last day of work

Screen shot

It's all about to be real.

hear ye, hear ye

This blog will have a new and specific mission for the foreseeable future. Instead of being a closely-held little source for occasional rants and rambles, I plan to use this space to document my travels and adventures in upcoming months.

I'm leaving early in September for an almost-three-month trip to India, Dubai and Jordan. (Refrain from Eat, Pray, Love comparisons, please; I didn't quit steady employment to scour the globe searching for myself; I already know that, wherever you go, there you are. Also, speculate in my general direction about emerging adulthood at your peril.)

I hope to write full-fledged posts before and during my trip regularly, but I make no guarantees. So this space will also feature my most recent tweets, since that will be another quick-study communication method I plan to use in the countries that haven't banned Blackberries by the time I arrive. You can also subscribe to get e-mails whenever I publish new musings.

I'm visiting Dubai/Jordan with one of my best friends from college, who works in one place and hails from the other. For background on why I'm going to India (again), click here.

happy 88th birthday, poppy!!

You're the absolute best.

eat, pray, love: overscripted, under-messaged

credit: Facebook

I took myself to see "Eat, Pray, Love" last night, following the cinema's directions through the back roads of Redding into Bethel. The roads were long, tree-bordered tunnels with few street signs and no lights, and I had a moment of something like panic when I realized I had no idea how I'd find my way home in the dark.

"We'll jump off that bridge when we come to it," I thought—the best bit of received wisdom come my way since "people who kill themselves never get to find out what happens next."

I read "Eat, Pray, Love" a few summers ago, at the height of its popularity, when my grandfather finished his copy. I remember wanting to be one of those sophisticated folks who dismissed the whole thing as hokey and contrived and bourgeois. But Liz Gilbert has an intelligent, engaging, honest writing voice, and if memory serves she spent some time in parts of Connecticut I know well, and we could all use a little wish fulfillment reading now and then. So I did like the book, though I probably never brought it with me in public.

The film adaptation was a disappointment. It did have some of the things I hoped for: Italian food porn, a few moments in India that rang true to my experience, a diverse cast (standouts included Hadi Subiyanto as an adorable Balinese medicine man and the young Indian girl forced into marriage), a radiant Julia Roberts. But the whole thing felt forced and far too long.

The dialogue was full of melodramatic, faux-spiritual cliches. It was as though the actors were not playing three-dimensional characters interacting in a meaningful way, just types with scripted bits to get across before their chess piece was knocked off the board. Roberts' Liz wafted around the globe with seemingly bottomless money and an inability to get over herself. Americans work too hard, she was told. Forgive yourself. Empty your mind and "the universe will rush in." I'm sorry, but these aren't epiphanies.

Granted, my impressions could have been colored by the fact that I kept flashing back to a recent pre-practice tidbit from my yoga teacher. She's reading Guruji, a new book by students of the late K. Pattabhi Jois. In the chapter by David Swenson (whom I took a workshop with in Westerly!!), she said he recounts grappling with disillusionment by joining an extreme monastic sect that lived apart, practiced celibacy, etc. All he found there was that the same pettiness, angst and hierarchies replicated themselves in that environment. Removing yourself from life to seek enlightenment, she said, is not better or easier, just different. Put another way, the Sutras say something like "it's not the world, it's how you're looking at it."

That said, on my way home I took the plunge into the darkness, attempting to retrace my route through the woods. Turns out I was paying close enough attention on the way that I was able to find my way back and even appreciate the drama created by the illusion that the tree-bordered roads were infinite. Oh, the profundity.

goodness gracious

Having a day where I didn't think about work (as much as usual) felt so luxurious. It's almost been worth it to have been working 24/7 for about 10 months, to feel such relief. The "almost" is because, although it's true and deep that overcoming obstacles makes the sweeter parts of life even sweeter, that doesn't mean it's not legitimate to feel happy a much larger proportion of the time.

in defense of ashtanga

With a couple new books out about the history of yoga in America and this year's yoga/music Wanderlust festival pending, the discipline once again has been making its rounds through the media.

And in most of that coverage, this Ashtanga aficionado has been sad to see what looks like a uniform dismissal of the discipline, one that I've found to be the most centering and spiritual practice I've tried.

Slate and The New York Times, both of whom group the books The Subtle Body and The Great Oom into joint reviews, respectively describe Ashtanga as for devotees who seek a "profound intensity" and as a "demand(ing,) grueling regimen that their upper- and middle-class adherents were only too relieved to surrender to." A profile of Anusara yoga founder John Friend in this week's Times Mag describes Ashtanga as a "demanding flow" akin to "boot camp" while Anusara is a "classical ballet lesson." (Disclosure: a former teacher was an Anusara teacher in training, and all the talk of heart opening and radiance felt like new-agey hokum to me.)

