On Being Present. With Broccoli.

Yesterday, I found myself in the country sitting on a blanket surrounded by fields of growing vegetables, smiling farmers, and seemingly happy farm animals. The sky was blue all around, but we were protected from the heat of the sun by the dappled shade provided by a nearby tree. I was drawn there, to a farm about 45 minutes away that I had never been to before, by the promise of a broccoli story. This fact was not even the remarkable thing about this moment under the tree. The remarkable thing was the shudder of recognition of being truly present. It happens so rarely for me, even with daily practice, that it is often a surprise, and the recognition of the presence pops me right out of direct experience and back into story mode nearly every single time.

You probably need the backstory. Why in the world would we have travelled for broccoli? My youngest son Hank has been interested in broccoli since a nutritionist that visited his old school told him to steer clear of broccoli that had gone to flower because it did not taste good. This one little comment sent Hank into an ever-deepening quest to find out more about broccoli. We have looked at every store and farm stand that we have set foot in to find broccoli with flowers on it. We planted broccoli and let it grow rather than harvesting it so that we could watch the broccoli go through its life cycle. And we have eaten buckets of the stuff. Hank still will not eat it raw, even after all this study. His preferred presentation is the "little snow-covered trees" (steamed with grated parmesan on top) that we have offered since the kids were all small, an enticement to the finickiest of his brothers. Those of you who know Hank know that he is a serious soul at times, and you will not be surprised by his quest or by the deepness of his fascination and need to understand this thing called broccoli. So, when an event about broccoli for children showed up in my Facebook stream on a farm I did not even recognize, Hank and I decided we just had to go.

Hank and I and a farm teacher named Ms. Karen with a kerchief on her head and a few moms and a few kids found ourselves at the Fat Moon Farm singing about broccoli, painting with broccoli, and harvesting and eating the stuff. Hank even got to feed some broccoli to some fat muddy pigs. The ducks in the pen quacked at us as we passed them with our white wicker basket of broccoli, and we were not sure whether they wanted broccoli or not. Hank, my rule-follower, told the ducks that they could not have any broccoli, because his job was to feed it to the pigs.

We saw chickpeas growing in the field. I have visited many farms, but I've never seen chickpeas growing before. We saw potato bugs in the larval, egg, and adult stage. Hank was very upset to see a baggie of the larvae hanging up on a pole, steaming in the sun, dying what must have been an incredibly slow and difficult death. Ms. Karen explained that the bugs were bad and were eating the potato leaves and killing the plants. Hank pulled me down so that my ear was on his mouth (he does this whenever he has something big to say but is feeling shy about it), and he whispered, "But those are lady bugs and they are good bugs not bad bugs." The larvae of the potato bugs do look surprisingly like lady bugs. Once we looked closely and he could see the difference, Hank was all about finding the larvae so the farmers could put them to the boot. The adult potato bug Ms. Karen stomped made a loud popping noise under her foot. Hank was not bothered by this at all.

We got home and Hank immediately had to begin work on a raised bed vegetable garden. We put a "rabbit-proof fence" around it, hoping that it will deter our neighborhood bunnies (and the giant turkey who is unafraid and visits our yard regularly for mulberries and to freak out my husband). Hank has explained that if the bunny is not deterred in this way, we will have to eat the bunny. He thinks it will taste good stewed.

But back to being present. As you can see, the default mode setting for my mind is not direct experience but rather constant stream-of-consciousness. At the farm, the moms and the teacher and the children and I were all sitting under this tree while the children painted with broccoli in place of paintbrushes. And I was fully there. And then I realized I was fully there and got pulled out of being fully there because I immediately started to wonder what was different? Why did I drift into awareness so readily when that so rarely happens? And I looked around and noticed that not one of us had a phone out or anywhere near. No gadgets or checking of statuses or blogging (ahem) or even taking pictures. No ringtones or texttones or alerts or alarms. Just some folks sitting under a blanket breathing and watching our kids make some art. With broccoli.

It was a great morning well spent.

Beginner's Mind

"In the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki

I have practiced yoga my whole life. I've taught yoga now for a little over a year - not long enough for the teaching to be entirely easy or comfortable, but long enough for me to be able to sleep pretty easily the night before I teach. That was not always the case. This time last year, I would toss and turn and fret and worry and write out sequences and rehearse them and memorize them and practice them in my head instead of sleep.

