Looking for magic

I started a post about my loathing for self-esteem, both conceptually and in terms of social roles & habits (jargon! artificial praise! in-authenticity!) - but I dunno.  It was grumpy.  Curmudgeonly.  It involved, inevitably, my opinion of self help books.  Mostly it wasn't what I want to think about today.  Grumpy takes a lot of damn energy.

I need some magic, I think.  Yesterday was nice:  I went to yoga in the morning and was able to touch my forehead to the floor in siddhasana for the second time.  It's so simple and yet feels like ...I don't want to say accomplishment, that's wrong, it's not a trophy for my mantle.  It feels elementally right, like I've regained an essential thing I did not know was missing when I find flexibility I did not know was there, or balance or straightness. 

All the things people say about yoga - the stress release, the peace, the exercise.  None of it's wrong exactly, but the words are placeholders for the experience.  It's like a giant secret - you friends say, "oh, you're going to love it" but they can't tell you why, the why is non-verbal, inexplicable in the truest sense, un-knowable until it happens to you.   When you put your head on the floor, you're a better version of yourself.  When you know where your sit bones are, the world has more solid outlines.  I think we are supposed to have strong and flexible as our default condition, like cats and the hind brain knows it.  Yoga gives it back.

That is so much better than self-esteem exercises (it was a exercise in writing down the things you love about yourself that set me off)

I had another interesting moment as well.  A friend of mine is much in my mind recently and I was having trouble stilling my head for meditation.  I finally said - I love you, can you leave me alone right now?  And they did.  That was new. 

(I am starting to wonder if when someone is on your mind it's not because you're on theirs?)

On the way home I remembered what I had forgotten the day before - Toilet paper.  I refuse to use un-recycled-paper TP, which means the hippy store, which I had already passed, so I went to Whole Foods, which is the next nearest 7th Generation dealer.   When I finished with that, the sky was turning some kind of crazy, lowering gray, with that flat, clear, glowing, sideways light that says run for cover.  By the time I parked across from my house it was thunder and torrents and overflowing gutters and no wiper powerful enough to keep the window clear of that volume of water is made on earth. 

I thought about waiting it out, but it's just damp you know?  It was home-ownership that made me regard weather as an enemy, but really I've loved storms since I was a tiny girl, I used to drag my little chair out on the covered milk porch when I was 3 or 4 to watch the lightening, so I gathered my toilet paper and yoga mat and festooned myself for the journey, all of 12 feet to my door, ankle deep in water, and by the time it shut behind me I was literally wet to the skin, left my yoga gear and sandals in a puddle by the door and sprinted for a towel, shut down the air conditioner and opened all the windows to the sound of water and the movement of real air and ducked out on the deck to clear a gutter and laugh again at how wet I got in 30 seconds.  I love that contracted chilled feeling of recently drenched skin under dry things, and curling up on the couch with knitting and listening to the rain.

I worked on a sleeve on and off all day - sleeves in the round on a top down sweater make me a bit mental, all that untwisting, but I'm starting to hit a groove.  I want to finish soon - I want to wear this sweater this autumn - and then a shawl I think.  It's been a while, but I think I crave the meticulous code of lace, the portable complexity of a big thing in fine yarn.

It is possible I had more magic in my weekend than I initially remembered, which is what I get for listening to radio news while I was still in bed this morning. 

Comments

[Bakerina]

Oh, my love, my love. I'm slowly getting caught up with your posts -- and yes, we *do* need to talk properly. :) Since I hardly know where to start, I'll start small and simple: While I love that ultimately you found a better, more affirming and magical topic about which to write, I'd be mad keen to hear that self-help exercise rant one of these days -- but only when you've the energy for it, because grump does indeed require energy. But there's the kind of grump that drains you, and the kind of grump that functions as a palate cleanser, that refreshes and amuses and sets you up for altogether happier things. But again, that kind of grump is very specific, and requires specific things from us.

It's just that when you mentioned the self-help exercise, it made me think of a woman with whom I produced a standup comedy show in the late 80s. (Long story, best told later.) She was a big fan of Louise Hay, and would frequently lean on me and the other women in the group, saying that it was a sickness that we couldn't say outright "I'm a beautiful person," or that we couldn't look at ourselves in a mirror and say "I *love* you." At one point she was hectoring me about how I couldn't say the words "I'm a beautiful person." Because I was all of 22 years old at the time, I couldn't think of a cogent response to that, but now that I am considerably longer in the tooth, I wish that I had said, "I can't say it because I try to imagine my heroes saying it, and you know, all I can hear is every last one of them, from Dawn Powell to Madeline Kahn to Laurence Sterne to Bob and Ray, saying 'You have got to be f***ing kidding me.' The only one who might, MIGHT say it is Walt Whitman, but he would say it with flair and humor, in a way that wouldn't make me want to kick him in the head at the end of it.'"

