Southern Eclair

Did I find God here? Yes. And more than the Him. I was led by the mind, by eyes, deeper inside the world until it became the swirls of a Van Gogh painting. Passing around outside and around within. “It would make me pass to let it pass on.”

Today I am at the top of the hill of life. Looking around. Arkansas.

Student, you are not e.e. cummings and this is not a text to mom.

Student, you are not writing in German. Please stop capitalizing.

If your head is down and you are snoring, student, you lack subtlety.

I know your life is exhausting. So is mine, but I wake for you still.

Ah, great. Here comes a man to correct me. Of course I needed that, huh?

Everyone is a critic about things that don't have to do with them.

I only want to pee in peace while at work. Stop talking on your phone.

You didn't know there was the paper due that I had mentioned ten times?

The drilling into the wall next to me is the antidote to peace.

When you chase after me at the end of every class: I don't like that.

It's a long-sleeve dress. There is no reason to talk about my clothing.

Don't make eyes at me. I have stuff to do and it's certainly not you.

You want to be a professor? All aboard the train to No Jobs Land!

It’s been hot so long that 72 degrees feels like an ice box.

I beg you to stop talking politics at the salon. Please no more.

Why does everyone at Lowe's drive like they're raving drunk and ego mad?

Olive says she'll get paid four grand a month as a GT teacher. Nope.

The kids fight nonstop. They make home feel like a war zone. We all need peace.

That skater is not my daughter, young fan. I did not give birth when 10.

Yoga derby pic posted. Then deleted. What stupid quandaries now.

Nighttime rehearsals for David mean nighttime fears for our children. Tired.

In the dark, there is only my breath, my heart, and my fears. Be enough.

I picture my student’s face as I read Thoreau’s Walden: “The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages imply this advantage at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature.  When he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. ... We now no longer camp for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”

So in my rooted place, I consciously look out to see heaven where I am, to see its textures of free-flowing freedom once again.

Often I forget my intention. It doesn’t matter. Life is not a failure.

After my workday is done, as I wait for the kids to return, I click my tongue to tell a cat it’s time. She settles in so we can settle each other. I sing to her: “It looks ugly, but it’s clean. Oh mama, don’t fuss over me."

"Blood is rare and sweet as cherry wine":

coursing through her tiny purrs, and through the top of my head, to the space between my eyes, down my arms to my fingertips, through the space behind my heart and river-running down my legs,

reaching toward the bliss which defies description.

But most people who have been human for a few years can tell you that such a goal---perfection---is absurd, because it is impossible. To be human is to make mistakes. To ask for perfection is to ask someone to pretend, deny, compress into less than they really are. Life is not like a performance at the Olympics. Life is continual practice.

As a tenured professor, I have done the “perfection” I was supposed to do. But rather than espouse the importance of perfection to my students, I know more clearly now than ever what a falsehood it would be to seek perfection. I am thoroughly imperfect from my writing to my thoughts, as are my students. While a grammatically-perfect essay may look and feel nice, it is not as useful as an imperfect essay that actually says something. So I do not ask my students to be perfect. I ask them to be brave.

In yoga, we call this “our truth.” In a seated forward fold, your truth is not when you fold over and touch your nose to your knees and make a show of limberness, a show of perfection: your truth is when you flatten your back, look at your big toes, and actually stretch what isn't limber. It's when you are honest with yourself. It's when you work on what you need to work on, rather than what you've already mastered. It is when you look your limitations in the face and don't try to hide from them.

Embracing this truth of imperfection, moment-to-moment, is freedom.

In my office, in the breaks between grading papers, I practice handstands. I am imperfect at them. I am reminded of this each time I do them, so I do them again and again. “Don’t try to be perfect,” I tell myself. “Just be fully brave.”

That colleague reminded me yesterday that it was the third anniversary of my blog. When I told him I no longer wrote there, he replied, “Don't let fear keep you from sharing your wonderful thoughts with the world. That would be unbearably sad.” 

His words reminded me of the cover of Joanna Russ’s How to Suppress Women’s Writing, which I have taped to my office door: 

“She didn't write it. But if it's clear she did the deed... She wrote it but she shouldn't have. (It's political, sexual, masculine, feminist.) She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen, her family. Other women!) She wrote it, but she only wrote one of it. (’Jane Eyre. Poor dear, that's all she ever...’) She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art. (It's a thriller, a romance, a children’s book. It's sci fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning, Branwell Brontë. Her own ‘masculine’ side.) She wrote it, but she's an anomaly. (Woolf. With Leonard’s help...) She wrote it, BUT...” 