One of the concepts in my practice and my teaching that I have embraced most lovingly is that of the beginner's mind - this idea that we should approach everything we do with the freshness of a child or the mindset of someone who is totally new to the experience, arriving at each and every moment with the joy and wonder and openness of a young child, unattached to expected outcomes or fear of failure. This, like much of the work we undertake in studying mindfulness or yoga, is a practice, and it is best approached with a loving touch and with compassion for oneself. Beginner's mind requires a steadfastness in the face of performance anxiety and fear, the ability to sit with those feelings, or at least the ability to laugh at yourself wildly when you inevitably make a giant ass of yourself.

It was in that spirit of being okay with making an ass of myself that I picked up my guitar again. I remember going to guitar lessons in the past nearly blind with fear, beating myself up for not being able to do a new trick on the guitar the moment the teacher showed it to me, being so frustrated every time she would say something like, "Oh, you played that pretty well, but now SING at the same time." Singing. In front of another person. While simultaneously playing an instrument. I've never felt so vulnerable as when I open my mouth to sing.

Which brings me to my friend Paula. I met Paula a little over seven years ago when she led a playgroup for young children. I carted my then eight-month old twins down the hallway of a broken down, apparently empty old building to an unknown destination. The hall was musty and stacked with boxes, and my arms were tired from carrying a baby in a carseat in each arm plus the gigantic diaperbag only a parent of multiples can shoulder. Down several dark twists and after a near retreat from our mission, we turned a corner and there was Paula, all smiles and bright eyes and with her mass of curly hair all stacked up around her head, welcoming us and offering to help me with my load.

A few months later, Paula was asking me if I played an instrument and if I would play in her band. I resolutely told her no.

A few months after that, Paula asked me if she could borrow an amp for a show she was doing. I said maybe.

A month or so after that, and Paula and her husband and son were all sitting in my backyard playing various instruments to see if I would maybe play with them. I was terrified. And I said yes.

We played shows with our band the Pixie Sticks, mostly at farmers' markets in the area, at local libraries, at pre-schools and coops and nurseries and schools. And it was amazing. Our little fans loved us, and they followed us from show to show. We were beginners, but the kids didn't care, and as long as I didn't make eye contact with the parents and occasional luminary from the Boston rock scene who would wander past (I'll never forget Billy Beard and the purposeful eyeroll he aimed at us at the Union Square Farmers' Market), I was okay. Paula would ask me to play guitar. I did, and I never really felt on the spot because her husband played guitar better and louder. Paula would ask me to sing, and I would just get up and sing. At a mic. In front of people. To this day I'm not sure how that happened, but it did, and it felt great. With the band to support me, I felt like I could do anything. I wrote some songs (here's one we used to play a lot). And then the band kind of stopped playing, and we all got busy doing other things (like teaching yoga), and the guitars got put away.

Now my children have gotten a bit older, and they are interested in making music. So I got out the instruments to show them a few things. We played around on a keyboard, and I gave them some piano lessons. The twins wrote brilliant poetry in their second grade class that just begged to be set to music, so I wrote some music and recorded the songs so they could see how that could be done. And then we needed to share those songs with their grandparents who live far away, and in today's technologically advanced and connected world, we found that pretty easy to do (check one out by one twin here and one by the other twin here).

Fear of failure or of looking like an ass would never have let me do any of this a decade ago.

I'm still a beginner on guitar - after 35 years of playing around on one. But making music with and for my kids gives me a great excuse to not have to be perfect, and having an outlet to express myself again after all these years of just trying to get by as a busy parent of three young boys has been a gift. And now I know how to use restorative yoga as a tool both to tap into the well of creativity and as a refuge from or space to sit comfortably with any performance anxiety that does come up. Now that the kids are older, they often do not need me to actively manage them or keep them busy, and they are perfectly happy to have me strumming and softly singing nearby while they read or play a game or play outside. This was not always the case. My youngest son was jealous of the guitar, and would crawl over and try to peel my hands off of it whenever I would pick it up.

