new

listening to music from india, walking
(slowly or quickly, depending on my mood), to work, paying attention
to how i move and how others move.
reading up on feminism, bodies and perfectionism and how we got this way...
setting up novel ideas in my head, and
expectations -- an equal parenting family (never before knowing there was such a thing,
an alternative), putting together bits and pieces of philosophies on how
i am going to raise my daughter, and cultivate my son, and expect of my husband. finally,
finally finding a yoga class i like, learning that i can support my pointy knees with towels,
catching a glimpse of krishna running
through sherbet colored fields,
floating home on clair de lune, on at just the right time on pandora
(remembering a beautiful moment when my beautiful friend played it on piano on one of our beautiful [too few] nights together. how her eyes fluttered closed.). loving cherries,
cheese, pizza with my boyfriend, the olympics, our cat on the edge of the couch,
eating, without analyzing -- just tasting.
living, without analyzing, just tasting.
good god, everything tastes so good.

currently reading: "perfect girls, starving daughters" by courtney e. martin

     "How much of our obsession with food and fitness, our daily evaluation of our bodies, even our textbook eating disorders is an unconscious expression of our loyalty to or rejection of our mothers? We speak to our bodies as well.

     "To reject the pressure to be thin is to reject our mothers' lifelong efforts. On the one hand, to extricate yourself from the culture of dieting and overexercise is to miss out on a huge part of female bonding -- the dieting promises exchanged between mother and daughter, sisters, friends; the self-disparaging watercooler talk about that holiday weight; the chats at the gym. On the other hand, some girls starve themselves expressly to avoid growing into adult female bodies and inheriting their mothers' lives. Some girls overeat and get fat to wound their weight-conscious mothers. Some girls become sports-obsessed, in part, to drive home the point that they will not be dainty and domestic like their powerless moms.

     "We see that our mothers cannot love their own bodies, and this translates, albeit unintentionally, to a lesson about femaleness, about form, about our own futures. Marion Woodman writes: 'Because our mothers could not love themselves as complete feminine beings, they could not love us as feminine beings. So our fear is archetypal, monstrous. We have a tremendous sense of something within behing shut off, abandoned.'

     "All daughters say to all mothers -- sometimes in words, more often with our own bodies as substitutes for words -- I came from you, your body was my first home, and you didn't suspect I sensed how you felt about it? Your genes imprinted themselves indelibly on the moment of my birth, creating an equation for what I would look like when I emerged. It was you. Even if I have Dad's knock-kness or Grandpa's curly hair, it is you that I become."

-- From "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women," by Courtney E. Martin

yesterday, on the Metro...

iPhone nation

the lone exception

A week after finishing "The Shallows" by Nicholas Carr, I can't stop thinking about how the Internet has so proliferated in our lives. I'd always speculated that the growth of the Internet has made us more scatterbrained; Carr actually argues, citing various scientific studies, that using the Web and computers to get information instead of books reroutes how we think, making us crave fast, quick and bite-sized information over comtemplative, serious thought. Even reading on a Kindle changes our reading and learning experience.

What do you think? How do you read? Do you ever fear that, with all we gain from the Web, just maybe we're losing something important?

what i'm listening to

No good live video, but sweet song. Simple and sweet. Enjoy your weekends, everyone.

today's commute

wisdom or vanity

I never had a yoga teacher know me so much, without knowing me.

She took her time. One minute after class was scheduled to begin, two, five... Everyone, several with iphones next to their mats,
looked on, as she sat there, breathed a bit, set up her music, situated her large blonde free curls around her ear, settled comfortably onto her haunches...
when is she going to start? She wore a long silver necklace with a round pendant over her black tank top and I wondered how she would stretch without it flailing around, hitting her face or getting caught somewhere inconvenient.

And then, suddenly and without hurry, she talked. It went something like this:
"I am so honored to be with you today. But before we begin class I want you to know what this is about. It is not about impressing anyone or even yourself. It is not about meeting an expectation.

It is not even about the poses. In fact, there is no such thing as a perfect yoga pose. All of our bodies are different, so the poses are going to look different, they are going to reflect our bodies.

What this is about is you being here. Just being here, and moving where your body takes you, where you need to go. It's about finding that place where you feel something. Not the place where you sweat or cry or hurt, but the place where you get a message that you're where you need to be.
The place between 'too much" and "not enough.'

And that place will be unique for everyone. But as long as you're here, and you feel something, you're exactly where you need to be.

Just like with life. You don't need to go anywhere. You're already there. Just be there."

There were wide eyes and skeptical eyes and squinted eyes and peaceful eyes, bored eyes and excited eyes. Faces that signalled they'd heard it all before, and ones that looked stricken with new wisdom. She asked for questions, and we all understood or we all didn't dare ask or maybe we all just wanted to get on with it. There were no questions.

"Let's begin," she said.

And as our differently shaped bodies started to move she watched them admirably.

And when some were off-center or half-bent, when some took variations, she nodded in approval but did not touch. No reposturing, no lessons.

And while we moved to more and more challenging poses and our limbs shook and the sweat dribbled onto the mat she posited, "Wisdom or vanity. You choose."

And when I, perhaps overly ambitious, reached too far and fell to the ground, she whispered, "There's a good lesson."


When I ignored an instruction and sunk into child's pose, my left thigh shaking, I felt safe.

The place between too much and not enough. The ever-chased balance. To seek it just not on a yoga mat, but in life, as well. To be at peace and feel love and presence in every moment. This is my ultimate goal. It was refreshing and beautiful to hear someone put into words and to believe so deeply in what I want for myself.

around town