Find Your Grace

In which we fattened her up! (March? 2015)

Dear friend and Dharma sister, Angela Mujaku Senjin Caponigro died very early yesterday morning.  She was diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer a little over a year ago.  Her healing became her final project, which she took up wholeheartedly and single-mindedly.

Her first project was dance.  She came to it later in life (as compared to most dancers).  But with that single-minded focus that was her hallmark, she achieved a high level of success.  Here she is performing Tympani, as part of Laura Dean Dance & Music.



(She is the one with the very long hair.) (Enjoy that early 80s PBS vibe!)

Her next big project was to take up kundalini yoga and convert Sikhism.  She studied, lived and taught in that community for decades.  Then she found Zen.  When I met her, she was a postulant doing a period of discernment to discover if she wanted to ordain as a monastic.  She did ordain and eventually became a senior monastic in the Mountains and Rivers Order.

I saw Senjin around the Monastery.  She fascinated me - it was clear that she had "a story" but she had a very regal, almost intimidating, demeanor so I mostly kept my distance.  The first time we really came into contact was when she was appointed to train me to be the altar usher for a sesshin.  It is a service position that prepares the altar for each service during the day - preparing and lighting incense and generally making sure everything is ready and in the right place.  There are a lot of details to remember in this position and, as it is often assigned pretty early in one's training, the components don't always make sense because the flow of the service isn't so clear yet.  At least that was my experience.

Senjin broke the altar usher duties into three dances - first you stand here and make these movements, then you move over here and make these movements, then back to here for the final movements.  It actually made a lot of sense and was really helpful to have it broken down like that.  But the thing that I remember most was that she noticed I had a slightly horrified look on my face as the list of things to do got longer and longer and it was clear that I was getting a little uptight about making mistakes.  She kind of stepped back and said, "Look, I know it sounds like a lot but the main thing is to find your grace.  The rest will follow."

I have kept those three words in my head ever since.  When I am in a situation that feels overwhelming, and not just at the Monastery, I call them up.  It is remarkable just how helpful they are.  I thought of them many times during this year of illness, especially when things got rough.  I'd think, "C'mon Senj, find your grace!"

Although she fought and fought and fought, in the end, she did find her grace.

Thank you my love-love, my Senjilina.  Thank you for everything.

Let Me Count The Ways

This blog has never been about one thing and one thing only.  I get a little envious of people who can contain their thoughts so that they relate mainly to one subject.  Art, yoga, Zen, kids, yarn....it's all too interesting to me to pick just one.

Someone recently asked me, "What could you eliminate in your life?  What feels like extra?" as a way of helping me feel a little less overwhelmed (it's been a rough two weeks between oral surgeries and sick friends and difficult teenagers).  I honestly could not see what I could eliminate - it all feels very vital and alive.

I thought perhaps I just need to schedule better and use my time more efficiently.  Like, not just schedule things for a day but get down to the real nitty gritty - hour by hour.  It's not really my style but I am willing to try.  Of course, I immediately cracked a tooth and dealing with all that threw any schedule out the window.

Now that my mouth is mostly healed, I can face this question again:

Hour by hour, what are you choosing to do?

What Does Caring Look Like?

For over a year, a group of women, including myself, have been caring for a friend who has Stage 4 cancer.  The surgeon who removed part of her intestines when she was first diagnosed said she was about two days away from dying when she came into the hospital that first time.  Now it is over a year later and she went from being totally bed ridden to being back up and about, taking yoga classes, riding her bike, and feeling the love and care from the group of us.  This has been, perhaps, the most healing thing of all, as her life has not been an easy one and basking in unconditional love has been a rare occurrence within it.  (As an aside, I think it is pretty rare for most of us, so c'mon people!  Get out there and love unconditionally!  The world needs more of this, pronto!)

Since Thanksgiving, she has been on a steady decline and things seem to be deteriorating more quickly now.  The will power and inner strength that made her such a survivor in her troubled life - and in the last year of illness - are what are tripping her up now.  All but bedridden again, she speaks of regaining her strength and getting back on track.  In other words, she is in denial about what is happening.  Not complete denial - there have been moments when she lets drop a sentence or two, or even just a look sometimes, that reveals that she knows perfectly well what is going on.  In her moments of "once I get my legs moving again..." she also is convinced that things will be just as they were before she got sick.  Both are real and true for her.