It's summer now, and the kids are home from school, and they are at this golden moment in time where they still love us and want to be with us but they want to have their space, too. We have long, slow days together, lately in melting heat, where we read or write or they play at something while I play guitar. They wrote fairy tales last week, tragic, violent fairy tales, and they want to set them to music. So we will be working on that together, too. And I can't help but think that you can't set a fairy tale to music without a ridiculous old-fashioned, over-the-top guitar solo, and I don't know how to do that yet, and won't it be great to get to be a beginner at that, too?

I used to think that parents had to be infallible or the children would be afraid. But now I see - I have seen - how much they get from witnessing my willingness to try new things, to take chances, and to occasionally fail brilliantly at those things. I want them to grow up unafraid, unlimited by fear, unhindered by the need to always have things under control. I do not want them to only undertake things that they know will succeed. I want them always to feel able to try new things with the same wonderment that I remember them having as toddlers, the same openness in the face of the unknown, the same beginner's mind they - that we all - were born with. What could you attempt to do today if you were unafraid and free of attachment to desired outcomes?

The band is getting back together for one more gig, at pajama storytime at a local community garden in a couple of weeks. It has been so long since we have played together that we will be beginners again. Plus we will be in our pajamas. And it will be okay.

My Friend the Pimp

I had this conversation with a pimp once. Actually, in my job taking ads from pimps and prostitutes, I had many conversations with pimps, prostitutes, and madams. But only one of those conversations has stuck and become part of the fabric of my day-to-day. If there were a Top Hundred Countdown of the Most Important Conversations in my life, it would be right in there somewhere.

You see, there was this young pimp who came in every week to place his ads. He ran several of them. We required that all transactions be in cash. I guess it works best for all concerned parties that way. He'd pull the giant roll of hundreds out of his pocket and hand me ten of them, with no more thought than I apply to using a fistful of dollars to buy burritos at Anna's Taqueria. Young pimp was always impeccably dressed in what appeared to be designer suits - like I would know what a designer suit looks like. What he was wearing? That's what I imagine a designer suit would look like. He was always super-respectful, in a deep South sort of way that is rare up here. "Yes, Ma'am" and "No Ma'am" even though I was probably only a few years older than him.

He seemed so bright; he could have been running any sort of business. His future didn't seem, to me, to be limited to trading in flesh.

After months of weekly cash exchanges that were only a few words at a time, "Could you change that headline to read 'Georgia peach' instead of 'Spicy Latina', Ma'am? Thank you so much.", I asked him what got him into this line of work. He looked up from his bankroll like I had slapped him in the face. There was a long silence while we stared at each other.

I wish I had a videotape of the conversation that followed. Time has not been kind to my memory. I remember everything up to the conversation like I'm in it, but his exact words have gotten misty. I do remember his first response, "What would you have me do?"

I had no answer. He continued on, then, explaining that he needed to make money, and that this was the only way he knew how. There were no other successful working people for him to look up to as a kid. He climbed up the ladder of success that was presented to him at a young age, and he was doing brilliantly at it. He said kids like him didn't go to college or go into the above-ground business world and that it was something I could never possibly understand. He thanked me for placing his ads and left.

I didn't cry then, but I did cry afterwards, in my office. And I quit the job shortly after that. We needed the money, but we didn't need it that badly.

I support a lot of anti-human trafficking organizations. I look for other ways to make amends for having supported myself on the backs of young girls and the men who sold them. A lot of the anti-trafficking groups demonize the men and boys who pimp. I learned that day that a lot of those men and boys are trapped in the same web as the girls they sell. I'm not saying they don't do horrible things. I have read about the ways they entrap girls and keep them bonded to them. There's a flaw in the system, though, if men like my friend the pimp go into this business because they see it as their only option. And, yes, Backpage and all the other businesses (including the one I used to work at) who profit from this system of exploitation and slavery should pay.

On Transformation, or Werewolves and Butterflies

I've always loved monster movies, especially the ones where the normal, run-of-the-mill folk get transformed into hideous monsters. I prefer my monster movies with the rough, pre-CGI transformations, like the original Wolf Man or American Werewolf in London.

That American Werewolf transformation is a particularly painful one to watch.

Any transformation can be painful, even the ones where you are not turning into a horrible monster. This yoga teacher training I am in has been anything but peaceful and serene, though it has provided moments of those feelings, too.

