to want to be rappelling down a mountain in Belize or canoeing whitewater somewhere. So, in my twisted little mind, it's this:

Or this:

and there's not much in between.


But I have to do something different; I'm wearing myself out, thrashing around. I get it. My life was forced into a new place. There was (and is) a lot to do to get to safety, much less to a place where I could thrive. Besides, I had postponed a lot in the interest of other things -saving an unsalvageable marriage not least among them. There was some resentment there, and by God , it was my turn. So, urgency and entitlement were all mixed up. I needed some things urgently, and felt like it was my bloody turn for a little adventure on the other.

Now that I think about it, perhaps I'm mixing up indolence and calm -gentleness and sloth. I know what the words mean; we don't have to go there! It's just assigning the words to my own behavior that I'm not doing with very much sophistication or tolerance. If I sit for a minute, it's not necessarily laziness -even if there are several visibly undone tasks in my immediate vicinity.

So, given that the list of things I want to do has not gotten any shorter, how might I live gently on purpose? We're talking Gentleness 101, here. What does gentle homemaking look like? What does gentle scholarship look like? What does gently physical fitness look like (especially challenging, since it requires exertion, by definition).

Sigh.... I just don't know.

Step Away from the Ziploc!

I have a bit of a thing about Ziplocs and tupperware and other plastic storage devices. I love having them around. Differently-organized people do this. We think that containers are the solution to being organized. (Note to self -It doesn't work if the containers remain empty!!) To make matters worse, in this busy life I've chosen, the temptation to choose convenience over economy or environmentalism or... pretty much anything else, has been darn near irresistible.

However... just now I used the last gallon-sized Ziploc. I had the empty box in my hand on the way to recycling, and made a mental note to add Ziplocs to the grocery list. Then I thought.... here's your chance to make one more right decision.

I do want to make green choices -and one of the ways to make that real in a small way, I admit, is to reduce the amount of plastics that come into my life. I don't have to buy more of these things; I just have to figure out an alternative.

A quick google search reveals that plenty of people charge quite a bit for making and delivering to your home reusable sandwich bags. I'm not out of those yet, so I'll just use up what I have first. However, when the time comes, with a yard of rip-stop nylon and some Velcro, I could make enough sandwich bags to last a lifetime, probably. The idea would be to make enough for a week's worth of lunches, and to have a few cycling through the laundry.

But as I said, I don't need those yet. And I'm not sure that I want opaque bags of fresh vegetables in my fridge. I waste too many fruits and vegetables as it is Hence the vegetable stock that's simmering in the crockpot right this minute. Vegetables invisible to me in the fridge -that way lies disaster. But, for heaven's sakes, my grandmother didn't have Ziplocs. I'm not even sure that my mother did. So, what did THEY do?

Here's some guidance. It turns out that the Berkeley (of course it was Berkeley, the home of my soul!)Farmer's Market has gone entirely plastic-free. They have published a guide to keeping your produce fresh without plastic: Guide.

When you add this list to my new gentle return to vegetarianism (another casualty of the convenient life), I will be saving a lot of vegetables from a slow miserable death in my crisper!

Are the Kleshas Keeping me Fat?

They sound like little gremlins who come in the night and inject saturated fat into my arteries. But no....they're Buddha-identified causes of suffering. Many wisdom traditions identify similar ways we get ourselves into trouble, and common sense will take us pretty far down this path as well.

As you know, my yoga practice has been important to me for a good long while now. And because of that, I knew vaguely about the kleshas when disaster struck my life in the form of a wandering and insulting husband. And I've been staggered by how simply and elegantly true this formulation of human suffering is. I've watched myself move through the kleshas one by one in my healing from that wound -not meaning to imply that I'm finished with this project, by any means. However, I've learned a tiny bit about sitting intentionally with myself in order to let go of these pain-causing troublemakers.

But lately (well, since yesterday) I've been wondering how the kleshas play out in other ways. Specifically, am I making myself fat (seriously... who else could be making me fat?) by a lack of awareness of the kleshas? The pattern certainly seems familiar.