So, what is compassion now?  How do we care for her in the way that best respects who and where she is in her life?  Should we travel along with her in her delusion about the future?  Or be more honest about what we see happening?  Neither is easy.

Among our group - "goddesses" she calls us - there are some who fall more strongly in the former camp.  They see no reason to do anything other than exactly what she asks.  Why would you steal away someone's hope?  I admit that I have trouble with this stance.  Sometimes hope robs us of exactly what we need to do and causes us a lot of suffering.

This is what writer and activist, Derrick Jensen, says about hope, or more specifically, giving up hope,

A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems—you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself—and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself. . . 

He is talking about the environment here, but I think you could apply it elsewhere in life. Or to life itself.  If my friend gave up her hope of staying alive for however long she hopes to remain alive, then she (and by extension, all of us) could focus on what her life is like right now.  We could take steps to make her more comfortable, steps that require that she admit that her time left on this planet is almost up.  Does that sound cold?  I hope not because it comes from a place deep longing to help her suffer less.

I often find myself asking, "what is the goal here?" when the next thing happens - she goes into the hospital or has another chemo treatment.  It doesn't feel like the goal is her comfort as these actions seem to cause more discomfort and pain.  And they create a greater distance from the reality of what is actually happening.  But it is what she wants to do.  This has been challenge of being part of her care.  Can I give up what I want, even when I see that it would be more helpful, less painful, and just offer her what she wants?  And is this really the best thing?  The best care?

There are no easy answers.

Here is a beautiful talk about death and dying.  May we all find our grace as we face that reality, whenever it may be.

Now We Can Begin

It has been my tradition to set some yoga āsana goals for myself at the beginning of each new year.  When I reflected on what I wanted to work on this year, I realized that I no longer have yoga āsana goals.  I love my primary series and there are still a couple of āsana that elude me but I no longer feel an imperative to "master" them.  Some days, they are like butter.  Some days, just setting out my mat is the biggest accomplishment.  Perhaps my goal is to allow this goal-less yoga to continue onward without fretting or anxiety or setting myself in competition with anyone, including myself.  You could say that I finally made it Square One, or Yoga Stura 1.1:  atha yogānuśasanam.  Now we begin the study of yoga.

I love that word: atha.  Many people zip right past it to get to the bigger words and the bigger meanings but I like to linger there.  It means "now" but it means now as in, after everything that has come before and you realize that there is something missing in your understanding, now, we can begin the study of yoga.  For some of us, it takes 50 years to get to Now.

Let's see how it goes!

BTW, I will be teaching a drop-in, ongoing chanting workshop at Abhyasa Yoga Center in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on Sundays from 7:45 - 8:45 p.m.  Pay what you wish.  We will learn some basics about chanting and how to integrate it into our practice.  Chanting is subtle and powerful - the mystery of how it works on us is exactly why we do it.  We will move and breathe and chant while we move and breathe.  Sound scary?  Sound like it is not for you?  If you answer yes, then this is exactly the class for you!  Remember:  atha!

It's That Simple

Winter sunlight feels so lovely!

At the sesshin between Christmas and New Year's, we stay up an hour later each evening so that by New Year's Eve, we stay up to midnight to ring in the new year with a ceremony.  It is a most beautiful thing.  We also continue to rise at the same time each morning, which for me was 3:15 am.  This is a little less beautiful as the week goes on.  Our teacher encouraged us to look deeply within when we found our energy faltering, assuring us that we had what what we needed if we could allow it to come forward, pointing out how powerful it can be to learn firsthand just how much strength we have inside of each of us.

Sometimes I fell asleep anyway.

The thing about being that sleep deprived is that, when you really hit that edge, it is much easier to see and let go of all those ideas about oneself that take so much damn energy to prop up.  For myself, I have so much resistance to, well, everything.  It's like I am dragging an old tire (or 12) behind me everywhere I go.  If I can snip the ties to just one of them, I find myself enlivened and energized even on 4 hours of sleep.  This is a good thing to remember when I am not in the depths of sesshin but rather at the end of a long, busy day and realize that I still have laundry to fold and dishes to wash.

