Small Victories

After another week of basically eating seeds and berries because the healthy lunch I packed myself was too bland to bear, I decided that I am gonna have to lean in on this food thing.  Up until the present I have been hovering around Dorito vegetarian status- you know, when “vegetarian” means that you just eat a ton of ho hos?

I have to branch out and learn some new food tricks, or I am going to die of a cashew overdose.

I made this! I am an awesome witch! 

So over the weekend I went all in and made three things that seemed far beyond my grasp.

I made a gluten free, vegan pasta sauce that went on shredded yams instead of pasta. The machine that makes yam-pasta is way too expensive, so instead I just used this hand tool that makes strips of things. Not surprisingly, I accidentally made strips of my left hand, which resulted in this amazing pattern of evenly spaced lines of blood down my palm and wrist. I hate it when I cut myself and there is no one there to see all that immediate red blood. What a waste. The sauce had nut milk and came out of the blender. I love the blender so much I could cry.

I made gluten free french onion dip also out of nut milk, and, like, onion powder.

AND I made fucking almond milk out of fucking almonds. Yeah, that’s right. I turned almonds into almond milk, using the blender and fucking cheesecloth like a fucking pioneer lady. Boom. Need some butter churned, bitches? I am pioneer times. Maybe the railroad will get finished and I’ll get an orange for Christmas. Made my own almond milk. This is West Philly, bitches. Manifest destiny.

This weekend was definitely the peak of my life’s culinary achievement. I think that this kind of on-purpose growth happens in an iamb. There’s the denial that lots of spiritual traditions embrace, but the heart is not in the denial, it’s in the readjustment that you need to do to fill the hole where the thing was that you gave up.

The things that I am gaining in yoga (small gains) come directly from the abandonment of pride or grace or control. I do not have these things in yoga. But little spring flower blades of other things are coming up in there.

And I am also breathing into the gentle daily embarrassment of my relationship. As much as my body has no idea how to do dandasna, my self has no idea how to be someone’s girlfriend in any kind of functioning, healthy way. I don’t know why I am surprised to learn this. It is basically the same thing though. Weird stretching and discomfort with either tears or insight coming out of nowhere occasionally.  To be so lost, so bad at something that I have, in fact, a lot of experience with is weird and kind of overwhelmingly embarrassing. I don’t know if I could do it if I weren’t practicing in yoga.

Man, the real and meaningful gains of life are so hilariously small. This is the real sense of humor of the universe. You are running and running towards some big capital-s success for years and years of striving and misplaced determination and envy and fear until you learn that the really valuable victories are just tiny.

This morning in yoga, I think pitying me, John the yoga guy was telling me that recently he had been getting back to the fundamental poses and trying to learn them really well. He said that when you start yoga, you want to get to all these cool, fancy poses, and go upside down and put your leg over there. But when you get further along, you realize how important the basics are.

This is how I feel about my life. The early part of it was about a crazy game of racking up measurable awesomeness, but when I look back now, I realize the time would have been better spent learning to have a friendship, maybe, or take care of my body, or not make terrible daily choices.

It is crazy the sense of personal satisfaction I feel when I have a decent human interaction, or cook a solid meal. And it’s great in it's own silly, small-scale way, because the opportunities for accomplishment are no longer bounded.

Almond milk, bitches.

Alhamdoolilah!

This morning  I managed to stumble into the yoga studio for an impressive third day of Mysore. I don't know why it is called that, but if you are wondering, yes, it involves a lot of soreness. Three days without giving up! Although one of those days was passive pigeon, so I don't know if that counts.

It's OK, guys. I will sit this one out. 

Anyway I went in to pay for class at 6 AM and the dude, John, who co-owns the studio was there being all meatless and bright eyed. I don't know why I assumed that John was some kind of hippie asshole, because I never saw him be one and he's not at all. I guess because he runs a yoga studio. He asked me how class was going, and I said that it was pretty embarrassing but otherwise OK. He got this big, sincere smile and looked at me and said "thank god for suffering, right?" And I said "yeah!" and I meant it.