The judgers do have one thing right: Ashtanga, the eight-limbed system of practice pioneered by K. Pattabhi Jois, does include a rigorous asana practice, one that flows without pause (David Swenson begins series by saying "the train is leaving the station"). It's given me arm muscles, and I'm damned proud of them.

But the asanas are just one component of a broader physical, mental and spiritual blueprint for reaching samadhi, or spiritual enlightenment. Physical postures are traditionally practiced to cleanse the body and prepare it for the experience of sitting in meditation. Jois' book, Yoga Mala, demystifies what looks like a graceful, stationary dance by explaining which postures wring out which digestive organs and the like.

But at the studio where I've been practicing—which, granted, is mostly populated by normal-shaped middle aged folk who can't expect to achieve the ideal form of most of the postures (with the exception of one normal-shaped, middle aged woman who is a total rock star)—the focus isn't on sweating as much as possible or toning the abs. The focus is on each practitioner learning the postures and the philosophies at whatever pace works for each. People whose practice inspire me are those who are there every day and who practice with faith and focus, not those who can do the second-series headstands. My own practice, most days, is more about teaching my mind to empty and focus—and to accept it on days when it won't—while the physical benefits are an added perk.

The practice is different things on different days; sometimes, in stereotypical, type-A American fashion, all I want is some stress relief. But there are days when bumper-sticker phrases: "live in the moment," "today is a gift, that's why it's called the present," become real ways of existing, and I really can look at all things as they are and then move onto the next thing when the moment passes. (Doesn't mean I'll be investing in bumper stickers anytime soon.) I'm learning that, while getting mired in minutiae is painful, having faith is simple, and it's a starting place to which I continually return, currently realized in my almost-daily return to the yoga studio, where a community of like-minded people practice on their mats, give their neighbors heart-melting smiles and then disappear into their own lives, bringing that practice of faith with them even as they left a little bit to share.

echo chamber

This blog is only active when I'm unhappy. Since a year ago, I went to India, moved across the state to start a new job, a boyfriend has come and gone, my godson has visited and left again, and I spent a whole bunch of days at a time since leaving my former job feeling happy.

Well, hi there again, world. I still mostly like my job, but friend and baby just left after a three week stay, and my life suddenly feels empty enough to echo. And I'm not sure I agree with the philosophical direction my employer is taking. I want so much to believe in what I'm doing. Am I endlessly naive?

insular media trend watch: twitter!

LA Times

NY Times

British People

Also, last week my paper offered a "webinar" so the middle-aged set could learn about writing snarky things in 140 characters. The Cut is tweeting from the Fashion Week tents. Seriously folks, the service is over two years old, and tech-savvy trendsters (I'm a latter-day Luddite and I beat the trend explosion by a solid week) have long been updating their Twitter feeds from their iphones and are sick of it.

Rachel Maddow FTW.

UPDATE: First few sentences of a Times article about Fashion Week posted this afternoon:

“HEY, this is my Twitter!” one journalist scolded another backstage Monday at the Marc Jacobs show.

Thumbs cocked, the two were having a backstage showdown, a BlackBerry quick draw. Everybody, from makeup artists to publicists to hairdressers, was similarly squaring off. Who would be first to record the very latest and most supercrucial bit of subtrivia to transmit to “friends” in the cybersphere?

Can we agree that most Twitter posts are about little beyond the fact of their own occurrence? Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that something existential is afoot?

tired metaphors

Last night, the woman practicing beside me at yoga asked how long it took before I could do a headstand. A bit less than a year, I told her. She asked if I'd done the whole year here, and I said I had. I told her that the trick was core control, and it wasn't too difficult, but headstands still actually terrify me (which is why I am determined to continue doing them). It requires courage and confidence to balance upside down, especially because the perfect position, which feels weightless and liberating, is just a tick mark or two from falling - a tired metaphor. I suggested she begin by practicing near a wall.

I swiveled to return my mat (I don't bring my own when I leave work for yoga; my editors don't need to know exactly why I come and go when I do), and I saw that the teacher, who is petite and was wearing all-black and can be silent, overheard the exchange as she tidied. I felt like I explained math homework shortcuts to my babysitting girls before realizing a parent was listening. She is more about legs and muscle wrapping than core, which seems remiss to me, but what do rookies know?

Our eyes connected. "Don't think I haven't noticed that you've been stealing my color scheme lately," I deadpanned. My urban monochrome. She laughed, the silence shell shattered and vanished and I turned away. Almost a year is long enough to learn how to manage people.

I'm starting to fear that I will be trapped here forever.

ole to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up