I see these words each time I arrive at work and each time I shut the door for home again. They put a fire back in me to speak for what is right, and to point out who has not been allowed to speak. Even when a senior colleague of mine stopped me one day to tell me all the words in the Russ quotation could apply to male writers as well (That colleague likely misses the point of many things.), it only strengthened my resolve to point out our cultural blind spots. How dare I, then, after seeing those words day after day, silence myself? How dare I be weaker supporting myself than I am about supporting others? How dare I not be brave too?

...Because I don't want the world to make me hard. ...Because I don't want to deflect knives thrown at me. ...Because it's so difficult. ...Because of fear. (Psychologists tend to be right.)

When I get ready for bed---rubbing Biofreeze into my injured knee, strapping a plantar fasciitis sleeve onto my foot, feeling the jetting lines of pain from a roller derby fall weeks ago---I breathe in the moments of my obviously limited time here on earth. Days and weeks, divided and speeding, are all I have. “Speak, woman,” my soul says to me. “Write anyway.” 

In the English professor world, having the president of the MLA think I'm cool enough to send an article around about me is as much of a rock star moment as I'm ever gonna get.

I’ve looked all my life for something that will stop the ache. My husband worked with a French-speaking playwright who called this ache the “boule” in the pit of oneself: a ball, a knot, a tangle that wants to be undone. When I was young, I learned to play musical instruments to ease that ache. My music teacher wrote to me this past Christmas to tell me he still has his new students listen to a recording of me playing the jazz standard “Summertime” when I was nine years old, because it breaks the hearts of people who hear it. I was just trying to get rid of the ache when I was nine. 

When I went to college, I began to try to write the ache away. I tried to find its source through words. Trying to uncover, trying to scoop out, digging like Seamus Heaney: “Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.” Academic views, philosophies, creative approaches, researched-based perspectives: this ache must have a history within words. 

Music and writing don’t necessarily cure aches. They voice them.

I’m grown now. I have a successful career, a marriage, children, a mortgage, a clear conscience, and people who depend on me. I am no less of a being in an external shell than I ever was. I still look for ways to resolve the ache. 

 Other people couldn’t cure the ache for me, and that lesson came with the most pain. “Maybe I’ll run it away,” I thought, and pounded my heels into the trails. “Maybe it needs praying on,” and I poured more guilt upon myself. “Maybe it is my unfulfilled potential, this ache,” and so I looked in buildings, in books, in the sky for what it is I’m supposed to do that I haven’t already done. On and on, while this yearning to resolve what I can’t makes me feel like a failure. 

 Yet slowly, gradually, repeatedly like a whispered reminder from God, I find in the breaths of meditation during yoga the answer. I realize as I breathe myself in and back out again that the ache is nothing more than the feeling of being human. It is not a curse. It is not something to be cured. It does not require fixing. It is merely the ability to feel: the feeling of being here on earth temporarily, of knowing there is but the present, of carrying pain and happiness and sadness and joy and empathy within. The ache is the weight of existing. 

 At an arena with thousands of people beneath me, I was thinking of this as Mumford and Sons sang, “And I was still, but I was under your spell when I told by Jesus all was well. So all must be well. Just give me time. You know your desires and mine. So wrap my flesh in ivy and in twine: for I must be well.” The thousands of us breathing together: that ache was there in all of us, singing loudly. And there was nothing wrong with it. The ache was beautiful.  

By making me sit with what hurts within me, yoga teaches me that there is nothing wrong within me. It teaches me to be okay with what I can’t do, and to be okay with all that is. It reaches within to help me resist the negativity that is inside and outside of me. It teaches me to love the ache but not revel in it. It teaches me “So all must be well.“ 

 If yoga is for most people about asanas or poses to strengthen and lengthen the body, then that’s fine for them. But if it can help me be okay with the difficulty of living, then I’m far more grateful to yoga for that than for anything physical: breathing in and out, reaching in and out, and accepting the creation I am. Then I can see clearly it’s the ache that has kept me going all this time.

"Like this, Mama,” she says, balancing on her two hands that are now the size of mine, her knees drawn up to her arms, a steady crow perched in explanation. "Wow. You are amazing, my girl." She is eight years old, and she is a miniature version of me: the same hair, the same face, the same half-smile on the lips, the same turmoil that gurgles inside like the whirlpools after Niagara Falls. "Help me be brave now, Mama. Show me the four-corner headstand again. I think I'm ready."

She wants to be a Jedi. She wants justice in the world. She intuitively avoids the fickle and gravitates toward the kind. She was granted an usual intelligence and ability to learn.

She teaches her weekly yoga teacher about meditation apps, she teaches her third grade teacher about mindfulness techniques to quell the disruptive students, she teaches the other students in her gifted and talented class about balance poses, she teaches me the best and weakest parts of myself.