An old friend recently accused me of "worshiping suffering," and maybe I kind of do, but it's only one god in my pantheon. It's so necessary- forcing me to learn things, keeping me honest, indicating what's wrong, bringing friends closer.

When John said that I thought of this word in Arabic that Abdulsalam taught me, which is pronounced like: Alhamdoo-lilah, that I am kind of in love with. It basically means "thank you god!" and you say it for suffering.

I kept forgetting how to say it so 'Salam
wrote it on a post it on my computer

In Saudi Arabia, when a terrible thing happens to you, you say "Alhamdoolilah!" which means something like "thank you god for this opportunity for growth and knowledge!" It is a reflex that you cultivate. (I guess that is easier in a culture where one isn't to say "shit! fuck! balls!")

 I love the idea of the reaction to suffering, especially when I think of it as a reflex, because it's a discipline. I can't imagine that when people in Saudi Arabia find out that a loved one is in a car accident they are honestly thinking "thank you god!" But they are saying it. Maybe after saying it over and over again it gets internalized. Or cultural or both. That's the thing about practice.

Today on the bus home, this teenage girl was driving me nuts by shouting into her cell phone. Her mother was yelling at her for something and she was denying culpability. Super annoying. So when this kind of thing happens, I try to do a loving-kindness meditation, where you sit there focusing your attention on the person thinking "let her be safe, let her be peaceful, let her be happy" over and over again. I enjoy doing this. It gives me a weird feeling of responsibility for the person.

So today I was thinking loving-kindness meditation at the girl on her phone, and my mind monkeyed over and asked me if I really thought this was doing her any good. I mean, it probably isn't. Maybe I'm somehow willing the universe in some inconceivable way to bring her safety peace and happiness. I'd like to think that. But probably not. It does work in the aggregate, though, as I cultivate the habit of responding to people who annoy me by focusing all of my attention on wishing them those things. Over time, maybe my natural, habitual response to annoyance or anger will be a desire for the person who is annoying me to have peace. That would probably have a positive outcome after a while. At least for me.

It's the same thing with prayer, which is now weirdly in my life. I guess prayer was always around- Help! Thanks! Wow! as Anne Lamott says. The things you can't help saying in the course of human experience and which seem to imply a listener. (It's the best evidence for the existence of god I can come up with. A semantic one. I'm definitely feeling thanks. I must be thanking something.) But now that I'm around Christians, they ask me to pray for them, and I do. I am dead certain that god is not sitting somewhere taking down my instructions, but I cannot deny that it feels GREAT to pray for people and to have people pray for you. Especially when there is just nothing you can do for the person. Prayer feels like something. At church, everyone writes their prayers on an index card and throws them in a basket. Then a team of volunteers prays them over the week. Being on that volunteer squad feels fantastic. I'm not sure why.

This pose actually kicks my ass. 

This is practice. Empathy practice, patience practice. Alhamdoolilah is a kind of equanimity practice. Yoga is all kinds of practice. Although I've been doing
yoga for years, I'm not any good at any yoga poses. I mean, if being good at them means being able to execute or hold them. Seriously, even the one where you just put your arms in the air is kind of a challenge. But for years, for me, yoga was not-punishing-myself practice, letting shit go practice accepting something less than perfection practice, and the change was meaningful and substantial. Going to yoga, even just going to yoga and laying on the floor for an hour, taught me the value of rest, and taking care of myself and lack of strain.

Mysore is different. This is requiring me to stretch, really. The dumbass feeling I feel when the Mysore teacher has to explain three times what to do, and then I do it pathetically reminds me of what it's like for my students every day. The way my own toes continue to elude me are a great chance to practice humility. And now I'm beginning to feel just the very beginnings of practicing strength. Practicing breathing through pain. Practicing staying with discomfort. Practicing knowing where to push a limit and where to respect it. I mean the very, very awkward humiliating maybe-I-should-just-sleep-in-today beginnings.