Of course, that was just my experience. Your mileage may vary. ;)

[Denise~]

I love your descriptions....evidence you are more fully awake and aware of yourself and surroundings.

It's through being aware that those magical moments are accessible.

Porch sitting during a storm - incredibly moving, thought provoking, freeing!

[Northmoon]

beautiful post.

[claudia]

I'm choosing to believe in magic today.

[Catherine]

I second Baraka's suggestion, but the method I've used is to place the garment in a large, wide bowl (think of a salad bowl) and sit the bowl on my lap. When I've knitted a couple of rounds on the sleeve, I simply spin the bowl around to untwist everything.

I must admit that the bag idea sounds more portable.

I'm glad you're getting what you need from yoga. When will you resume baking?

[k]

I think "loathing for self esteem" is kind of an interesting oxymoron.
It's fun watching people fall into their own bodies/ lives/ whatever.

[charli]

You are truly a great writer. I'm quite jealous. or am I envious?

[Debra]

I love all of this post, especially your comments about yoga (which I've been reading daily). I've been playing tai chi for 3 months, and I feel the same way about it, as you do about playing yoga. Also, your writing about yoga is the best description I've seen anywhere regarding that unexplainable magic that happens. You keep keeping on, lady.

[Tara]

I know exactly how you feel about the rain. I've been able to reconnect to it, make peace with it as it were, with my kids this year. Whenever there's a torrential downpour, we put on our swimsuits and run around outside in the rain. The neighbours think we're nuts, but they don't know what they're missing.

[evalyn]

What could be more magical than water falling from the sky? I wish I could work in my garden in the rain. That would be doubley magic for me.

[M. Henry]

i enjoy your description of the weather. :)

[Em]

I invited a young man to come live with us for awhile. He's old enough to be out on his own, but has no confidence and lived at home where they were always criticising him. I think he's probably gay and their first line of attack was that. Anyway, he's very up in his head. It's useful for me to marvel at that in him and thus slide down deeper into my own body. But anywho, last night he was off on a bitter rant, the intensity of which was wearing me out and I remembered the most marvelously bitter rant of all time which is Mark Twain's essay on the literary offenses of James Fenimore Cooper. Sometimes it's good to visit that energy but I don't want to live there any more, ya know?

I loved what you said about magic and about yoga. I'm in the middle of a rough patch in which I have been self destructing by not moving my body and by eating transfatty acids willfully. Nothing too alarming. But I'm rethinking this not moving thing.

Oh and the way you wrote about the rain! Beautiful. I grew up in Missouri and now I'm in California where they wouldn't know a good rainstorm if it tapped them on the shoulder and poured water down their back.

Oops, I've typed a book in your comments.

[Carol Cousins-Tyler]

I understand your reaction to self esteem exercises. Years ago, my therapist gave me a list of the "wonderful" things I was to repeat to myself when the "unworthy" feeling came over me. I found that I totally didn't "buy" what I was saying, and worse, that nasty negative voice started speaking louder and louder, drowning the "love myself" things out. I have since read some very helpful philosophy in the plot lines of my favorite SF author (Bujold) and reflect upon those lines when I find myself sinking into a funk! That and the peaceful repetition of knitting, gets me through the bad patches. For fun I am knitting a bunny. The pattern is in the round, but I am using two colors and have had to flatten the body and put a seem up the back. This is my first attempt a modifying a pattern. I struggle, but I feel empowered! I hope you feel the same! Carol

[Kelly]

It is challenging to convey the depth of experience one may have while practicing yoga. To new students, all I can really say is "You just have to try it for yourself." People often want to know what to expect, what it will be like, how they will feel once they can do x, y, or z pose. The only reasonable response is, "You'll know when you get there. The experience will be undeniably unique to you...and yet familiar to all who have done it."

Thank you for the way you expressed how you feel from practicing yoga. Your perspective is at once refreshing and keen. I wholeheartedly agree with your idea about our "default condition" and am grateful to feel it for myself and guide others into remembering & resetting.

[becky]

This is a great post. It's amazing what we see when we look for it, isn't it?

[Jocelyn]

Sometimes the magic of life sneaks up on you unawares, and becoming aware of it at the right moment is another kind of magic in itself. Thanks for the beautiful writing. I can't tell you how much I needed that just this moment.

[Baraka]

You know, when I do sleeves on my top-down sweaters, I put the body of the sweater in a bag (plastic, shopping, whatever will close either by tying or rubber-banding) and then I do the sleeves like two socks at a time on 2 circulars.

It keeps the bulk of the sweater contained and getting both sleeves done at once makes sure they are identical and not fraternal - which I can deal with on socks but not sleeves, y'know?

Magic is alive (google Buffy Saint Marie and listen to her sing your heart to mystery!)

[lizbon]

I suspect that there is often more magic in our lives than we are usually aware of. I almost think sometimes that we are sleepwalkers, now and again bumping into our own selves in the dark.

Except that that sounds bitter and depressing, when actually I am feeling light and amused by myself today.