Two Hearts Yoga

I love gentle and restorative yoga at Two Hearts studio.

Today's class was easy and relaxing--except that we had so many props that the room looked like a slumber party.

Blankets folded four different ways, a big orange bolster, blocks, straps, and eye pillows were strewn around each yoga mat.

By the end of it, I was relaxed but tired from all the folding, arranging, stacking and strapping.

As we were relaxing into Savasana at the end, the teacher led a guided meditation: Imagine your body melting into the earth; listen to the sounds inside your body; do not judge them, just listen.  Now listen to the silence.

One of my hearts was annoyed: How could I listen to the silence while she was talking?

The other was--as directed--expansive and warm, radiating compassion and love toward all womankind--and the one man in the class.

We ended by saluting each other, Namaste.  The fire in me honors the fire in you.  Every time I do that, I think of my first and favorite yoga teacher, Mary Frances Weathersby, many years ago.  She often ended a class by singing and then bowed toward each student: "Namaste: the divine in me sees the divine in you."

Mary Frances and Esther Vexler were the mothers of yoga in San Antonio.  Esther continued teaching into her nineties--a force of nature!  Mary Frances, unfortunately, is no longer teaching--as she is now in a Colorado nursing home with Alzheimers.

The best thing said in class today, for me, was this: "Thank you to all my teachers and all my teachers' teachers." I sent a telepathic thank you to the mind of Mary Frances, below where it's broken, to the place that still knows she's loved and remembered. She was someone who made an enormous difference in my life twenty and more years ago.

Last night, Elena asked me to unroll my yoga mat so we could do yoga.  I showed her the dog and the cow and the cobra poses, and she did them all.  Then she made up her own.  "I am a cow," she said, right leg up in the air.

On The Way To School

When American kids go to school, it's rarely with joy on their faces.  American kids go to school in a parent's air conditioned car or on a school bus, either plenty comfy.  Alas, when they get there, they might be subject to bullying--or at the very least, a barrage of state-mandated tests and a very competitive atmosphere.

We tease about our collective parents saying, "I walked three miles in the snow barefoot to go to school,"--though that's actually probably an urban legend.  My parents never walked three miles in the snow--not in Georgia or Tennessee.

"On the Way to School features Jackson, the Kenyan; Carlito, the Argentinian; Zahira, the Moroccan; Samuel, the Indian, four children who live light years away from each other and who have never met but who have a common point. They have to cover tremendously long distances to reach their school. On foot, on horseback or in a wheelchair, but all with an extraordinary determination."

What strikes me about this documentary is the kindness of the children, the parents, and the teachers.  When Samuel arrives at school after an arduous trip, pushed and pulled by his two beautiful brothers, his classmates run to meet him and carry him into the school in the white plastic yard chair attached to a frame (his homemade wheelchair.)

The parents send them off in the morning knowing they have a dangerous trip--in one case warning them to avoid being trampled by elephants.

All of these children have their dreams--to become a teacher, to become a pilot, to become a doctor "who helps kids like me walk." They are male and female.  They go on foot (and in one case on horseback) for hours to get to school on time.  They wash their clothes by hand to prepare for school.

In spite of meager food and material poverty, these children radiate joy, a love of learning, and a sense of friendship and caring for each other.

Tuesday Night

After trimming the bougainvillea so I could back out of the driveway, Suzanne dropped by--what a happy surprise!  Then Will and Bonnie and the kids came over, so we six went to dinner together.

Nathan says, "Suzanne looks too young to be married."

Suzanne's husband Ryan and Will are both firefighters--so they had lots to talk about.  This was the best kind of party--unplanned, spontaneous, altogether fun!

The kids pounded each other with new pillows for a couple of hours, giggling nonstop, then we went outside, turned on the twinkle lights, and Nathan and Elena did a play: The Whacky Man and the Little Girl, directed by Nathan.

Here's Jackson at his National Junior Honor Society induction, with his little brother Marcus.

Marcus and Jackson

It's a packed week, getting ready for a road trip to Georgia and a flight to Virginia: doctors'  and other appointments, car stuff, packing.   Off now to yoga, and to check a few things off my To-Do-Before-Leaving List.

June 9, 1967

What do you call an anniversary, if what it commemorates no longer exists?  I sometimes say (when I think about it) that today "would have been my wedding anniversary...."

Today would have been my 48th wedding anniversary.

When I was younger, I liked looking at pictures in the newspaper of couples celebrating 50th anniversaries.  It was often remarkable how the two people had come to look so much alike. It made me wonder: Did they always look something alike and were drawn to each other because they saw some feature of their own in the other?  Or did they grow to look alike because of shared habits of living, diet, geography?

Did one mirror the other's smile so often that it became a shared way of smiling?  Or frowning, for that matter?

The marriage that began on June 9, 1967, lasted 28 years--if you count all the calendar days from start to finish.

The 18-year-old bride

Playing the piano on my wedding day,
Betty my maid of honor

"This is a storybook romance," said my groom's mother.

"We get 'em young and raise 'em right," said his father--to my 25-year-old groom.  (Arghhh!)

It was a story alright--but not exactly the one his mother had in mind.  Each marriage is its own story.

What I got from that marriage were a lot of life lessons, San Antonio, two children, Day and Will, and four grand grandchildren: Jackson, Marcus, Nathan and Elena.

May 1978 with Baby Will

October 1971 with Baby Day

                                                     Fast forward four-plus decades:

Day and Tom, married since 1997

The Leary Boys,  Marcus and Jackson

Will and Veronica (Bonnie) married for four years

Nathan and Elena

Monday Night Writing Group

What are the chances that in a group of six women, we'd have two Charlottes and two Janets?   We do!