Let's start at the beginning. Avidya (ignorance) is the misconception of our true reality, the belief that the temporary is eternal, the impure is the pure, and that pleasure is painful. This false representation of reality is the root klesha and produces the four others. This ignorance is not a failure of the intellect; it's a failure of the intellectual apparatus. We just can't know everything through the intellect.

Avidya happens when we forget the spiritual (or divine, if you want to go here) side of our nature and focus on the material. In my quest to become fit again, I have made many material-world changes. I have not one, but two, gym memberships, to accommodate my schedule and to eliminate excuses for not working out. I'm reclaiming a yoga practice. I've been saying that for years now, I know; it's just that it's a process. I drink more water. I have completely eliminated fast food. You know the drill.

These things are important, and I need to continue to do them. One can't eliminate suffering simply by switching to the other pole of this bi-polar problem. Fatness isn't solely a spiritual problem any more than it's solely a material one. A yoga practice is all about reclaiming balance, about eliminating needless dualities.

On some level this is nothing more than old habit -trying to wrestle my world into submission through the force of my intellect. (How's that working out, Andrea???) But flipping the question around, what is this fat doing FOR me -spiritually, metaphysically, even psychologically? I must believe on some level that this situation is less painful than its solution. I must believe that it works for me, in spite of evidence to the contrary.

So, what's going on? My marriage was all about shame. Perhaps this is one of those clearly self-defeating strategies to shame myself before someone else does. Or perhaps I am saying physically what I say vocally all the time. I am NOT interested in another intimate relationship EVER. Well, in this culture at this time, fat will pretty much guarantee that. Perhaps my spectacular (seriously... the stuff of legend)inability to say no is just manifesting itself on my hips and thighs. Maybe it's all these things, or something else altogether.

But I'm going to sit with this for a while and see where it takes me.

Darn These Life Lessons, Anyway

I've hurt my back. I would love to spin you a tale about rescuing a puppy off a rock face while climbing, and....

Not so much. I was rearranging the furniture in my bedroom. Oh, the glamour.

This kind of muscle strain happens when the abs aren't strong enough. Abs aren't strong enough because they aren't being challenged. They aren't being challenged because I don't work out enough. I don't work out enough because I almost always put someone else's needs ahead of mine. And I do THAT because my metaphorical core isn't strong enough.

It only looks like circular reasoning. My workout PLANS are good. My workout "actual" is ho-hum. Time after time, I put my plans on hold because someone needs me to do something else. Sometimes that needs to happen, granted. But my guess is that it doesn't need to happen quite as often as I let it happen.

One moment while I explain the back story. Psychology-types talk about organizing one's self-concept around a core identity. Bearing in mind that we all live with a lot of inconsistency in these matters, the core story can give meaning and purpose to that role and to all the others we adopt and live, or adopt and discard, across a lifetime.

Most of the time we hold incongruent identities in a workable tension. However, when two mutually exclusive stories each strive to be the core story, the tension can become unbearable. That's cognitive dissonance (in spite of how the term is used in popular parlance, that's what it actually means). People can put up with this situation for a really long time, but when it does become unbearable, it must be resolved or madness will surely ensue.

So, clearly, the idea is to get this taken care of early. Cognitive dissonance can, then, be a motivator for change. My self-concept as the helper is pretty darn important to me. My self-concept as an independent and physically strong person is, so far, mostly words. It doesn't approach the level of a core story, but it could get there. The thing is, the helper identity is actually truncating the independent strong person. If I don't become fully who I am because I stayed at work late to help you, then my failures are your fault. I have "an out" for not succeeding. Of COURSE, that's not true; my frontal brain knows that. My subconscious? I don't think so.

So, my sad stiff back is telling me that I am setting myself up for failure. I need to haul my sorry self to the gym and do some ab work -and all the other things I authentically like to do there. I need to stop pretending to be too busy.

