A Sense of Ease

The student discussion leaders of my Emotions and Senses class on Wednesday began by asking us to assess our emotional states. Were we happy, sad, surprised, angry, disgusted or fearful/anxious? Four of us volunteered, and every one said fearful/anxious. 

Although two people blamed the weather (after a long dry summer we've had rain every day for a week) and others cited work or traffic as primary stressors, these answers made me think (not for the first time) that we live in an age of anxiety. 

This is nothing new. W. H. Auden published a poem by that name in 1947. But we still have the hallmarks: a sense of unease, a low-level discomfort, a feeling that another shoe may drop at any time. 

I'd like to say these anxious feelings will go away after the election, but I suppose they will only go away for half of us. So how do we keep the anxiety at bay? One idea is to devote ourselves to the people, places and activities we love, that we find meaningful. That's how I try to restore a sense of ease. 

Effort and Ease

I often get ideas in yoga class. Breaking my concentration to write them down seems most un-yogi-like, though, so I try to file them away to retrieve later. 

Last week the inspiration arrived during shavasana, the final, resting pose, when you spend a few minutes lying down and (at least for me) trying not to fall asleep. The teacher read us a passage about kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing ceramics with gold lacquer, celebrating the cracks rather than hiding them. Obvious post potential in that, but I'm saving it for another day.

Today I want to explore a suggestion I heard in class several weeks earlier: the need to balance effort and ease in each yoga pose. While some contortions seem more effortful than easy, I can see the wisdom in maintaining these two poles. If you're slacking, pick it up. If you're hurting, tone it down.

Some of us find it easier to slack, others to overdo. But neither attitude gets us where we want to be. To find freedom in movement requires attentiveness and relaxation, strength and flexibility, effort and ease.

Surely this isn't just advice for yoga, but for life. 

Creeping Jenny

It's Advent, the season of waiting. But waiting for what? The birth of Christ, the gathering of the clan, the arrival of yet another box from Amazon? Or for a contentment I long for but can't explain.

Advent is also the season of preparation, not just wrapping gifts and baking cookies but preparing ourselves spiritually. For me, the best way to prepare is to stop waiting and bask in the moment.

Today's moment is noticing the jaunty upward growth of the Creeping Jenny plant. I've been neglecting it, putting it on top of the bookshelf in my office so it would trail down from on high in romantic tendrils, like wisps of hair escaping from a Gibson Girl bun. 

But it gets no sun there, so I moved it yesterday to a free corner of my desk. It already looks healthier, greener, more in sync with its surroundings. I want to be like that plant: well placed and pointing toward the sun.

Sky and Clouds

One of the more effective meditation metaphors I've learned is to see the calm mind as blue sky and the worries and troubles that beset us as clouds in that sky.  They come and go; they obscure our vision. But the blue sky is still there.

It reminds us that even when tranquility seems to have vanished, it actually has not. It's there all along, and we can restore it by resting the gaze, stilling the breath, and seeing the clouds — the worries and troubles — for what they are: distractions.

This doesn't mean I put this metaphor to practice, but it's top-of-mind enough that when I look out my office window at thick clouds and an ever-shrinking patch of blue, I remember ... and take heart. 

The Message

Say what you will about the cluttered house (and I've said plenty), but every so often it can surprise and delight you. 

The other night, while looking for something in the closet, I jostled a tube of silver wrapping paper, which dislodged a spool of curling ribbon, which brought down an old envelope filled with photos and a note from my father-in-law, who's been gone for almost 29 years. 

What a gift this was, to hear again from this man who, even in the midst of his own illness was writing to share holiday photos and wisdom. The note was filled with appreciation for his home, his family, for the snow that had recently blanketed the woods around his house. 

The delivery system may have been a bit unorthodox, but the message was simple: love life while you have it. 

(A different snowfall, a different woods.)

Robins in Winter

Yesterday I watched two plump robins hop around the backyard by the witch hazel tree. It was the first in a string of warming days, and it would have been tempting to see them as harbingers of spring. But I've been seeing robins off and on all winter, stepping out of the house into air brisk enough to tickle my nose only to hear their distinctive spring-like sound. 