This sesshin, I spent some time paying particular attention to the one inside of me that needs to be special, whether it is from being exemplary in what I do or the most clever in what I say or write, or the most helpful or useful.  It's a pretty big motivating factor in my life, this need to be special or stand out in some way.  (See post below!  Funny how these things come up just before sesshin and lead to all sorts of things happening once we sit down and be quiet.)  Often, it results in things that are good - I aim to do my best and I try to serve others and generally get stuff done well.  But that little extra that I tack on - the need for it be seen and praised - that isn't so helpful.  Certainly it causes me pain when that kind of acknowledgment doesn't happen.  And sometimes it just gets so damn complicated.  A simple act of giving suddenly has all sorts of strings attached.  Yuck.  It makes me feel icky to think about how this is so, but that's part of staying up for 20 hours a day to meditate - you have to stick with that icky feeling and get it know it really well so you can remember it for the next time.  Or maybe even before the next time.

Part of the New Year's ceremony we do includes making an incense offering and setting an intention for the new year - everyone walks up to the incense box and does it (silently) in front of the whole community.  So, you aren't declaring it out loud but still, there are witnesses!  Among my resolutions to be more organized and disciplined, to do the right thing by my children, and to paint Finn's bedroom, is an intention to let my actions be (more) simple and unadorned, maybe a little less icky. Let's see how it goes.

Happy New Year!  I don't really have a sense of who is still reading this beyond a couple of people but I send my best wishes out to any and all!  May 2016 be simple and unadorned and a little less icky for you too!

To Be Ordinary Is Very Special

We are all special.

A few days before Christmas, I had an attack of TMJ.  I forget what those letters stand for (look it up, if you must) but what it means is that I slept with my jaw clenched and woke up in severe pain on the right side of my face.  My usual techniques for dealing with pain (something that I don't often experience) didn't work.  Instead of scurrying about my business, I wanted to curl up and weep with the hopelessness of it all.  And I would have except that my face hurt too much.

I think it was the fact that I sent an angry text to my son from bed at 3 AM reading, "You MUST do ALL the dishes and clean up the kitchen!!!" that put me over the edge.  Since returning from Italy, he has taken to making himself pasta in the small hours of the morning and leaving the kitchen a mess, which I then discover only a couple of hours later.  This does not make me happy.  In fact, it causes me to send angry texts from bed and then clench my jaw so tightly that I spend the next week downing ibuprofen like they are peanuts.

But the good news is that my jaw is softening up.  The pain is under control and lessening each day.  I should be able to enter Rohatsu sesshin without the added thrill of severe facial pain in the mix.  But the whole experience was a bit of a wake-up call.  I didn't even know that I had reached my stressed out tipping point.  When I finally did some accounting for myself, the list of things that were worthy of jaw clenching was actually pretty high.  As someone who spends a ton of time bearing witness to my thoughts and actions, it is almost embarrassing that I was so unaware of what was really going on.  But there you go!

So....my wish and hope for you - and for myself - in the coming new year is that you - and me - allow ourselves enough space and time to really know what is enough.  And then allow it to Be Enough.  Because we are enough!

See?

For One Thing:

Sparkly alpaca.

...and for another thing:

The Raspberry couch.

The Road Not Taken

Not going to Italy, what did we do?

Part of my deal to myself was to use my time not in Italy as wisely as I could.  This means that I have been working steadily on my Staycation DIY Project - Living Room Update.

The couch is currently being re-upholstered so we are sitting on pillows on the floor (the cats love it!).

Where's the couch to?

The curtains are finished and up, which is glorious.

I think I bought this fabric more than 15 years ago.  I guess some projects have a longer incubation period than others (ahem).

I painted the walls a new, more mature and sophisticated colour that matches these new and sophisticated curtains.  I am very excited for the return of the couch, which also will be a new and sophisticated colour.  Or maybe not.  I chose "Raspberry" cotton velvet for the couch.  Oh yes I did!  No pictures yet as we are still waiting for its return.

Next up, a new rug for the floor.

Not raspberry

Also made a couple of batches of soap that will go into gift bags for people who come to the Zen Mountain Monastery Dana Dinner  (December 18th) - a community holiday dinner for people who live around Mt. Tremper, NY, and who might not otherwise have the means for a big holiday spread.  If this describes you, then please go!  A nicer group of eager elves, you will not find.

And Then, What Really Happened

Buon Giorno!  Or, as we like to say in Sunnyside, hello!

Wait?  What?