Before she goes to bed, she likes to practice a little yoga with me. If I've come from class, she wants to know anything new I learned so she can learn it too. We fly together as crows. We stand together as eagles. We relax together as pigeons. We open up together as frogs. We are journeying together, figuring out how to be peaceful inside our shells. I give her the yoga as I learn it, adding it to her toolbox of coping skills---a toolbox I wish I had also carried at such a young age.

When I walked into class again on Thursday—St. Patrick’s Day—I thought to myself, “I know what’s it’s like to sit in those chairs and be them. They don’t know what it’s like to stand up here and be me.” So I spent a few minutes at the start of class telling them how I got here—standing there in my “Cleveland Irish” t-shirt—so they know why I acted as I did, right or wrong as it was:

“I’m from the far east-side of Cleveland. Everyone in my town was pretty much poor. There was no rich section. Mostly fairly recent immigrant families from Europe, African Americans, and a whole lot of Irish people. People there will tell you to your face if you’re an idiot, and they will break your nose if you have done them wrong. Nobody expects anyone from there to become anything much. Most people work for local factories and chemical plants. At night, they drink. If the chemicals don’t kill them early, the drinking will. That’s how my dad died in his early fifties—from drinking—like his mother before him.

I’m the youngest in my very Irish family: my full name literally translates to mean “Irish girl.” Nobody expected much of me either. But I expected something of me. So I went to a college that was much better than my high school had prepared me for. It wasn’t easy in the least. I decided to be a professor, and worked my tail off to get fellowships to make that happen. But those fellowships required I move 2,000 miles away from the east side of Cleveland. The South wasn’t a bit like where I grew up, not even if I squinted, and I’m incredibly introverted. Leaving home was really tough. But, again, I expected more of myself. I became the first in my extended family to be called “doctor.” That’s one reason why I kept my maiden name when I married: so that the title would be attached to my family and where we’ve come from.

To even have a chance at becoming a professor required twelve years of college. There are about four tenure-track jobs a year in the nation in my field, and each of those will have about three hundred or more applicants. Twelve years of college for chances like that? [I turned around with my arms outstretched then.] I made it happen anyway. That’s who I am.

Once you get that job, there is no sitting around eating truffles. A professor’s job is divided into research, teaching, and service. I’ve spend seven years publishing, I’ve developed 18 new courses for the university, and I oversee 70 instructors across the state. I work nonstop. While you’re on spring break next week, I will be here working.

So when I give my brief half-hour lecture each week and I see people falling asleep during it, I think about what it took to get here, to be able to stand up here in front of you, about the thousands of dollars you pay to even have access to me, I think about all the people back home and all I’ve sacrificed…for you to fall asleep when I’m talking. Maybe you can understand now why in those moments the Cleveland Irish girl in me rises up and gets real pissed off.

Lordy, I have been where you are and I don’t want to go back. I know how tired you get. But put yourself in my shoes too. Remember what your grandmama taught you and treat me as you would want to be treated. If you were standing up here, if you had done what I had to do to get here, you’d want the respect of me at least keeping my damn eyes open for you.“

I study with four yoga teachers in real life. I study with about a dozen others virtually, but they don’t know me; and I study with some on paper, but a lot of them are dead so let’s not dwell there right now. I’m not a dabbler: when I do a thing, I do a thing, and I’ve done that with yoga. I add the new thing to the things that float inside my brain like milk into espresso. It will blend in eventually and become homogenous.

Teachers. One of my yoga teachers uses the judgment in her eyes on me until I find myself standing freely on my head, my own eyes fierce, no movement, all control. She won’t let me wimp out and pretend I need things I don’t: another moment, another day, another week, another year. She knows. She’ll come over and say, “You’re a derby girl. Lengthen out and take that bind.” And I do. Because she’s right. I need her to remind me of who I am when my insecurities and pitiful child voice get loud in my head.

One of my yoga teachers doesn’t speak very strong English. I don’t really know what she’s saying, but even my toes hurt after her class. Yet when she adjusts my forehead gently during Savasana—a sweep from the center outward like an eraser—I stop breathing. Everything in my body falls in an instant like Alice down the rabbit hole. I understand then why it is called corpse pose.

One of my yoga teachers seems to hate me every other class for my own good, humbling me. She steps on my toes because I’m absentmindedly lifting them, and I feel like Ramona Quimby, Age 8. She critiques my elbows: they’re doing something slightly the wrong way. I correct them incorrectly. My hands slip in Down Dog like I’m a sloppy jalopy then. I stare up at the projector on the ceiling, because it doesn’t matter—I can’t effing yoga right. So I breathe deeper, deeper, deeper into her words…they have more meaning than the poses anyway: “Let it all fall out on the mat. All the mind chatter. All the chitta vritti. You can pick it up later. Let it fall out right now.” So I do, watching them fall down like leaves dropping—my over-analysis of her teaching, my insecurity in the very act of positioning my body this way or that, my need for perfectionism, how hard I take criticism. Dropping one by one from my head, drifting to the mat, I watch them go where they can stay until later. And in those moments I know she doesn’t hate me every other class. She’s trying to help me more then.

