Space In the City

When you look out and all you see is 180 degrees of blue sky and then another 180 degrees of grape vines growing on rolling hills, you can't help but feel that the world is really big. There is so much space to breath and your busy little brain feels like it can fit a lot of thoughts and an infinite amount of emotion inside. But if you're a city girl like myself (given that San Fran is a town next to Manhattan or Hong Kong), who loves the buzz of people and that I can hear my neighbors singing in the shower, you wonder, how can I have both?

I guess one solution is to have a house in the country, but given that most of us slave away just so that we can have the standard of living that we do in SF, it's not generally possible. Or you can just give up the goat and live in some quiet place with a bunch of green stuff and say goodbye to the concrete all together. But really, I'd need to be near no less than four different awesome ethnic food restaurants, a great place to dance and an array of shoe stores. Because I love the side of my heels clicking on the ground and well, having someplace to wear high heels to, on any day of the week.

But the spaciousness that I'm talking about isn't really about physical space anyway. It's about the space in your head and having room to string thoughts together, or chose to let them go. I taught a yoga class this morning where I made people close their eyes, breathe, and imagine that all their thoughts were like a deck of cards, spilling across their consciousness in the most casual and chaotic way possible. There's all kinds of shapes and numbers and light and dark. There's even a Joker (cause who doesn't have a goddamn Joker in their deck, right?). Then you slowly start to shuffle them together, pushing them together into a pile with that oh-so satisfying way that cards shuffle together; with the rounded corners pointing every which way, and then almost magically, they start to make sense, they start to come together and suddenly, you have a neat little pile. You then put the whole deck in the corner of your mind, where they're accessible, but not necessary in-use. What you've got then is a whole canvas of empty space, of possibility and thoughts that

have yet to come.

I think that most of us have this kind of space very infrequently. Our heads are filled with what we did yesterday, what we should've done yesterday, what we need to do today, and what the hell we have to do tomorrow. If we could find space inside our bodies (both metaphorically and literally), and in our minds, we could have it all. We can be connected to the buzzing hive of humanity that I find so enticing and have the space for clarity and possibility.

The work for me then, is to remember that this space is possible. That I can gather up that deck of cards any time and shuffle them into the corner. I don't need to be at the most adorable little treehouse tucked into amazing vineyards in Healdsburg. And if one of those thoughts strays, and stays in my head, it's totally okay. Because in my head, of course, it'd be the Queen of Hearts.

Unobtainium Obtained

Unobtainium (also spelled unobtanium) is any extremely rare, costly, or physically impossible material, or (less commonly) device needed to fulfill a given design for a given application. (From Wikipedia)

It seems to me that the key to this concept is that it's impossible. It's oxymoronic in its own definition. Like, more difficult to grasp than

winning the lottery, since all you have to do to have a chance is to buy a lottery ticket, however remote your chances. Whereas the concept of unobtainium rests on the premise that it's an impossibility in our current state of reality. Its value cannot be measured since it doesn't respond to normal market forces (even the unusual laws of the black market) since it cannot exist. (I mean, how much does it cost to stable a unicorn?) Therefore, it's not about whether you have the means to buy/trade for it, instead, it's about changing the reality to which you are accustomed in order for it to not longer be unobtainium.

Even though I saw Avatar leagues after everyone else (and what I thought about the movie is a whole other matter), I find the concept of "unobtainium" fascinating because I fee like several people in my life, including myself, have recently found their unobtainium.

For something like two years, the chef-ex and I had looked for a blue apron for him (for those of you unfamiliar with The French Laundry, they wear signature blue aprons in the kitchen). We even bought something that looked like it might be the right thing but turned out to be the wrong color, length, etc. For something that seemed as simple as a freakin' blue apron, it was impossible to find. Well... (trumpets please) he recently landed a job at The Laundry. For those of us in the culinary world, we all know how dreamy and impossible that is. It's not like he's not talented enough, or wouldn't do a great job there, it's just that...it's THE FRENCH LAUNDRY! More importantly, for him, it was beyond the impossible dream, it was something that he didn't think about because it wasn't really within his concept of reality. Granted the whole stage process sounded super intense and although he's certainly qualified, he was only able to get the job because he applied. And he only applied because he was able to change his perspective. You're right Albert, "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

I'm not saying that anything is possible for anyone; I am a yogi, not a moron. I'm just saying that we don't really know what's possible until we imagine that it is. I bet we'd all be surprised by the result.