The week before leaving for Rome, I was up at the Monastery in a week-long, silent meditation intensive retreat.  It is a wonderful thing and I highly recommend it to all but it did add a certain level of stress in terms of being ready to leave for nine days in Italy about 24 hours after getting back home.  Indeed, as I sat in silence for those many hours, my mind would turn towards this trip and it would say "No."  While my fears around flying came into the picture, the No wasn't totally about being afraid.  It was more a longing to stay put (for once).

I am pretty sure that when the idea of wandering around Rome seems like a burden and chore, then it might be a sign that the timing is off.  I mean, it feels almost like a crime against humanity to say that you don't want to spend nine days in Italy.  Who says that?

Apparently I do.  Each day, I would do a little check-in with myself:  how does it feel to imagine going?  How does it feel to imagine not going?  Then, when I got home, I checked in with Lucy, who said, "I knew I didn't need to pack!"  Old Mom is very obvious, I guess.  I checked in with Finn, who just said that he needed more money if I wasn't going to be around to pay for everything.  Ever practical, that guy.

Finn will be coming home for a spell very soon, so I will be seeing his long and lanky self in, well, about nine days time.  Now, I can actually be ready!  And finish the living room curtains.  And paint the walls.  And get the couch re-upholstered.  Also: grocery shopping.  And get the two art projects that returned from their various locations organized and put away instead of filling the above-mentioned living room.

I know that all that I just mentioned could have waited for nine days with no dire consequences but it occurred to me, as I sat in my stillness and silence, that my body was giving my a very clear message about what it needs.  Usually, I might notice that message and overrule it.  I mean, we gotta do stuff, right?  That's how we prove our worthiness to occupy this little patch of real estate that we currently occupy on the planet.  Right?  I had the very radical thought that I might be worthy of occupying my little patch of real estate under my feet without running my body into the ground and even without making everyone around me happy or impressed or anything at all.  What if I just listened instead and  did the thing that was alternately easier and more difficult and stayed home?

Finn plans to return to Italy after getting a job and saving up some money so he can mix up WWOOFing with other travel.  So, we considered this a postponement not a cancellation.  Of course, who knows what will happen in the meantime - he is in a pivotal time of his life - but I trust that Rome will be there.  It is the Eternal City, after all.

Holding onto the Bars

Yesterday, I went to see an exhibition of paintings, drawings and etching by Giorgio Morandi at David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea.  It was so beautiful that I actually got a little teary-eyed.  The paintings just shimmer with their subtle colour changes and simplicity.  They are both confident and humble.  Pure joy, really.

As a bonus (as if we needed one!), we discovered that there were two other shows at David Zwirner (the guys owns almost a city block of gallery space): one of paintings and drawings by Bridget Riley and one of sculpture by Donald Judd.  Three home runs, if you will excuse the sports metaphor on an artist blog.

I went to see these shows with my art school pal, Patrick Glover, who is, himself, an amazing painter and someone who it is great fun to talk about art with, although we were pretty silent in the Morandi show.  It is beyond words - you just have to feel it.

Patrick had arrived on the block where the Zwirner real estate empire resides before me and had looked into a gallery across the street.  He didn't have a very high opinion of the work on view there - photoshopped landscapes that were manipulated, enlarged and then painted over - but he invited me to go look just in case he had missed something or sold them short.  To be honest, I already knew what I thought even before we got inside - the paintings visible through the window from the street told me all I needed to know.  But, we went in and looked more closely.

In a good story about redemption, we would have looked more closely and discovered their hidden beauty and realized how our short-sighted, knee-jerk reaction was causing us to miss out on so much of the nuances and beauty available to us in life.  But it didn't happen that way.  The more I looked, the snarkier I became, first in my mind and then, out loud.  I became irritated by what I perceived to be the fatuous attitude of the work - sickly sweet colours, the worst kind of cleverness in the technique, and meaningless content.  I began to imagine this guy at parties, surrounded by glad-handers and being praised for his talent.  And him smugly accepting this praise as his due.  Indeed, I had a full picture of him, his life, even his clothes and the inevitable beard.

It must be nice to know so much from so little, right?

This is what struck me as I hissed sarcastic comments to Patrick and we sniggered in our own version of smug superiority - a feeling that was so familiar that it actually felt physically warm.  And it felt old and worn out.  I realized that I had not had this kind of snarky conversation in a long time, where I ripped apart someone's art with my words and my superior attitude.  While it felt so, so comfortable - oh yes, I know this place so well! - it also felt kinda yucky.  I thought about how reluctant we (I) are (am) to let go of the bars of the jail cell of our own making.  I might be working very hard and very deliberately to let go of the many ways that I confine myself and make myself smaller, not to mention hurt people and cause suffering, but...can I just keep a bar or two of my cage?  You know, for comfort's sake?