I am gearing up for Module III, the last ten day module of teacher training, after which I will be a 200 hour certified teacher. The teacher training is only part of the transformation that I have been going through, American Werewolf-style, for the past four years or so. After the birth of my twins and then my third son a brief spell after, I burned in the fire of anxiety and panic, got swallowed up in depression and fear. And somewhere in the process of trying to keep my head above water, trying to continue to be a loving and mindful mommy while my insides were churning and I was consumed in completely unregulated emotions, I learned some ways to cope with dread and still find beauty on a planet that wasn't (and frankly still isn't) living up to my high expectations. This transformation has been painful. I can see myself on the screen, writhing and howling, eyes turning yellow, teeth getting sharp, hair growing all over my body. Actually, since I turned 40, hair HAS been showing up in odd places ...

Some might find it more comfortable to compare the transformation from certified crazy person into yoga teacher to the transformation from caterpillar into butterfly. I certainly WAS chubbier before the transformation, and I DID eat a lot like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I imagine the transformation that a caterpillar goes through is probably pretty brutal, too. We just don't get to see it behind the screen of the cocoon. In the end the butterfly floats off on the breeze, blissful and serene (we imagine). Yes. This transformation isn't like that.

Again, there are moments of the blissful and serene, but there are more moments of hard work and continued challenges along the path to continued transformation. I still occasionally have panic attacks when I miss my "medicine" - daily yoga practice. My body is sore and my brain is tired more often than not. But I still feel like I'm transforming into something stronger, more resilient, and more aware than before.

The comparison to the werewolf movies really hit home this weekend, after Saturday morning yoga class with Bo. I have been working hard to bring space back into my cervical vertebrae, into relaxing my neck and upper back muscles while strengthening the muscles that pull my shoulder blades together and down my back. All of these areas have been set asunder by pregnancy, nursing, having giant breasts that really no one should have to carry around all day, and by stooping to compensate for being six feet tall in a world where ladies are expected to be much smaller than that. At any rate, Bo worked these areas on Saturday, and on Sunday I woke up looking like I was going through a werewolf transformation. I was sore all over, my neck was kinked, and the muscles of my shoulders were burning like they were on fire. I had that hung over feeling that you sometimes get after a really strong workout or after a massage. It was all just the pain of muscles truly exercised - no damage - but it still hurt. That's what this transformation has been like physically and emotionally more often than not.

While I have been contemplating my transformation and the upcoming finale of my teacher training, there has been a debate raging over the relative merits of yoga practice. More on that in another blog. But this quote from Barbara Benagh (from this Sunday's Boston Globe) sums up my feelings on that subject as well as my feelings on yoga and the transformation it can bring:

"...I conclude that [yoga] is neither inherently dangerous nor guaranteed to be safe and healing. Yoga is a process that requires a willingness to look at one's own physical and mental patterns with honesty and humility, and to develop the discipline to seek physical and emotional hardinesss. It's a lifelong and imperfect process for which I am thankful daily."

The House is the Shoes

We are preparing for a move. But we don't know where we are moving to yet. We know we need to leave, but we don't know where to. It is unsettling.

We bought this house when we thought we wouldn't be able to have kids. We bought a cute, small house for the two of us to live in. We promptly painted it purple. It was a cute, small house so close to the train tracks that it shakes when they go past and its walls get coated in black soot from their exhaust. A cute, small house so close to the neighbors' houses that we can hear them speaking softly in their houses. We also can hear them yelling and hurting each other and smell their food and their cigarette smoke. It was a cute, small house that doesn't have a parking space and where little rows over parking become big, heated battles with the people we share our street with.

Within a year of buying our cute, small house, we had filled it up with twins. Then another baby a couple years later. We continued to be committed to our town, the place where we have lived longer than any other place in our lives. We went to public meetings, we agitated for positive change. We volunteered for things. We put in roots. We got chickens as pets and put them in the yard. They promptly tore it to pieces and pecked us in the eyes, but they were still our pets.