Like personally, I want some superpowers. And as I'm writing this, I'm imagining that it's possible (maybe I need to cook up something radioactive- it worked for Spiderman, The Hulk, Daredevil, etc.). I'm probably not going to try to run through walls any time soon. But maybe I'll try for an easier one, like levitating. I'll let you know how it goes.

Inheritance

All my most annoying habits come straight from my mother. This is pretty much what my last two significant boyfriends and I have all decided. She's neurotic, relentless and will chase you down even if you're desperately asking for some goddamn personal space. She worries about my health, my future, my job, my love life, even my teeth. And she sprinkles a whole bunch of Chinese and Catholic guilt atop everything that she feeds you.

I've been working on shedding this madness for years. And it seems that finally, I've been able to come to terms with how these traits have influenced my life and how to let them go, at least a little. It's hard work, especially because I love my mother so fucking much. She's an amazing lady, despite everything that makes us both a little crazy.

Every fall when the San Francisco air starts to get a little nippy, I start wearing this black turtleneck that I stole from her when I was about 17. It's nothing fancy or special, except that it fits really well and is some crazy polyester blend that no one makes anymore. But I do get complimented all the time when I wear it, which I've always wondered about. Can people tell that I took it from my mother's drawer?

One of my favorite baby pictures is from a birthday party for me and my brother, I was probably 3 and he was about 8. I'm in a highchair with my brother making some mischievous face next to me. My mom is wearing the famed black turtleneck. She's gorgeous (she's always been and continues to be alarmingly beautiful) and smiling and it's clear that she loves us both immensely. I was too young to remember the party, but the image of that photograph pops into my head whenever I'm feeling warm and fuzzy towards her. I love that turtleneck.

Along with that turtleneck and a whole list of neurosis, I've also inherited her smile, her habit of putting her hand flat across her collar bones when she worries, and her undying devotion towards the ones that she loves. She's drilled into me that mistakes are part of life, but when we lie, bad things happen. I've learned that being a really good friend sometimes means flying across the world to surprise them on their 60th birthday. It's from her that I learned to dig your heels in when things are getting difficult and to give your loved ones gifts, even when you can't afford them for yourself. I learned that no matter how much she disapproves of whatever "crazy" thing I'm doing at the moment (piercings, tattoos, performing arts, boyfriends, etc. etc.), she'd rescue me in a second if I was ever in trouble. These are some of the things I've inherited from her.

So here I am, on the eve of Father's Day, and I can do nothing but write about my mother because as much as everyone knows that I'm daddy's girl (and proud of it!), I'm also my mother's daughter. And in her proudest moments (when she allows herself to be proud of the "unconventional" daughter), I hope that she sees a part of herself reflected in me. I hope that she realizes that I am who I am because she's been doing nothing but giving me gifts since the day I was born.

Everyone Needs a Forcefield Now and Then

Call it survival instinct based on our ability to read body language, call it a cognitive skill, call it intuition, whatever, we all have a sense of danger and when something is just not right. Yet, how many times have we been burned when we knew better than to touch the flame? Sometimes we're just not totally clear on situations and we read it poorly. Sometimes we ignore our own instinct to quit while we're ahead.

I've been working with the public for a really long time. Like, more than a decade. I've got a pretty well developed sense of the creepy. I've been hit on by so many creepy men I stopped counting a long time ago. I can usually hold my own (see post from September 15, 2008). I usually put a wall up pretty quickly and squirrel around the situation. I'm pretty squirmy. But every once in a while, you end up giving people the benefit of the doubt, you trust that their intentions are straight and BAM, you end in a place you don't want to be looking for the emergency exit. Teleportation, a great super power to have at those exact moments.

Yeah, like when the older "yogi" whose wife is on vacation befriends you to "talk about his daughter" then starts talking to you about poly-amory, you 1.Puke a little in your mouth and 2. Start looking for a way out.

What I've been developing for the past few years, however, is a sense of openness, of wonder, and of connection with the world. I should've remembered what my teacher Jane House said when she talked about the danger of being so open when we're walking around out in the world. You don't really want to do a chalk load of heart-openers then walk out into Hunter's Point with no protection for your mind or body. The truth is, boundaries are essential and developing a well-built but spacious container with a healthy and protective outer wall will not only keep you sane, it'll help you flourish.

While Sue Storm (a.k.a. Invisible Girl/Woman) had to absorb cosmic rays in order to develop her powers of invisibility and used psionic waves to create force fields, I really believe that anyone can do it. You see it all the time; we all do it all the time. We sense when people have really strong or large personal space issues; we can certainly repel other people with our own discomfort or dislike. We can make ourselves really small and walk around without anyone truly seeing us. The question, of course, is how to control these powers so that they serve us in the best way. We certainly don't always want to be invisible and it'd be a lonely life if we kept up the forcefield all the time.

