Enchanting Juno

Why I am not afraid of becoming who I was.

So you know how pain hurts?

I was walking down the stairs last night and I had this moment of awareness of the miraculous way my body works and for a minute there I could feel it, all the joints and bones and muscles interacting smoothly with no pain or ache or weakness or stiffness.  It was really beautiful.  And then I had a glass of Bruichladdie and took my beautiful body and my mild buzz to bed. 

Things that are good:  muscular-skeletal structures and really great booze.

I noticed the beauty because I twanged my leg last week - I THINK it's the IT band?  But really, what do I know about musculature?   It is something that reaches from above the knee up to and around my hip and when it twangs it feels like the muscle was shortened by 6 inches and the hip is being aggressively pulled forward.  I can't stand straight and walking makes me want to cry a little.

It is extremely unpleasant. 

I find myself wanting to say its Nothing In the Grander Scheme, which is true and not true, but also annoyingly self effacing.  Pain is, your FEELINGS are.  Denial serves nothing but the status quo.  Etc. Etc.

So I used to feel this way all the time.  That's what is blowing my mind this week, the fact that I forgot that this is what I used to feel like almost every day.  For years. 

I was fat.  I'm still fat but in a very different way.  But then?  Unfit, unhealthy, full of bad food and depression and puffy and withdrawn and sad and sort of basically unfriendly.   I hurt all the time.  My legs felt tired, my soul was heavier than my body, my back hurt every day.  I had no energy.  I would no more have gone for a walk than set myself on fire.  

I was already two years into therapy and it was WORKING.  This was an IMPROVED place for me. 

I meet people now and they notice most of my friendships are under 10 years old.  Why?  And I'm like, you would not have liked me.  And they are all, why do you talk about yourself that way?  And I am like NO, you would NOT HAVE LIKED ME.   Not many of my old friendships survived my learning to like myself. 

All this from a muscle spasm, right?

The first time I went to the gym as an adult was in maybe 2003 - February I think.  A neighbor dragged me.  And I was all I WILL DO CARDIO ONLY and when I am thin I will do weights (Free weights are for FIT PEOPLE<--------This is what disordered thinking looks like, in case you would like an example).  Thus guaranteeing that I would gain nothing from this process because who could go on the cross trainer for 3 continuous years without dying of boredom?  It's grim.

But the gym membership came with a training session with my mad Russian and for some reason, some bit of progressive thinking that was beginning to stir in my brain, I DID the session instead of putting it off until a year from never.  And it was...fun.    I lifted things.  Very light things.  But still, this was new.  I liked the Russian.

(He told me recently - we still work out once a week - that when he first saw me trailing behind the salesmen he was, not to mince words, horrified at what stood before him.  Me too, my friend, me too) (Don't be hating on him for saying that.  There was context and I was not offended).

So I lifted wights and did cardio and lost 20 pounds and then gained it back in muscle, and I learned the DIFFERENCE between fat and muscle and met with him 4 x a week for several years and the outside of me changed and the inside of me changed and honestly I was still at the bottom rung of human fitness, but I was so much better that I could begin to learn to be a real person.  Because the one thing I have really come to know is that I'm a body AND a mind.  I only ever valued the mind and neglected the body and the lack of balance very nearly killed me I think, which sounds a bit melodramatic but is true.

I have a related post brewing about my relationship with my appearance which will continue to brew until I can talk about being pretty without feeling like a total douche-bag.

ANYWAY.

Somewhere along the way I hurt something, or - more likely - discovered something I hurt a long time ago but which only began to nag when I asked my legs to DO things regularly, this shortened feeling at the front of my thigh that limited movement and for a couple of years it was with me most of the time.  I never even really thought of it as an injury or a chronic problem.  It was just the latest in a line of small things and I almost didn't notice when it didn't heal and fade from my head.  The Russian moved back to Russia for a while and I worked with a young woman trainer.  We switched to more mat work,more body weight work than free weights and that was an interesting change, and with her I began to work around the leg, target it with stretching and sometimes, for a week or so we'd get it working again without pain.  I saw the rolfer* then and the chiropractor and it helped.   But I began to understand that this was a problem that I wasn't getting rid of.  This was middle age.  And in middle age I limped. 

Time passed, leaves fell, hearts broke and mended, flowers bloomed.  The Russian was back, I was restless and bored with weights, I was stronger, my feet hurt and I had kidney stones and I was turning 40 and the whole thing was just an OUTRAGE. 