Two were unable to come tonight, but the four who were here let me take photos in my Daily Collect App--and here they are, four lively wonderful friends!

One is spending the night--my second guest since we made a guest room, the first being Mary Elizabeth.

The playhouse is complete!

What Her Body Thought: Susan Griffin

This is a brilliant book about the ways the body thinks, what it feels, what it remembers, and what it wishes for.

Susan Griffin writes about repressed memories from childhood,  how healing it is to bring them out of repression, into the light. But the memories that contributed to her debilitation illness are not repressed at all; she remembers them in her mind and her body.

She also writes about suppressed memories--the things a person actually remembers but chooses for one reason or another to keep to herself.  She was abandoned by an alcoholic mother.  The memories were too shameful to share at the time they were happening and for many years afterwards.

The body of a democracy experiences desires as well.  (I'd never thought of it like that before.)  After describing the trauma within her body and within her family, she writes:

"I can feel it in myself now. A longing in my body for a kind of fluidity, a relaxation of boundaries, for trust to be the medium of my existence.  A desire for commerce aimed not at profit but as a way of being, as in the ecology of the forest, a valley, or the larger body of earth, which contains us.  Can a political body long too and, even unaware of its wishes, consume itself chasing phantoms of desire?"

What affects the individual body shapes the way it moves about in the world.  The diseases it is prey to, its gestures and postures, its voice.  What it chooses to do for pleasure; what it avoids.

Imagine that that may also be true of a nation's body, or a village's, or a continent's:  the boundaries we erect, the injustices we accept or overlook, how the powerful regard and treat the less powerful, the collective vision we carry about who we are.

I will be thinking about these pages for a long time, and I'll read certain sections again.  In some places,  Griffin's writing style borders on tedious, but overall, it is a profound, haunting, and unforgettable book.

My friend, Deb Pena

Deb and I had a great afternoon and dinner--and we scratched the surface at least in catching up!

She's teaching at UTSA and working on a book based on her dissertation about Caroline Miller, the Georgia Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Lamb in His Bosom.

While Margaret Mitchell, the other Georgia Pulitzer Prize winner, author of Gone with the Wind, received much acclaim, Miller is all but forgotten.  Deb is hoping to bring back her unpublished novels and renew interest in her writing.  It was fascinating to hear about Miller's work and life--and to hear about Deb's journey to resurrect a former writer from our shared home state.

 

Secrets and Lies

Untold secrets.  Truth and lies.  Without these, we'd have little literature.

On Friday night, I planned to start watching a film Gerlinde recommended, then go to sleep: The Retrieval.  I thought I'd watch just enough to get hooked, then finish watching today.  Like a  good book, I couldn't put it down.  It's a beautiful film that moves slowly along the ground, yet the closeup shots of the faces of the main characters takes you into every conflicting feeling.  This is a film I'll definitely watch again.

After it ended, I saw "If you liked this film, you'll like...."

It was after midnight, but again I thought I'd watch just enough of The Human Stain to jostle me out of the Civil War era film.  Again, I wound up watching the whole story.  Based on a novel by Phillip Roth, it centers around a powerful secret--and how that secret impacts the main character's entire life.

Tonight, Freda and I went to see Far From the Madding Crowd--an excellent film version of the Hardy novel I haven't read since high school.  Sometimes secrets are what we don't admit to ourselves.

I'd like to read the novels on which these films are based.  I think now of how I read certain books in high school without understanding or having a big enough view of the world to understand them.  I read voraciously.  I lugged books home from the library and stayed up late night reading.  But at the time, I didn't understand the universal themes that drove the plots.

"Let's Celebrate the Art of Clutter" by Dominique Brown

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/style/lets-celebrate-the-art-of-clutter.html?_r=0

An excerpt:

It is time to celebrate the gentle art of clutter. We live, and we pick up things along the way: the detritus of adventure; the vessels of mealtimes; the books and music of a life of the mind; the pleasures of our daily romps through the senses.

In accumulating, we honor the art of the potter, sitting at a wheel; we appreciate the art of the writer, sitting at a desk; we cherish the art of the painter, standing in front of an easel. (By this litany ye shall know that I have many books, many paintings, many pots — and many more things I love.)

Poetry of the Unwanted

I love wandering around on Saturday mornings, stopping at moving and garage and yard sales!

I've always thought of it as a bit poetic, "words" of what the former owners wanted scattered randomly on tables. This morning, I found an assortment of perfectly wonderful things, the whole bill totaling $21 at one sale, $8 at another:

Picture frames and wrapping paper in its original cellophane; a name-brand red and white polka dot raincoat for a dollar, a white shell-shaped chip and dip bowl from Italy for another dollar, a lamp, a bowl with 1948 on the bottom (my birth year), measuring cups and salt shakers, a silk scarf that's probably not real silk but pretty, books for Elena, an ice cream container with a blue top, and a brand new Guatemalan belt for two dollars.  I haven't unpacked it all.   There will be other surprises I'll find in my car after my nap.

Unlike clerks at stores who have no connection to their wares, sellers of their own stuff often say, "Oh, I'm so glad you're getting this!" or "I've had this for thirty years and have to let it go when we move."   Other customers see me trying on the polka dot raincoat and say, "If you decide not to buy that, I want it."

Freda and I are going to see Far From the Madding Crowd at six.  And Kate may stop by after a poetry reading and I can show her my finds.  Saturdays in the spring and summer are lovely days of discovery and play! I feel like a child on Saturdays.  School is out.  The possibilities are endless.