So I suppose it's all about being conscious of how you're using your superpowers. I've been distinctly working on how to make my energy bigger, on how to be able to direct it outwards, so as to better serve my community. Maybe it's time that I re-establish my invisibility cloak and control over my forcefield. God knows, you need it as much in yoga studios as you do in restaurants.

Where are we going?

Make Like a Tree and...

I've never been the leaver.

It's my M.O. to stay around until things are dead. This is true for parties, jobs, and even boyfriends. I don't like to feel like I've left anyone hanging in the wind, I believe in making things work, in being durable and outlasting whatever troubles come. The problem with this way of living is that sometimes you're the awesome girl who can hang all night but sometimes, you're the awkward one who should've left an hour ago.

I've been finding myself doing the leaving a lot lately. And even though I know it's been the right thing to do, it surprisingly doesn't make it any easier. In fact, it's damn hard. It hurts just the same. You still feel abandoned. You still feel like there's an empty hole inside where once something lived. And I want to just fill it with whatever come my way. I don't think I'm alone.

It happens every day, right? You break up with your boyfriend, you leave your job, whatever. But the thing is, you've grown those things, you've put yourself into them, if you're any kind of decent person, you've invested in these things. And leaving them just feels like you're hanging out in a storm in your underwear. Things are blowing around you and you don't know what to hang onto. It goes against all my instincts to not just grab onto whatever branch comes into my reach. I've been single longer than I have in about a decade. Holy shit.

So what does a girl who loves stable ground do? I like to think that I can just reach my roots really deep and sway with the breeze. I think it's all I can do. Just bend and flex and get tossed around a little bit. It's a lot of work, this staying upright and going with the flow. It feels like you have no control, but I guess in the end, none of us have control over life anyway.

For now, I'm going to work on hanging around when it's right and when the time has come, I'll just make like a tree and...

Can People Really Change?

I've been thinking about change a lot lately. My life has drastically changed in the last 8 months or so and if you had asked me a year ago if I could imagine being where I am now, I would've laughed in your face.

And I've found myself talking about change to all kinds of people, especially after the sighting of a bumper sticker that said, "Change is inevitable, growth is optional." Love it. But even as I've been sprouting statistics about how you shed about 1.8-2.4 million skin cells an hour and that your skin pretty much renews itself completely in about 35 days (hence, we're always changing), I wonder if it's true. Do people ever really change?

My ex-boyfriend said to me a few weeks ago after what I thought to be a perfectly normal exchange between us, "Who are you?! You're not even close to the same person you were." It was one of those double-edged compliments because I had actually said something really nice. Okay, where do we go from there? Was I really just a bitch when we were together and am a completely changed person now? Am I just able to express myself more openly now that I'm free from the power struggle in our relationship? Was I always a nice person and he just couldn't see it because he was too wrapped up in his own self-judgement to be able to see me? Do people just constantly miss each other completely because we're all too obsessed with ourselves to be able to see other people clearly?

On a theoretically level, the universe is changing all the time. Nothing is ever the same, but the processes just take so much time relative to our lifespan that it all feels the same. I mean, some stars are dead by the time the light has traveled far enough for us to see them. In some cultures, time is circular and not linear, are we just all chasing our tales?

I really want to have some incredibly deep and meaningful answers to this question, but I just don't. On some level, I want to believe House (as in the TV show) and just believe that people don't change- that they lie and adapt their behavior but are actually incapable of change. But in my experience, I realize that I've changed, my friends have changed, life changes all the time. I can barely keep up with the changing that's happening around me right now.

I guess if I were forced to to put it simply, I believe that it's all true. There's a certain part of us that don't change; call it your soul, your true self, your ego, whatever, but there is something in us that stays the same. But it's our ability to let that shine out that changes with time and space. I know it's super yogi and corny, but I really believe that the work for all of us is to tap into real honesty and let ourselves be who we are.

If You Want to Get Something Done, Ask a Busy Person

My tennis coach in high school was highly neurotic. He believed in winning, winning winning and hitting your opponent with a tennis ball as hard as you could because it was unlikely they'd get it back over the net if you did. He had a 10+ year undefeated league championship team with 3 State wins in his division and he was the devil. But he did say to us once, "If you want to get something done, ask a busy person." For my own sanity, I've pretty much forgotten everything else he ever said to us but I've never forgotten that. It rings in my ears at the oddest times. I think it's because I see a lot of truth in it. A person who has a lot of free time probably isn't too gung ho about getting whatever you need done; they probably don't have a lot of fire under their butt. I sound terribly judgy- I know.