That's what it felt like - like I was carrying around one of my old bars of my jail cell.  Pretty heavy and totally useless.  Maybe I can loosen my grip on them now.  And may I wish that guy - beard or no beard - my congratulations on his exhibition in that gallery across the street from David Zwirner.

Prima di Roma

You know how you can be thinking something and thinking that something for a long time and it gets all fixed in your head and you start to believe your idea of this particular reality and you believe it so thoroughly that it seems impossible that anyone else would not also believe it and then you actually say that thing out loud and almost instantaneously everything changes so that your very fixed idea about this thing is so woefully out of date that it is remarkable that anyone, let alone yourself, ever believed such a thing?  You know?

Well, that's sort of what happened when I wrote that post about losing my fire around making art.  Whatever process that happened around writing about what I had been thinking for months opened things up and - wait?  Was that a spark of something creative that I felt burning inside?  I went to my studio and sorted through the work I made at the Saltonstall Foundation residency and, you know, it didn't totally suck.  In fact, there are some solid ideas there worth pursuing.  Note to self: go to studio more often.

The thing that signaled most clearly that a shift was happening in my entrenched "I am the worst artist ever" energy is that I was noodling around on Newfoundland real estate websites (hey - some people collect stamps, ok?) and I found a listing for a former high school in a wee town way up at the tip of the Northern Peninsula, St. Lunaire-Griget.  And I wanted to buy it and make something BIG.  The back story about this is that, fourteen years ago when we were looking to buy a house in Newfoundland, we came across a former school building in a wee town on White Bay.  Like this one, it is available for a crazy low price.  At that point, I was married to someone who thinks very, very practically and he entertained me and my fantasy for a brief - very brief - period of time before listing off all the ways that buying a huge building in a tiny, remote community was a bad idea.  So we ended up with our (now, my) lovely house in Gillams instead.

Clearly, it was a wise decision....and yet.  The "what ifs" have haunted me ever since.

So, what would you do with a 25,000 sq.ft. building in a town of 600 where it snows in June on a regular basis?

Maybe going to Rome later this month will actually help to dampen the fire!

Ecco Roma

For a couple of weeks, I have had the thought that I need to post something here.  And then I would check in on myself and realize that I have nothing to say.  It is not that nothing is happening in my life - I feel quite stretched to the maxium actually - but really, what is there to say about that?

Although I applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship (hey - you gotta be in it to win it!) to expand on my To Stand in the Centre project, I am still feeling my way with this new energy around artmaking.  Where, oh where did my aggressive, competitive attitude about making art go?  I don't know but it is gone, sister.  Like, big time.  What's left?  This is the question that I am working with.  I glance through various art journals and websites and it is all really boring to me.  I just don't care about the questions most artists are taking up.  The questions that get me charged up are related to how we make our way in this crazy, messed up world.  Art holds some answers to these particular questions but, for the moment, it is not really how I want to work with them.

Maintaining the sense that I need to keep some kind of professional momentum going with my art career takes a lot of energy.  There is the doing of art business stuff - applying for things, keeping up networks/contacts, doing paperwork.  There is the guilt about not doing that stuff.  There is going to galleries and other shows to stay on top of what is what in the art world today.  There is other stuff too and it all takes time and energy.  And I am just so not interested in it.  When I can release a little of that feeling like I need to keep all those balls in the air, it is such a huge relief.  I feel both energized and profoundly tired.

Making things with my hands is what I do - this is not in question.  But somewhere in between the deadlines and hustling and the self-promotion, I lost the connection, or some connection of some kind to what made the whole thing make sense.  For now, I am giving myself permission to not make anything unless I really feel the need.  It feels a little like waking up from a deep sleep - where am I?

At the end of November, Lucy and I will visit Finnian in Rome.  It was in Rome, in 1985, that I had a profound experience of coming into my own with colour and painting and really feeling like the work I was making was truly my own.  Perhaps beautiful Roma will work its magic again, 30 years later!

