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.