The first springtime flowers are starting to poke out of the rough in people's front yards, and they look just like the blades of switchblades. They are seriously tough. They poked out on Saturday, and on Monday it snowed, and now they are sitting in the ground all snowed-on and immobilized because growing is slow and you can't reverse it. How do they do it? It must be pure miserable. Alhamdoolilah for them, and thank god for suffering for real.

Passive Pigeon

This is Pigeon Pose

This is Passive Pigeon

At yoga on Monday morning, the yoga lady said that I should not do yoga when I have my “ladies’ holiday.” I did have my ladies holiday (Three day blood cruise through pain town!) but since I was already there I got to lay around doing restorative yoga (the kind when you never get up off the ground) and the yoga lady taught me to do a pose called “passive pigeon.” Of course, once I knew what it was called, I was going to be down, regardless of what the pose was. I did passive pigeon for, like, ten minutes on both sides, which is a long time to do a yoga pose.

I have been getting cocky. I’ve been biking around and exercising and doing yoga and only talking to me, my bike and this ‘possum I got off the internet. It’s Lent so all I eat is kale seeds and all I do is not facebook. So I’m feeling pretty groovy. I’m surprised how much I like being alone. I never liked it much before. But I like it A LOT now, and just when it starts to get trying Rachel and Andrew let me watch TV with them upstairs.

Oh, man, but it is easy to get caught up in this focus on improving myself. At least I have some better tools than in back in the day when I made myself insane every morning trying to find the least morally offensive breakfast, and losing time at the bottom of the stairs as I rationalized the escalator when really there was little to no moral harm in the escalator. I just saw it as a weakness of character.

Stairs- You are Nelson Mandela
Escalator- You are 

I used to spend a lot of time reading Amnesty International reports and thinking that I needed to buck myself up for the day someone might torture me for my political activities, and that every decision was a chance to practice moral and mental discipline leading up to that possibility.

My fascination with China started with my constant reading of Cultural Revolution memoirs which led me to believe that every Chinese person was basically Nien Cheng. I mean, I guess I just ignored all characters in these books who weren’t the protagonists. Imagine my surprise  and disappointment when I got to China and everyone was just people.

So the endless stairs vs. the three escalators up  that I faced every morning at the Roosevelt Island station were a very high stakes test of character. I would stand there thinking “Nien Cheng spent 20 years in a Chinese prison, and you’re going to take the escalator?” Once I stood frozen on a Manhattan street corner trapped between three coffee choices and not sure in which one my three dollars would be the least ethically spent. I stood there for 15 minutes, then did not get coffee, harming no one.  I wish that were hyperbole.

The first thing I can remember ever writing in my journal was that I need to start waking up earlier, when I was, like, eight. I wrote that and endless other self improvement plans in my journal for about 20 years. Never quite started getting up earlier, though. Nor do I have a meditation habit, do yoga at home, know how to sew or ever practice Chinese. I’m really good at buying the equipment for resolutions, but it kind of goes downhill after that.

John Winthrop did this, too. His spiritual journal was a catalogue of countless infinitesimal moral failures, each one a likely indicator of damnation. But he was a Calvinist. Sarah Vowell pointed out that Winthrop’s journal looked like Gatsby’s notebook (‘be better to parents’, ‘read one improving book or magazine a week’, and of course ‘rise from bed- 6:00 AM.’) Gatsby was a Calvinist too, but just the parts we carried on and called American.

If I had put a dollar in a jar every time I resolved to ‘rise from bed- 6:00 AM’ I could buy this bed that was at the world’s fair in the 1880’s that had two of the legs on a timer so that at the desired time they would buckle and dump you on the floor.

It’s funny that although I’m far, far gentler with myself nowadays, I am just as passionate about self improving habits. It feels really different though, when you’re not trying to fix a mess. And it also feels different when the obstacles actually seem surmountable (thanks, medication!)