A Bit of a Bender

Maybe it was some pushback after my big (and yet unfinished) Konmari clean-out.  Or maybe it was just because I haven't actually bought yarn in about three years.  But whatever the case, I have been on a bit of a yarn buying bender.

Michele Wang, knitwear designer and owner of Gauge + Tension, the yarn store in Greenpoint where I have been lucky enough to teach spinning a few times, has developed her own line of yarn from Cormo sheep.  She is working with an indie dyer to make a series of gorgeous colors.  The result is yarn that is bouncy and soft and beautiful.  When I taught the intermediate spindling class, I asked for payment in yarn.

Let it be known that teaching at yarn stores is a dangerous thing!

On the plus side, I have the pattern picked out already.

Then, it so happened that Lucy spent ten days at Not Back to School camp up in Vermont.  I drove up to pick her up on Saturday, which was rather grueling - 12 hours in all.  Such a demanding trip required at least one reward (I mean, beyond having my daughter back).  

It so happened that the route to Vermont goes right past...

Yes, the Mecca of yarn stores - WEBS.  It is all that.

There is so much yarn there that it is hard to make decisions.  I found myself over near the Lopi section, thinking about how I have long wanted to recreate a sweater that my mom made me about 30 years ago that has entered the unwearable stage after so many years of service.

Enter nine skeins of lopi.  Not exactly the same colors but I think they will be gorgeous together (the dark grey will be the main color).

Now to seek out that missing element in this big adventure:  time.

Of a Tuesday Morning

For the past three weeks, I have been teaching yoga at the Manhattan Detention Complex (yes, the same one that used to be called the Bernard Kerik Complex). Every Tuesday morning, I meet up with my fellow teacher, Jaime, and we go up to the 7th floor together, after a good bit of complicated security measures are taken. We teach an hour-long class to the women in the transgender unit.

I have this privilege through a group that I have mentioned before, Liberation Prison Yoga. LPY advocates for teaching yoga in prison in a way is "trauma-informed". We don't teach with commands. For example, we wouldn't say, "put your foot forward and bend your knee." We might say instead, "For this posture, we step our foot forward and bend our knee." It's all about offering the students a choice, even in subtle or simple ways.

This past Tuesday, everyone seemed agitated and distracted. We practice in the communal space so there are televisions on and people wandering around in the best of circumstances. This week there seemed to be an extra number of guards and inmates coming in and out, extra noise and extra tension in the air. I was leading the practice and it was a challenge to keep the class together between the background noises, side conversations, giggling about farting, the freezing cold cement floors, and a host of other internal and external disruptions. My inner school marm was wanting to call everyone to order, to sit at their desks with their hands folded. 

 
Fortunately, I resisted that approach.  I used two other things: the experience of our breath and a bhavana or visualization/direction for our minds about the full moon , drawing inspiration from the beautiful moon that happened on Sunday night.  At the end of class, I read this poem by the 14th Century Persian poet Hafiz.

Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise
Someone would call the cops.
Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one who lives with a
Full moon in each eye that is always saying,
With that sweet moon language, what every other eye in
This world is dying to hear? 

- Hafiz

I wish I could say that it settled everyone down and we finally were able to relax into our bodies and experience a moment of calmness, but it didn't.  They did seem a bit shocked that I had read something so openly vulnerable in what it revealed and what it asks of the reader.  Then, one new woman in the unit asked me if I knew about Buddhism since she was interested in that.  And another woman sat with me and Jaime and told us more of her story - even going so far as to tell us that she was starting to ask why she let herself go back to drugs whenever she was out of prison even when she knew it would end badly.  We didn't really have answers for her but we listened to what she had to say.

Make no mistake.  These women are tough.  They have had hard lives and they know how to survive.  A couple of yoga classes isn't going to suddenly make them soft and tender-hearted - although I see moments of softness and tenderness in there, alongside the toughness...and the strength and the brilliance.  I see a lot of brilliance.  I am not fooling myself that a few hours of deep breathing will make up for the years of whatever horror they have witnessed and experienced, and who knows, maybe even inflicted on others.  I don't think that is why we are there.

I do think, however, that showing up, caring, making mistakes and then having a laugh about it, moving around a bit, sitting still a bit, reading a poem, taking a deep breath, sharing a story - being there with a full moon in each eye - is a worthwhile way to spend an hour each Tuesday morning.

What is yoga practice?  It's in there somewhere.