So I did what any self-respecting modern person would do. I googled "robins in winter?" in hopes of learning that their presence in January meant warmer days would soon be here. 

Ah no, it meant nothing of the sort. The "first robin of spring" saying, at least in these parts, is just a saying.  Robins winter in these climes, so seeing them doesn't mean much of anything. 

But what I learned warmed the heart if not the fingers and toes. In cold months, robins are much more likely to be found in large flocks. They have learned to stick together when the pickings are slim. Would that we humans could follow their example. 

(Photo: Wikipedia)

"With Room"

This morning while carrying a mug of hot tea from the first floor to the second floor of the house, I thought about the coffee shop lingo I only learned last year,  that of ordering a tea to go "with room" — meaning to leave a little space at the top for the milk.

I remember what a revelation this was when I first heard it, a practical shorthand for communicating that I didn't want scalding water up to the very brim of the paper cup.

Today, of course, I was not in a coffee shop but in my own house, but I have learned the hard way that when the cup is full the carpet bears the brunt of it. So "leaving room" is now a mantra both at home and away. 

It's not one that comes easily to me, however. I'm an up-to-the-brim kind of person, and restraining myself enough to leave room is an act of restraint I'm not always willing to make. 

The little bit of wisdom that flew down on me when I glanced at my not-quite-full-cup this morning was that it's an easier way to live and is perhaps worth a more-than-occasional try. Living "with room" means not packing every day quite as full, leaving minutes at the beginning and end to think, ponder or meditate. Living "with room" takes some of the edge off he day.

(My brother is an excellent packer, but even he left room in this well-stocked box of gifts.)

Running Start

Animals, in their vigor and innocence and lack of self-regard, often hold some deep and true lessons for humans. I was thinking of this today while watching Copper climb the deck stairs. He doesn't do them slowly and gradually, but quickly — and only with a running start.

There must be a physiological reason for running starts, something in the motion of muscles and mobility of tendons. But the psychological component is large, too.

There are the running starts that precede a dive off the high board, the quick steps that introduce a tumbling run — and then there is that scene I've always loved from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," where Paul Newman and Robert Redford dash and then leap off the cliff into the roaring stream below to escape their pursuers.

The running start is not always easy — I can see Copper pause at the stairs, as if to gather his energy before the effort. But there is much to be said for it: how it screws up our courage, helps us hew to our original intentions, how it commits us to action.

Underland

Like the underworlds Robert Macfarlane plumbs in his book Underland: A Deep Time Journey, there is much going on beneath the surface in this marvelous new offering by one of my favorite authors. 

And there would have to be to combine prehistoric cave art, Parisian catacombs, the "wood wide web" (the fungal and rooted connectedness of trees in the forest), underground rivers, sweating icebergs and burial sites for nuclear waste — all in one book.

One theme that ties them together, besides Macfarlane's exploration of them (no one is better than he at describing fear) is a growing recognition of the Anthropocene, the geologic age that experts have come to accept we are living through, one defined by human influence on the environment.

To comprehend the enormity of this designation, Macfarlane brings many tools to bear — literature, myth, science, philosophy and language, always language. "Words are world-makers — and language is one of the great geologic forces of the Anthropocene," Macfarlane writes. But of the many terms for this "ugly epoch," only one seems right with Macfarlane — "species loneliness, the intense solitude that we are fashioning for ourselves as we strip the Earth of the other life with which we share it." 

"If there is human meaning to be made of the wood wide web," he continues, "it is surely that what might save us as we move forwards into the precarious, unsettled centuries ahead is collaboration: mutualism, symbiosis, the inclusive human work of collective decision-making extended to more-than-human communities.”

And so the image at the heart of these pages, he explains, is that of an opened hand — extended in greeting, compassion, art — the prehistoric hand prints in ancient cave paintings and the touch of his young son's hand. 

I know I will write more about this wonderful book; this is a start.

Walking the Way

I picked up Walking the Way, by Robert Meikyo Rosenbaum, because I was browsing the library and liked the title. (It was no doubt the word "walking" that did it.) I almost didn't check it out when I saw the subtitle, 81 Zen Encounters with the Tao Te Ching, which sounded too esoteric for me. But I brought it home anyway — and now may have to buy it, so wise and calming do I find its words.