And so I started to practice yoga, turning the vague notion of years into a reality.

My first class twanged that thigh hard and I limped out, but it also receded after that to better than it had been in years.  And then a month later it twanged again and then faded for a month completely and then it twanged hard and stayed twanged until I finally made the synaptic connection that resting this NEVER HELPED and made myself go for a walk,  the first 3K of which made me want to cry with every step and the last 2K of which were as pain free as I had felt in a decade.  Oh. OH.

That was Summer 2009 and until last week, I've not felt a twinge.  I'd begun to forget about it, in fact. I have a deep hippy suspicion about why this twanged now but it requires a whole 'nother digression and I'm not in the mood.  Superficial summary:  I reached a new place with pigeon pose and didn't respect how wobbly and open my hips were feeling, accused myself of laziness and went to class when I didn't want to, and in the simplest of movements my leg said fuck you for not listening, HERE FEEL THIS DUMB ASS.

Ow. 

I know what to do, and I did it, OUTRAGED every step of the first few days.  I FIXED YOU you betraying bastard.  And then I stopped being such a damnpissytwerp about it, and noticed that I hadn't had this chronic pain for over a year and that was really a cycle broken and a remarkable thing.   A little respect please.  Last night - after 5 days - the spasm eased in a moment I didn't even notice, during yoga of course.   And meditation was amazing afterward, the silence that the pain left behind it was big.

I'm not sure there's a lesson here - my pain is not yours, not everything can be healed this way - though I have a tendency to say that yoga fixes everything because in some larger sense I think it really does. 

But last night I walked down the stairs and felt the exquisite working of my body like the miracle it really is and I was grateful.  I love that. 

 

 

 *love the Rolfer.  This is Rolfing

 

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. 

Fresh!

I'm wearing a weird perfume today.  Which isn't all that unusual really, I often am wearing a weird perfume.  Pascal Morabito Or Black
It's got a kind of blast of dry tangy wind in ocean grass thing going on to start - with pepper.  It made me sneeze in the beginning.  Partly the pepper in the mix, but a little of the sinus stripping burn of the soap aisle.

Oddly, I am enjoying it.  I want to know what happens next. 

(Odd because my feelings for the soap aisle are fully developed and unfriendly.  The last time I needed some household cleansers I walked down the aisle, breathing through my mouth, and realized I cannot buy cleaners at the grocery store anymore.  An entire aisle of stuff and it is dead to me.  Except for the borax/baking soda.   Very occasionally I use ammonia on grubby whites (outdoors).  So then I went to the hippy little vitamin store and got some earth friendly scent- and dye- free powder for the laundry and an all purpose concentrate)

This Or Black is a famously quirky scent and really, I'm not getting it.  People go on and on about leather and gasoline and flowers and wood and I'm getting mostly vetiver and maybe the beginnings of a warm woody something.  I always wonder when this happens if I'm anosmic to something in the scent, lacking in imagination or if I just come at perception sideways. 

(A recent discussion about the movie Secretary would suggest sideways, but I cannot rule out the other two.)

Just vetiver and soap.  And a headache.  Must go wash my hands. 

Better.  It's the soap that gets me, though I am informed that it's really the synthetic musks that go in many if not most commercial soaps and detergents that give that give the scent I call soapy.  I've been sensitive to such things since I was a little girl - contact allergies mostly.  I've never liked that 'soapy' smell and everything from Safeguard to Dove has left me faintly itchy.  I did have a brief love affair with the Irish Spring guy when I was 8, that ended tragically when a bar of Irish Spring was left in a tin in the bathroom and opened in an eye-searing cloud of acridity that first taught me to start avoiding certain things.   My mom thought I was some kind of snob, always looking for ever more esoteric cleansers and emollients, but nothing felt right, you know?  Until I found my beloved cinnamon oatmeal Got Soap, which I buy 10 bars at a time and am considering stockpiling the way my grandmother hoarded TP during World War II.

The perfume thing has been interesting.  I started off with the Black Phoenix samples back in May and had a world of fun learning to smell.  You would think I already knew how to smell, but nope.  Had to learn to pay attention, to understand how perception can be influenced by everything, to practice connecting scent to memory and vocabulary.
I was a bit scared of the BPAL forums - those are some enthusiasts and I'm forum phobic anyway - but enjoy the hell out of their website.  Unfortunately, other than one or two  favorites, they all rapidly began to smell alike to me - like olfactory blunt instruments, all from the same mold.