In Sum

She longed to travel. She longed to go back and live in a convent. She wanted to die. And she wanted to live in Paris. 

Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

Trusting Trust

My camera cable has arrived but, as is usually the state of things, I don't really feel like talking about the show in Nova Scotia right now.  Maybe I will tomorrow.  What I want to write about is trust.

Someone asked me yesterday what I trust.  He meant it in a Big Picture kind of way.  In a "Do you believe in God" kind of way.  I don't think a lot about God as he/she/it is thought about monotheistic traditions.  So I told him that I believe there is a perfection to the Universe.  I trust that.  I also trust my practice.  And when I said that, I realized that I must trust myself on some level because...who else is practicing?

This came up because I have been thinking about my piece, To Stand in the Center and See All Around.  The piece that I fondly also call Bitch Slapping Richard Serra.  That title is not so politically correct, even to me who made it up, so I don't use it.  Except sometimes.

I made the piece with a pretty specific idea in mind, which was to create a wall of black wool that would absorb light and create a presence that could not be ignored.  I didn't really know what else it might create but that was my starting point.  I bought pounds and pounds of black Shetland wool and I spun it into a thick, single ply yarn.  I knit it up in stockinette stitch with some purl stitches here and there so that it would come out like a rectangle, not a parallelogram (it's a spinning thing).  I took it with me everywhere - to Nashville, to my friend's chemo appointments, everywhere.  And, as a result, it absorbed all that energy and started to have an unexpected presence and power, even as it sat on the needles.

But I didn't trust it.

For my BKBX exhibition, I added mirrors and sound and special lighting effects and even inflatable bladders.  I pretty much created a three-ring circus around it so that the piece itself was totally lost.  Truly, you couldn't even see it in the installation.  Not surprisingly, I was less than happy with how that all turned out.  Not exactly feeling crushed by failure but it has been more of a nagging sense that it just didn't do what I wanted it to do.

The good news is that I used the mirrored cloth in my installation for Starting from Scratch at Ithaca College and it looks great.  Totally works.  The knit piece, however, sat on my living room floor and became little more than a very large, luxurious cat bed for a few months.  I tossed it in the car when I left for Cape Breton, not convinced that I would even have the nerve to try to pass it off as art.

Then, it happened that there was a wall in the gallery that fit it perfectly.  A nook, even.  So I hung it up.

To Stand in the Center and See All Around, 2015.  Handspun, handknit wool.  Installed at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts, Inverness, NS.

Minus the three-ring circus, the piece is powerful.  In fact, it actually does exactly what I hoped it would do and more.  No one is more surprised than myself!  I didn't trust.  I didn't trust the process or the materials.  I didn't trust trust.

I paired this piece with my SpinCycle performance and I spun (with help from various people pedaling and storytelling) the same black Shetland wool that is in the piece.  I think the two go together quite well.  The strength of this piece is that it is full of all the stories and energy that it collected over the months in which it was made.  It is the antithesis of minimalism while still being very minimal.  So, I like that the SpinCycle piece is a kind of companion to it.  In fact, suddenly I saw my recent work in a new perspective and I could see a fresh direction for it.  It feels true, somehow.

If you were a literary type, you might see this as a metaphor for how one lives one's life.  Not trusting, we add all sorts of layers - call it a three-ring circus - around what it already simple and complete and powerful.  Trusting, we can let it just be what it is, which is always more than we can imagine.

Location, Location, Location

When I wrote that I had sorted through my books in my last post, I was not being 100% honest.  I hadn't sorted through my knitting/sewing/craft books, which I kept on a bookshelf in the basement.  It was more daunting than the other books (or so it seemed) so I left them for last.  But sort, I did, just after writing that post.

I weeded out about 2/3 of them - passed them on to other knitters - and those that remained were put on the bookshelf in the living room, which now had a lot more space because I had already removed all the non-joy producing books.

Could you call it double joy?  As I was putting my various knitting-related books on the shelves in the living room, I had a new wave of happiness sweep over me.  These books that have helped me with many an art project and many a domestic project didn't deserve to be sitting in the basement. They are important books!  They are all about what I love!  They should be upstairs, enjoying a privileged position on the shelves, not sitting in darkness underground.

Hint: the answer is Yes.  