Of course, spiritual life plays a very important part in this. Lent and other periods for fasting and reflection make me aware of what is possible the rest of the time. And shine some light on what happens when I don’t restrict myself. The happy-but-not-really-happy in a bag of cheez curlz.

People in my yoga class

Me

But on the first day of Lent, when I rose from bed- 5 AM so that I could go to yoga, and then when I got there and everyone was all ropy and sinewy and tattooed and twisted up into pretzel balls, and when I leaned over to start a sun salutation with my knees bent looking like a dope and a drooped over flower instead of a jacknife because I can’t touch my toes, and when it was so funny what I looked next to the person next to me, and how much effort I needed to expend to fail so miserably was so hilarious that I cracked up, that was happy-really-happy.

Oh, there is joy in the right kind of failure. The Calvinists missed out. Or maybe they didn’t. The way they knew rapture in Grace, probably they got it. Their failure brought them closer to god- necessitated god and was therefore required.

The pigeon pose is when you put your one leg up front and your other leg to the back and then bow down on the ground. I guess sort of like a pigeon.

Passive pigeon is the same pose, but a yoga lady puts a blanket in the hole between you and the ground and a pillow under your face.

You can do passive pigeon. That’s ok.

Keep Mardi Gras

This Tuesday has been Fa-a-at. I had two hot dogs and thing of cheese fries, or really, cheez fries, for lunch, then I had, like, half a box of Godiva chocolates. Yesterday, I ate all seven servings of a seven-serving bag of this devil popcorn called “Chicago Style” where half of it is covered in cheese and half of it is covered in caramel. Tonight, I plan to eat the contents of an Afghan restaurant, drink red wine, and then eat a choco-pot alone.

I will do all of this in the name of religious practice. For this is FAT TUESDAY!

Jesus: "Let's run some kale through the
 juicer and read a play!

And I am really glad. Because for a week, I have been eating whatever I want to celebrate the free-for-all eating period between Chinese New Year and Lent. And the thing about whatever I want is that I don’t want it.

But someone does. Someone INSIDE me. I assume this being is Satan.

I think Satan is probably misdepicted as a red dude with horns and a pitchfork. My satan is, like,  a super emotional undisciplined teeenager. Maybe that is why I’m so scared of them.

I have been trying to get pleasure out of eating all kinds of crap- cookies, cake, cheese, cheez, coffee &c for these past few weeks, and I guess there is a KIND of pleasure in it. It is good against my tounge for sure. But the eating is pretty absent of actual pleasure. Which is disappointing. It is hard to ramp up a good “but I deserve X” narrative without the belief that the food is a real reward.

Satan is all “YOLO! I worked hard today! I deserve a brownie!” And instead of being like “yeah!” I’m like, ugh, OK, well if it will make Satan happy. Then I eat a brownie and Satan is happy. And I’m sad. Also, bloated and sleepy.

Satan: "Let's get Starbucks and spend
two hours on facebook!

Satan has had free reign on the eating since Chinese New Year, and without rules, I haven’t had much ability to resist her. Which is weird, since the rules are mostly arbitrary and made AND enforced by me. For some reason, though I can only enforce them when they are connected to a particular practice, like the diet, or lent. And right now, lent feels like a huge relief, that I am very excited about,  which is also weird, because there was nothing stopping me from NOT eating cheese fries today.

Nothing except Satan.

I cannot shake Satan, I have to live with her. She is in my custody, and in that way that happens when you are responsible for a teenager, I am in hers. I have to live with her. And that means indulging her sometimes, not all the time, but sometimes, because otherwise it would be cruel. Even if brownies are not good for us, we should get one every once in a while. They are delicious and the kind of good they are is not good for my well being but a good that is part of life.

The thing with teenagers is, you have to set boundaries. If you tell them “never do this” they are probably just going to defy you secretly. But if you tell them “there are appropriate times to do this” maybe, over time they will grow up and make better decisions.

You got to keep the devil down in the hole.