Walking the Way is a series of reflections on 81 poems from the Tao Te Ching, a book of wisdom and fundamental text for the Chinese religious and philosophical system of Taoism. It is, as the foreword describes, like an "ancient, weathered, solitary pine that exists above the tree line that whistles the tunes of the wind on a high mountain." Reading these words reawakens my desire to meditate, or at least to sit quietly for a while each day.

Here's a passage that speaks to me:

It is easy to fall into the tyranny of doing. The feeling that you should do more is a tyrant worse than any dictator. It will wear you out and bring not just an early demise but the daily death of a thousand stressful cuts. If you do not free yourself from this tyranny you'll die early, or daily, or both.

(Illustration, Wikipedia: Laozi, reputed author of the Tao Te Ching.) 

Gibbet Hill

Many years ago I lived across from a small hill in Massachusetts. Gibbet Hill, it's called, a great New England name with character and more than a whiff of dastardly deeds. Men were once hung there, according to local legend.

But the hill was for me a great source of inspiration and beauty, especially in the winter. In the summer the hill was obscured by tall trees and a tangle of underbrush along the road. But in the fall it revealed itself like a puzzle in reverse, each tumbling leaf making room for a view of the slope beyond.

It was more than just a scene. It was the promise of winter wisdom buried beneath the snow drifts. It was earth, tree and sky — all stripped down to their barest and most essential, the outline of life laid open to all.

I haven't lived near it in decades but the hill is clear in my mind's eye. It has come to stand for the beauty of winter and all the lessons it holds.

(Photo: Gibbet Hill Grill. It's not winter, but it's the hill I remember.)

Life Preserver

If all birthdays should hold within them some memento mori, some reflections on our own mortality, then my recent one was complete even in that way, with the funeral of an acquaintance, a woman my age (too young to die!) held Saturday in a local cemetery.

Attending this funeral brought many thoughts to mind: Sadness for the family, especially the two twenty-something children who now must make their way without their mom; gratitude for my own health and family, for everything I have; and relief that I've escaped a trap that suburban living makes women especially prone to.

It isn't always easy to schlep to the office, but the suburbs have a way of sucking women in and making everything about the kids. While I made sure I was home with the girls as much as possible when they were young, and I look back on those years as some of the most precious and happiest of my life, I tried always to have a separate self, a career (writing) self — an Anne that is not also Mom.

Now I tell my girls to do this, to keep themselves alive. The childrearing years only seem like they'll last forever. In truth, they're over in a flash.  When they are, you want a self to go back to.

Cats and Dogs and Beauty

Dancers are satisfied in a way that dieters and exercisers are not, writes Ursula Le Guin in her essay, "Dogs, Cats and Dancers: Thoughts About Beauty," which was summarized in the latest Brain Pickings.

Dogs don't know what they look like, where their bodies are in space. Cats do. Le Guin describes a pair of Siamese, one black, one white. The white one always lay on the black cushion and the black one on the white cushion. "t wasn’t just that they wanted to leave cat hair where it showed up best," Le Guin writes, "though cats are always thoughtful about that. They knew where they looked best."

Dancers, too, are exquisitely aware of where they are in space, she says. And I think about my tap teacher, Candy, still jaunty and perky in her 60s, knowing exactly how to move her arms, to hold her shoulders, so that every angle and line was a pleasing one.

From these observations, Le Guin takes us to a place of pathos and love. She talks about aging, that it's not just the loss of beauty that dismays her ("I never had enough to carry on about"), but the loss of identity. It's that the person she sees looking at her in the mirror isn't her — it's an old woman.

Death, though it is the great equalizer, can also illuminate the essential beauty of a person. Le Guin uses her mother for illustration here, and I will use mine. Because even in death Mom was beautiful: the essential beauty, which lives in the bones, never left her.

Wearing Purple

This morning on Metro I realized I was wearing a purple jacket, holding a phone with a purple cover and wearing glasses with a purple frame.

It's just a coincidence, I told myself. I'm not turning into one of those old women who wears purple. Not that there's anything wrong with the color. But I'd rather not wait till I'm old to wear it — and, more to the point, I'd rather not wait till I'm old to be a free spirit.

