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.