I need to do this for myself, but I also need to do it in order to be in authentic relationships with my friends and colleagues. Because why would healthy strong people want to be in a relationship where this kind of scapegoating -however subconscious- is a possibility?

So, either I've reconciled the dissonance between two of my life stories and now really have to work on getting stronger, or this medicine is making me crazy. Besides, Faith the Vampire Slayer was a helper-girl, too. I just need to change what I'm aiming for in the helping department ;)

The Joys of the Handmade life

I'm reading Made from Scratch: Discovering the Pleasures of the Handmade Life by Jenna Woginrich. For me, it goes in the guilty pleasure reading category. It's like reading cookbooks as though they were novels. I know I will never make...pheasant under glass, or some such recipe, but I love to read about it and look at the pretty pictures. Similarly, I know that I will never be a "live off the land" sort of person. To be fully me, I need to be near libraries and universities and knitters and ...people, I suppose.

Moreover, I don't even WANT to do what she does. She has chickens in her yard. She keeps bees. She wants a farm in Idaho. More accurately, though, my handmade life would not look like her handmade life. She and I do want the same thing; it's just that the particulars differ. Bearing in mind that I do not need to complicate my life further, I nonetheless need to live MY life. We've covered this... I want to make my house a space where people are welcomed, where comfort and conversation are the norm. I want to honor myself and my guests with good food. I want to have an outdoor space that invites people in. I want to make warm and cozy things for myself, for my home, and for people I love. I want my environment to be full of old things, things with a history.

So, my house was emptied and is being refilled with new (to me)furniture, art, knick-knacks. I'm repurposing and repainting rooms. I'm cooking and baking again -witness the Sunday "Susie Homemaker" posts on facebook. I iron the cloth napkins and endure the gentle teasing from my friends about that. I have my garden plans, at least for the backyard. I've relocated my knitting urge, and have socks on the needles as we speak. I go thrifting and hunting in antique stores, and have fun even when I don't buy anything.

And all of this is consistent with my other need to live a more environmentally gentle life. It does matter how my food is grown and delivered to me; making at least some of it myself reclaims some power and artistry. Re-using old things discovered in junk stores supports the local economy and is an elegant form of recycling. Gardening makes a mark, creates another welcoming space, and creates a safe and gentle space on the planet -a place where scary chemicals are not used, thank you very much.

But that's the airy-fairy version. While true, as an ideal, the reality is that for these (and the 40 bajillion other) tasks to be done with anything like the grace they deserve, there has to be a calm order. One can't live gracefully -or even intentionally- in a mess. Rather, it's always an equilibrium-disturbing lurch from one emergency to another. So, the question becomes... how do we get from here to there?

I don't have the slightest idea. Yet.

la gratitude est la mémoire du coeur

I realized -again- the other day that I love my life. I am grateful for the whole divorce debacle. I will stop well short of saying that Math-Rat was right to do what he did, because he was wrong in every particular. What's true is that I've managed to thrive, in large part because of my friends but to some extent because of strength I didn't know I had. So, yay for us!

I'm grateful that it's going well with Ohoud, the exchange student. She's just a 23-year-old girl, for heaven's sake. She's very afraid of my animals. We haven't gotten into a rhythm yet. She got lost in town yesterday, which scared me (and her) to death, because she doesn't know enough English to tell me where she was. But I showed her that the cats don't have claws, that they're soft, and that if you walk toward them assertively enough they will get up and move. I'll wake her up earlier tomorrow so that I can drive her to school and she doesn't have to walk God-knows-where. It's a start.

I'm grateful that I am healthy and getting stronger. That's a huge thing, and I know now to never take it for granted. I think I'm not doing the AIDS Ride this year, which is sad. However, I'm getting stronger, I'm swimming, I'm training for a 5K, and I'm ready to take my bikes to the shop for a tune-up. All is well.

I have a really cool job, and really astounding colleagues. Most days, I wake up and smile because I get to go do something fun.

And -sadly for the rest of you parents everywhere- I have the best, most astounding children on the planet. I am grateful for that, as well.