Yes, there's something to be said for how years lessen the esteem with which we hold the opinions of others. Maybe that's because we've seen more foolishness. But I hope it's because we're more tolerant of ourselves and others, that we've grown in compassion as well as nerve. If that's what frees us ... then bring it on.

Radical Love

Usually on Valentine's Day I write about personal love. And I'm certainly thinking of it today, feeling grateful for my family and friends, all those I hold dear. But these are extraordinary times, and they call for the most radical and extreme of actions.

They call for love.

"If we are stretching to live wiser and not just smarter," says Krista Tippett in her book Becoming Wise, "we will aspire to learn what love means, how it arises and deepens, how it withers and revives, what it looks like as a private good but also a common good."

Tippett, the host of NPR's "On Being," describes the love shown by 1960s civil rights workers, their belief in the "beloved community" that meant they were fighting for equality with courtesy and kindness.  "This was love as a way of being, not a feeling, which transcended grievance and painstakingly transformed violence," Tippett writes.

Though her book was published just last year, it already seems to hail from another era, a time when were not yet as deeply divided as we are now. Tippett doesn't address the division as much as she would had she been writing a year later, but reading her book makes me think about how much further we'd be if treated each other with courtesy and kindness.

Maybe love is what we need, love translated into forbearance and understanding, into biting our tongues and holding our applause. Divisiveness got us into this mess. Maybe love can get us out.

Oldest Living Albatross Lays Egg

It's been hard lately to make my way through the national and political news sections of the newspaper. Which is why I've been open to other, more offbeat stories. Like Wisdom, the 66-year-old albatross who is still laying an egg every year. Just laid one a few days ago, in fact.

Wisdom was banded on the Midway Atoll in 1956, so scientists are pretty sure that she's truly a (late) middle-aged gal.

What an inspiration! Here she is at a time when many human females might be slowing down. Instead, she's adding to her brood.

Is she worrying about her children? Heck no, she's too busy having 'em.

And as for her appearance, she's smooth of feather and sleek of bill. No tummy tuck or chin lifts for her.

(Photo: courtesy Smithsonian.com)

First Walk

Yesterday, the walk came first. I strolled out into the morning, the first day of my new year, and felt a sort of awe.

The headphones, they would remain in my hand. There were birds to listen to, morning music free for the taking. There was a bird that seemed to be saying "Judy, Judy, Judy," a poor imitation of Cary Grant. There were crickets in the woods, chirping as if it were still night.

And then there were sights that made sounds unnecessary: banked clouds that seemed lit from inside, a wind stirring the high oak branches. Most of all there was a hush to the morning, a holding of breath.

I felt a sort of wonder at this new day, at the sheer gift of existence, of being alive. Beyond people and expectations. Part of the natural world for which we surely were made.

Remembering Dad

Today would have been Dad's 91st birthday. And I've been seeing him everywhere. In the graduation celebration we just had. In the new spring leaves. In the finally warm, "not-a-cloud-in-the-sky" day.

Where I've not been seeing him is in the arm chair where he used to read. Or the corner of the couch where he sat to watch TV. Or the McDonald's where he hung out with his coffee buddies. It's still a shock that he's not in all those places, not alive and laughing in the world.

"Come on, Annie," he'd say to me during episodes of childhood drama. "You're living your life like it's a Greek tragedy." At the time it bothered me. Did he not appreciate the full implication of having bad hair on picture day?

Somewhere along the way, of course, I realized that he did. But he also knew how to swallow hard and move through life's sorrows and disappointments. He knew how to make the best of things. It's a valuable skill. One I'm nowhere near mastering.

Luckily I have his words and his example.  And I think of them often — especially today.

Epiphanies

Yesterday was the Feast of the Epiphany, a day I've always liked, though not so much for its liturgical meaning as for its philosophical one: "a sudden, intuitive perception; an insight into the reality or essential meaning of something."

When I was younger I considered epiphanies the "ah hah" moments in life, grandiose and breath-taking. But as I've grown older I've realized they are more common than I once thought. They are part of the wisdom that comes with age. They are moments when I say to myself, "Oh, so that's what it's all about." They are not always pleasant, but they are always true.