And now we are looking to move. A million small things have piled up to make us realize that we need to go. But we don't know where. We know we need to go soon. We know we need to have our house ready to show in the spring rush for housing. So we have been going through all of our years of belongings and putting them in a "Keep" pile or a "Donate" pile or a "Trash" pile. The keep pile has things like baby shoes, pictures of us when we were much younger, art that we have made and don't make any more. But the baby things are the hardest. Preparing for this move is admitting that our babies are growing. And that our baby years are over. Our baby things go in the "Keep" or "Donate" piles, but they are not necessary items any more. They are just memories. Our chickens moved to a farm where they will live out their days. The house wouldn't show well with chickens, we were told.

All of our "Keep" pile will go into storage. We will live simply until we know where we are going. We will have to keep our limited possessions neat and put away so that strangers can walk through our house and imagine their things in place of ours, their lives superimposed on what remains of our stuff.

Our kids get sad whenever we go on trips, whenever it is time to leave. They attach their sadness onto possessions, usually. For example, when we left a family trip to Georgia for Thanksgiving at their great grandmothers', they had to leave behind old carry-on bags that were falling apart. They cried for the hourlong drive to the airport over their luggage being left at Great Grammy's house. When we left a Christmas trip to my parents' house, we left behind very old, very ill-fitting shoes to be donated to smaller cousins. On our drive to the Tampa airport, they cried big, hard sobs for the shoes being left behind.

We get it: the sadness we feel for the house is the sadness the kids feel for their shoes. The house is the shoes. It's just a place. It feels like it holds the memories, but it doesn't really. The memories are in us. But it's easy to get sad at the thought of moving on and leaving these things behind. We will all be together in our new house. The family is intact and unchanged. It's just the place that will be different.

Impermanence is a theme often studied in meditation and yoga. Pema Chodron addresses change in her book Comfortable with Uncertainty:

"What do you do when you find yourself anxious because your world is falling apart? How do you react when you're not measuring up to your image of yourself, everybody is irritating you because no one is doing what you want, and your whole life is fraught with emotional misery and confusion and conflict? At these times it helps to remember that you're going through an emotional upheaval because your coziness has just been, in some small or large way, addressed. It's as if the rug has been pulled out from under you. Tuning in to that groundless feeling is a way of remembering that basically, you do prefer life and warriorship to death."

The Chicken Lady

We are selling our house, and among the many things we had to do to get it ready to put on the market was to get rid of our pet chickens. I was afraid this would mean eating them, or giving them to the Live Poultry Fresh Killed place in Cambridge, but after a call to my friend Paula Jordan (the Queen of Arlington - she knows everybody), I emailed a woman who knew a woman ...

So, the chicken lady that I met via email had a self-proscribed "large flock of birds" in Bolton including two bantam hens and a bantam rooster who were wild and could use the strong presence of a family of domesticated hens. Plus she had her eyes on my very nice wood coop that I was giving her for free for taking the chickens off my hands.

The chicken lady gave us her address and told us how to prep our birds for the trip - wait til they went to sleep, when they are basically dead - you could do anything to them when they are asleep and they won't notice - then put each one in a box and let them sleep there overnight and through the trip.

Everything went precisely as planned, and I woke up bright and early on Saturday morning to break down the coop. Thank goodness it was a balmy 50 degree January morning, because that was back-breaking work already, and having to pry a frozen coop apart would have been much less fun.

I loaded the chicken boxes, the coop, and all of our various chicken supplies in the car with my youngest son, Hank, who was recovering from a nasty reaction to a Measles vaccine. He was excited to go see "the farm" where the chickens would live, plus it was an opportunity for him to hold Garmin, our GPS. He is in love with Garmin. It makes it hard for me to find unknown addresses, however, as he has to HOLD Garmin - in the backseat - and then interpret Garmin's directions for me. Did I mention he is four? At any rate, we usually find the places we are looking for, but not always by the most direct route. He's starting to learn his right and left, though, which helps.

We drive out to Bolton, into a subdivision, and I think, "Uh-oh ... I was describing this as a farm to the kids ... " We pull up to the Chicken Lady's address and first notice the giant trash pile in front, the Christmas tree laying in the middle of the yard, the enclosed front porch with sheets hanging over the windows, blocking our view. Hank didn't want to come with me onto the porch. He was flummoxed by the lack of a doorbell, by the empty tanks that probably once had animals in them, the collection of axes by the front door, the ram skull, the various other skulls, the piles of things ... We knock once. We wait. We knock again. We wait. We knock again...