Sometimes my teacher talks about "not having an inch of ground to stand on" in talking about practice.  This is not to be confused with not deserving to take up an inch of ground.  I get those two confused sometimes.  In fact, I think I have spent a lot of my life feeling like I don't deserve to take up an inch of space so I guess it isn't surprising that I would misunderstand that notion.

Such a simple thing - putting books on a shelf.  And yet it wasn't just books on a shelf.  It was me finally filling out the ground I stand on.  Finally giving credit and respect to one of the things that has been most important to me.  Down in the basement with the kitty litter and washing machine and cans of leftover paint?

I think not.

I'm Doing It

While waiting for my camera cable to arrive, I have not been idle.  Yes, teaching yoga (two new classes in Williamsburg starting at the end of the month!) (And teaching transgender prisoners at the Manhattan Detention Center starting tomorrow!).  Yes, teaching spinning (intermediate drop spindle in Greenpoint this Saturday!).  But also this:

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up.

Some friends were talking about it and it sounded so...liberating.  Own less stuff.  Not only that, but only own the stuff that brings you joy.  Who doesn't want to be surrounded by joy?  

I began last week and, as the author suggests, I started with my clothes.  I took all the clothes that weren't in the laundry and piled them in the middle of the living room floor.  One by one, I held each item and asked myself, "Does it bring me joy?"  Really, it was quite easy to decide after that.  I bagged up half of my wardrobe and sent it off to experience a new life with someone for whom I hope it does bring joy.  Then I re-folded the remaining items according to Marie Kondo's instructions and found that I have an entirely empty drawer in my bureau now.  The lightness of that feels lovely.  In fact, it is this lightness that I think is the goal of the whole undertaking.  Without knowing it, all that extra stuff (that doesn't bring joy) brings heaviness into our lives.  We carry it without even realizing it.  Only after it leaves do you notice the weight that you have been bearing.

Next up:  books.  This was more difficult because I have books that I would not describe as bringing me joy exactly but feel important.  So I just went with that feeling.  I eliminated an entire bookcase.  I gave the children's books to the local PTA and I set the rest outside on the sidewalk.  All but about ten were taken before it started to rain.  Again with the lightness!  It feels wonderful.

Marie says to slowly progress towards those categories that are more difficult because our attachment to those items is strongest.  Kitchen items are probably next but I am also looking at my yarn/wool stash.  I know there is a lot of dead weight there.

I think it is a very good system of decluttering but it is not for the feint of heart.  And it is not for the short of time.  I have had to set aside a day for each category.  There is a lot of work involved with gathering everything into one place, going through it, getting rid of the the rejects in a responsible way (the author says "throw it out" a lot but I hope she doesn't really mean that!).  Then there is reorganizing the remaining items.  It all takes time and energy.  

She claims that no one goes back to their old ways once they do this.  I can see why.  It feels good to live with your favorite things.  It also helps me to better understand what I actually need so I can buy or make new things that I will really use.  It is as if by having fewer things to care for, I can actually care for the things that I have.  And that brings me joy.

Meanwhile...

Still waiting on my camera cable so I can download the photographs of the installation in Inverness.  Meanwhile, The Ithacan, the student newspaper for Ithaca College wrote a nice piece about Starting From Scratch, in which they dubbed my piece "The Thinking Hut".  Love it!

And they used this great photograph of two people inside The Thinking Hut.

You Wanna Be There!

Interlacing Conversations

 The exhibition is installed and open.  I have many pictures but they need to be downloaded and made pretty.  Meanwhile, here are some of the contemporary artist projects that are part of it.  I will post more later when I am less totally spaced out from all the travel.

Cast Offs, 2015.  Collaborative project created by Mackenzie Keey-Frere.  Knit pieces and rebar installed at the Inverness County Centre for the Arts.

Artsy shot of Cast Offs at sunset.

Patriarchy Has No Gender, 2015.  Embroidered apron by Barb Hunt (one of nine installed).

To Stand in the Centre and See All Around (revised), 2015.  Handspun and hand knit wool (my project in a new form).

While I was in Inverness, I stayed at the art centre director's house, which is one of the houses built for the coal miners (coal mining was the reason for the town).  She bought it from the family of a man who was born and died and in the house.  It still had many of his decorating touches and I found them deeply fascinating.  I took lots and lots of pictures in an attempt to capture what was so amazing about it.  Here are but two:

Many Lamps.  Inverness, Cape Breton.

Salt Air, Inverness, Cape Breton.