But googling for more information led me to scent samples from the whole vast world of niche and mainstream perfumery and this is where I have wallowed happily for many months.

I know a lot of people have a problem with perfume - I wonder where I know this from?  Is it like the anger of Hillary supporters who might vote for McCain, that is to say, largely a media fabrication?  A remnant from the Giorgio saturated 80s?  No one's ever said anything to me, but it is a theme that surfaces in perfumista talk.  And there are places that ban fragrance. 

What I wish is that commercial fragrance would be limited - as I think sensitivity to perfumes of all kinds is exacerbated by constant low grade exposure to extreme smelling things.  Disinfectant sprays, shower cleansers, the entire Airfreshener/Fabreeze industry (the smell of fabreeze makes me actively queasy), Scrubbing Bubbles, Cascade, Pledge, etc. etc.   Even deodorant.  I'd rather be able to chose a candle or perfume that pleases me - things that are genuinely far less common that the million and one vile plastic aromas of modern life - than have that merry band of manufactured soapy cleanliness molecules continue to overwhelm my daily sensory experience.  I read something about plans to scent casinos recently.  Not that I like casinos to begin with, but that will certainly keep me all the way away.  What are the chances of a subtle choice being made there?  New Improved Lavender Scented Waste All Your Cash. 

I use unscented things as much as possible, or ones scented quietly and organically that disperse rapidly.  I like the un-scent of actual clean far more than the 'clean' scent of ad-driven American aspirational life.  I can't figure out what on earth is wrong with smelling human: I was scarred by the FDS commercials of my youth, where one was encouraged to scent one's private parts with artificial strawberry instead allowing the horror of your natural female aroma to be potentially perceived by you or any one else.  Personally, I think the fake strawberry punzie spray is far more terrifying (they don't appear to make strawberry (anymore?) - only Extra Strength (extra strength what, I wonder), Baby Powder, Shower Fresh, White Blossom, Sheer Fresh, Delicate Breeze and New! Ocean Breeze) than the funkiest I have ever smelled.

What it is with the ocean scents?  What is it with the horror of smelling a bit like the animals we are?  There's a big difference between the smell of a day's energy output and a real aversion to bathing, but we act like the merest whiff of anything to do with the body is the rankest decay and moral turpitude.  I think we're so busy masking that we're interfering with our ability to experience real olfactory pleasure.  Control, control, control.
To me, perfume is art and sensory experience.  Like a gorgeous single malt or Starry Night - you taste it, you feel it, you inhabit emotions by wearing it, you feel a place or time in past or future.  Sometimes you have to sit still and let it all in in silence.  It makes me feel more alive, less bound.  And thinking about the experience  - what I love or hate, and why, how it connects to my perceptions of myself and others - has been an intellectual and emotional adventure.   

I seem to have wandered off a bit. 

Or Black....that was a no then.  Make a note. 

Oh, and yes, I did my push-ups Wednesday. 12, 12, 10, 10 and 22.  I've got a stitch in my back.

Week 1, Day 1

Not as bad as I thought, though I expect that will change.

Day 1

rest 60 seconds between each level

               Goal               Actual

Level 1     10                  10

Level 2     10                  10

Level 3     8                    9

Level 4     6                    6

Level 5     Max (min 7)      20

I will say that I don't go as deep on the arm bends as I should, but I know from the past that that will come once things start to sturdy up.  And I am so going to have trouble with the time between sets.  I'll have to get a timer, as I am more of the school of - OK ready, in a 20-lets-call-it-60 kind of way.

My knitting group reconvened for the first time in months last night.  Not that we did any knitting - it was more stories of every one's huge summers full of change.  Explains why we haven't been knitting so much, or meeting.  Who has time with all that personal evolution, love, change, family and adjustment?  Love and death.  Adventure.  Fighting.  Pirates.  Life.

One of the hard things is knowing when to hold onto a group and when to let go, and this summer I have been worried that it was time to let this one go.  How happy I am that the changing of season means a new beginning rather than an end.  Autumn ought to be spring really.  Always seems to work this way.

And when will I learn that few things ever really end?  Particularly the important ones?