I'm starting to hear rustling inside. I'm getting a sinking feeling of dread myself. I'm thinking about the guy who posted on Craigslist that he needed farmhands and then killed the people who showed up. And then the door opens and a very nice looking middle-aged lady smiles at us and asks us in. I look at the skulls, the axes, and I follow her inside.

The front room of the house is piled with stacks of ... things. There are large stacks of little cakes of cheese or soap or something. There are cooked animal carcasses in various states of decay. There is a giant stack of waffles. The kitchen counter is covered in old food. The lady invites us into the kitchen where she starts pulling out skulls of things and showing them to Hank, who has lodged himself so deeply into my thigh that he can't possibly see anything. He keeps mumbling, "let's give her the chickens and go, Momma." She explains that the skulls get left out in the yard for the animals to clean off for two years and then they are ready to bring in. She shows the hole in the back of the baby lamb skull from where the bolt when in to kill it. The cakes of things are soaps made out of baby lamb fat. Hank says, again, "Let's give her the chickens and go, Momma."

So we go out to the yard to look at the coop. She has about ten geese, giant geese, flapping and yelling at her. She has ducks, about a dozen ducks, flying all around. She says, "The geese are mad at me right now because I keep eating them." She points to one of the ducks flying around and says, "She'll be the last one that I eat because I can't CATCH her!!"

She puts us in the chicken coop.

As I'm trying to figure out if I can break out of the chicken coop if necessary, she comes into the chicken coop to show us around (it's the size of a walk-in closet). We are in there with the ducks. Hank says, "Let's give her the chickens and go, Momma."

So we go get the chickens. They seem to love her. They are unsure of the coop. They have never roosted higher than a foot off the ground. The Chicken Lady's roost is about five feet up. The chickens are VERY unsure of the ducks. The chickens bok questioningly at Hank and I as we get led out of the coop by the Chicken Lady.

The Chicken Lady shows us her rabbits. She's eaten all but two of them. She says she won't eat the two that are left - one because he is too old and mean and the other because he is too sweet.

She shows us her beehives. She talks a lot. She tells me that her neighbors in her fancy subdivision hate her, but that her town has recently passed a Right to Farm act so she is legally allowed to do all of these things in her backyard. She gives me a block of baby lamb soap to take home. It's going to be good for my skin, she assures me. Hank is literally dragging me, with rapidly increasing force, towards the car, and his pleas to leave the area are getting louder and more forceful as well. So we bid farewell to the chickens, and the Chicken Lady. She promises us she will send us pictures as the girls get settled. She promises us to invite us out when she gets new chicks and baby lambs in the spring so that we can see the menagerie in full swing. She promises us she won't eat our chickens.

Choosing Contentment, Accepting Change

"Choose contentment. In this very moment, you can choose contentment - and in the next, and in the next, and in the next.

The changing seasons show us the absolute reliability of change. Nothing is more dependable than change. Take comfort in the changes."

From Judith Hanson Lasater's book A Year of Living Your Yoga.

A milestone birthday reached. A growing realization that my growing family has outgrown our wee, quaint dreamhouse and needs more space. A growing understanding that I want to live my next decade somewhere with trees. Choosing contentment while also taking comfort in change.

I turned forty this week. My children are growing into larger boys. Three very large boys in one very small house. The train tracks that are twenty feet behind our house are getting busier, stinkier, louder. They rattle the house, my bones, every fifteen minutes or so. They park and idle for half an hour at a time, spewing black clouds of lung-raping particulates into the air, blackening our walls. A large housing development is going in around the corner from us - 200 units. Our government representatives are admitting that the subway we were planning on isn't going through. A growing discontent with the schools that my children attend. The sinking feeling that everything is about to change. A heated, all-consuming debate in the community about the schools and how they stink but they might be better than they used to be. The fact that we can't spend ten minutes with other parents from the community without someone complaining about the school system.

The fact that my youngest is afraid of trees? That many of my kids' peers are playing "gangsta" on the playground? That they are reading books about urban blight, a young girl who rather than getting depressed every morning tiptoeing around the homeless drunk person asleep on her stoop, decides to pick up some litter and make her neighborhood less depressing? And realizing that we don't have to live like this, that we can make a choice. And realizing how hard that choice is to make. And resisting change. And trying to choose contentment in this moment and the next and the next.