I'm pretty much not happy if I don't have a million things going on at once. Even when I have free time, I'm busy doing "free time" things- reading a book, making cookies, trying to "finish" reading magazines so that I can recycle them. I love and hate this compulsive need to be productive. It sounds totally neurotic...it kind of is.

In different epochs of my life, this drive, this need to be productive has been either really useful and effective in helping me towards my goals, or they've driven me and whatever boyfriend I had at the time completely insane because I could focus on nothing else but getting stuff done. And this drive to push forward, to check things off lists and get them off the radar, it makes me wonder about not only what I'm running towards but what I'm running from. I mean, anyone who has this distinctive goal driven orientation is leaving something in their wake, right? When it's no longer about the process but the completion, when you forget what the movie was about but only that you watched it, then what's the point?

As I'm entering another really busy period of my life, I'm trying to re-examine this drive that's both served and hindered me. On the one hand, I'm so incredibly happy to bask in the glow of productive action, but on the other, I want to make sure that I'm not just whizzing past things on my way to the finish line. Smell the roses and all of that. I like to think that I've grown up a little from high school, and that I'm learning to have some patience, and to look around me and enjoy the view a little (at least without checking off "Enjoy view" from my to-do list). At least for right now, I feel like my drive to do a lot of things come from the invigorating sense that life is just too short, that I'm trying to take advantage of the time that I have. Or maybe it's just an excuse for my insane behavior. Either way, I'm loving the action, and I'm getting a lot of stuff done.

Reflections on a Decade Past

2010. So much happened in the last decade, it does feel mighty significant that it's over.

Let's see... we had the first foreign terrorist attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, we elected a Black president, we're having the worst economic conditions in something like 80 years. It's been a big one, this decade.

For me personally, I've had 3 big relationships, each of which has taught me a lot about myself. It's been a decade of long term relationships and very little time alone. But really, who wants to be alone? That's a question I ask myself a lot these days. I'm figuring out what it means to be single and not to feel alone (quite a feat, I think).

From the first, I figured out that as much as I consider myself a Feminist (with the capital 'F'), I can still fall into the trappings of an emotionally abusive relationship. I have the tendency to belittle myself and allow someone to dictate my behavior and happiness. I put myself in a subordinate position because I was blinded by romantic notions of self-sacrifice and the trappings of emotional blackmail. Wow, I still can't believe that it was me in that whole escapade. I guess without those relationships, you don't know how far you can fall. It was a great big black hole, that one. Just sucked me in and I couldn't find my way out for much much too long.

The second taught me that friendship and love doesn't equate a healthy relationship. It taught me that it's necessary to see someone for who they really are to love them in the right way. You can't will someone to be the person you want them to, no matter how clever you are at convincing them of it. I learned that compatibility and view of a shared future life is painfully but honestly important. It taught me that it's possible to love someone but that your paths still diverge and even reasonably good relationships should end when they're supposed to.

I'm still figuring out what I've learned from the third. So far, I think that I've realized that even if someone thinks they want to spend the rest of their life with you, you might not want to spend the rest of your life with them. It sounds so obvious, but when someone you care about and love tells you that they may say or do a lot of things that are "wrong," but one thing they'll never do is leave you...well, it's excruciating to chose to be alone instead. It's easy to say that the future is uncertain no matter how you look at it, but to toss yourself off the edge without a net is a whole other matter.

I've been lucky in a lot of ways. My path has led me to things that I love: restaurants, intellectual pursuit, yoga. Life has bestowed some of the most amazing friendships upon me. I continue to be in awe of the friends I have, how amazing they are, how it's possible that they love me as much as I love them. There are some remarkable human beings out there and the fact that our paths have crossed and intertwined are beyond me. It's certainly nothing I can understand with my head.

I'm working on saying "adieu" to the last decade and starting to look ahead. I've said goodbye to an awful lot of things. I've burnt the sage, I've ritualized the shedding of things around me. I'm looking at my new skin and wondering if it's thick enough to endure the decade ahead. I have a lot of hope. I hope that I will feel more comfortable in my skin this decade. I'm hoping that I'll be able to be my true self, or at least keep working diligently on getting there. I'm hoping that I'll be able to welcome change and adventure with an open heart, regardless of whether it brings pain or pleasure.

In the words of the Rolling Stones, "No, you can't always get what you want. No you can't always get what you want. No, you can't always get what you want, and if you try sometime you find, you get what you need."