One of my yoga teachers is a master of zen meditation. He warns against the American style of yoga where everything is excess, like we’re trying to rip our muscles in two with each move, this violence even in yoga. He is the least experienced yoga teacher, and so often his class will be just the two of us—the others leery of this inexperience where I am not. I train new professors, and so I can spot an instructor’s essence before they’ve discovered it themselves. And his essence is best when he stops caring about what he should be doing or what another yoga teacher would do and falls into himself and what he loves. Then we both learn and we both get stronger and clearer. “Should I do anything differently?,” he asks as we leave class. “All yoga is good yoga. I will not tell you to teach me differently,” I say, smiling.  

They follow me throughout the day—like every teacher I’ve had in the decades of my life—their lessons whispering in my mind who I am and can be. I wander with them, seeking the divinity within this, my older self, as it forms by writing on the pages of my younger self.

Yoga. I'll tell you what yoga is. When I was young and my mom and I were clamped up in all the stress of life---that life raining down on us like a downpour---we'd hop in the car on a Saturday morning and forget we ever had anything to do, and drive to nowhere. The two of us, no direction, music as loud as we needed to drown out our interior noise, singing from where our toes joined our shins joined our hip sockets joined our bellies, like one bellow of all we were. That, right there, is yoga. The true self.

The formal practice. I would have never come to the formal practice of yoga had it been a bunch of my students in their tiny tank tops telling me I should, because I would not trust their youth to know what is right for me. I began practicing yoga because my 70-year-old mother-in-law took the free weekly yoga class at our church and loved it.  Now understand, she had been taking this yoga class for five years before I even considered going myself: that is how skeptically I view things and how long I consider whether what others do is or is not something that could be for me. All that for one hour of trying a new thing. I might be a tad silly.

Had this first class been a bunch of advanced yogis taking binds and doing ujjayi breathing, I likely would have crawled inside myself and closed the door to yoga forever. But it was a room full of senior citizens sprinkled with one or two women my age---all shapes of folks---and they laughed and groaned and half of them could do hardly a simple stretch. They were there because the teacher---a woman in her sixties, a transplant from New York City who had taught movement for years---was so good. With gentleness, intention, and knowledge, she guided whoever showed up from the inside out, and within ten minutes she made me believe I could feel the top of my head growing into the heavens and my pelvis reaching into the earth. She softly walked over to me as I breathed self-consciously at the start of class, touched my elbow, and whispered in my ear, "Even less." And somehow at that moment I grew into the sky.

We can't drive off into nowhere every day to find our true selves again. It's not practical. Maybe that feeling of freedom, of release, of leaving it all behind, is what drives some people into the forgetfulness of drugs: it's quicker than driving for hours. But what I learned that day in a room full of groaning, happy old people is that locating the true self is not about a path to nowhere: finding the true self---who you really are at your best---requires nothing but a teacher. Then you can find it anywhere just by breathing and feeling yourself lengthening like a beam of light into the sky.

“Start writing about yoga,” my husband said to me. “What the frick do I really know about yoga? No.” “Honestly. Just start writing.” And he kissed my hair and left for rehearsal.

My automatic response is to reject whatever people tell me to do: I like discovering my own paths. But he so often correctly turns me where I need to look. That seed became a weed and in a week’s time it had germinated and I had to start pulling it out of me. So I began to write about yoga every night while he was gone rehearsing his latest play—my pathway outside and within yoga, the ridiculous and transformative of it. 

I’ll be sharing pieces of this yoga text with you in this space under the header “Yoga Posits.”

I taught her a long time ago when she was a freshman in college and we were both different people. I weighed 150 pounds more then than I do now. She weighs a whole lot more now than she did then. I’m not going to bullshit her on what it feels like. I’m not going to sell her on some magic. If she wants to make this happen, any self-pity or excuses have to go out the window and she has to face herself. It’s work work work work work work. It hurts.

She’s a bold, hardworking, loud-mouthed soul. So she looked back at me without flinching and said, “I know, Doc.” And she got to work.

Season after season, freezing temperatures and blazing sun, we’re out there on the concrete track skating, jamming, juking. Working. We train in all weather, through all things. We do it for ourselves, but we also do it for women like her. So she has a place when she’s ready, if she wants it.

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” ---Marianne Williamson

As I read those words, I thought of the hundred or so students I stand in front of each week; and instead of bowing down to my critics and making myself smaller, those words helped me stand taller. My students need to see a woman who is not afraid to be all that she is capable of, all that God intended her to be...even if it intimidates people who are not yet that. I should not play small for others' comfort: I should be vast for my freedom and for theirs.