Sweet Dreams

I went to my yoga retreat in Ojai last weekend, as I do twice a year.  After four years, I've observed that each retreat seems to take on a sweetness of its own, a shared thread that binds each of the participants to the others.  This one seemed to take on the shape of a tempest in a bottle, a little spark of lightning housed in its own vessel. By the time it was over, my feelings of sadness and bittersweet desire to go back in time were overwhelming. 


But I also recognized the glorious special-ness of retreating only once in every 6 months. If it were more often, we might take it for granted or remember each step of the process so well that we react to it like adolescents who recite every line of a favorite movie.  There are things that you cannot predict, no matter how many times you've done the same ritual. The alchemy changes, the mood shifts, the emotion hits you in ways you didn't expect, your age and experience brings you up the mountain with new eyes each time. 


And then it is over.


Prospero's monologue from "The Tempest":


Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.


(Thank you, Julian Walker.)

We're All Made of Stars

I hate late night phone calls. There comes a point in your life when late night phone calls aren't drunk-dialing friends or booty calls from your FWB or an alert that your bestie is in labor.  They won't call you after 10 o'clock at night to say you won the lottery or that you have been chosen for Dancing with the Stars. 


On Friday night, I was brushing my teeth when the phone rang. I didn't know the number, so I let it go.  Minutes later, I noticed a voicemail.  Listening, I could hardly comprehend what was going on.


My dear friend is dealing with the "worst case scenario" that all of my married girlfriends fear.  Her husband is going to die. Today.  At 12:30. And she's the one who has to say "yes" so that it will happen.


Here's the thing: he shouldn't be dying.  He's only 50, perfectly healthy, and he went to Saint John's in Santa Monica for a knee replacement surgery last Monday.  It was successful. He went into recovery and spent the next day there, in a lot of pain but doing well, and Bren said good night to him on Tuesday, planning to see him the next morning. He was given an Ambien, on top of pain meds, and went to sleep.  The nurse checked on him at 1:30, then took his break. When he returned at 2, Steve had flatlined.


They revived him, but he never regained consciousness, stuck in a state of paralysis while they assessed the damage to his body (so much brain damage, liver and kidneys shot). Their best guess is that he had a sleep apnea episode, something blocking his airways, then went into cardiac arrest.


That's the physical part of this story.


I spent hours with my friend on Saturday afternoon, watching her smile through sad eyes and talk to her husband lovingly from his bedside while the beeping machines help him breathe and keep him alive.  She's being asked questions like, "Where will the funeral be?" and "What will you do with his stuff?" while she's looking right at him, clinging to his remaining hours on this Earth.  She wants him to wake up and help her navigate the details - they have a will, of course, but it doesn't tell her how to teach her son about astronomy or drumming or how to deal with waiting through the entire weekend until they can take him off the beeping machines and allow him to die in peace.


At one point while I was there, the neurologist told her, "It's best if can start to get on with your life."


A week ago, if she'd been told that, she would have reeled from the insensitivity. But now, she understands. There's only a little of her husband's energy left in his body.  He needs to be let go and she's the only one who can let him go.


Her birthday is next month; she'll be 40. He's only 50. They got together the same night that Raf and I did.  We were college friends, but we also lived next door to each other in Hollywood after that.  On the way out to LACMA on a Friday (a weekly ritual for our apartment "family"), she told me about this guy at work that she'd invited to meet up with us, and then she said, "I know it's crazy, but I think this is the guy I'm gonna marry." And we met up with our neighbors, and her husband-to-be, and Raf was there, and we all went out to the Snake Pit later (where another neighbor looked at me and Raf and pointed to herself and said, "Bridesmaid?").  Clearly, it was the night everything changed for all four of us, the very beginning.  We married, they married, we had kids, they had a beautiful boy.  I always observed how deeply in love they were, how she never had a mean thing to say about him, never complained about their life because she was so happy to have "her guy." 


Steve was an Eagle Scout and an amateur astronomer.  He took a group of us to Joshua Tree in the year before Raf and I got married - the first and only camping trip my husband has been on - and led us on a hike that lasted HOURS in the desert.  It was crazy, hilarious, wondrous, unforgettable. He was a drummer, a rocker, an encyclopedia of rock-n-roll and pop culture.  He knew a little somethin' about everythin'.


And he had a spark. You know what I mean? That twinkle in someone's eye that says, "There's so much more to me than I can ever even tell you."  The thing that makes you say, "Okay, fine, but can I sit down and just listen for a while?"


There's a song by Moby from several years back called "We're All Made of Stars." Thinking of Steve and his connection to the stars, to the world beyond this one, I began to think... Maybe it's true. Maybe we *are* all made of stars, of the same crazy, cosmic energy as every other thing, each of us miracles wrapped in a flesh-and-bone package, suffering through the human condition as we make our way back to the cosmos.


This post doesn't make as much sense as I'd like, but I wanted to write it to affirm that our lives are happening now.  We may not get another chance.  We may not make it to retirement.  We may only get a string of moments to say "I love you" and hold each other tight and lay our heads on each other's chests while watching bad TV at the end of the night. And when that's done, I hope we all make it up to the night sky, linking ourselves together into a constellation that wraps around the universe.

More Collective Compassion

When I open up my email on my laptop, I first have to wade through the "news" that AOL deems appropriate for its subscribers.  Often, it takes a few seconds longer for my mail to load than it does for a few grisly news items to pop up on the Huffington Post feed.  And often, I'm lured into stories that I cannot seem to turn away from, like a train wreck.


That is my challenge: to ignore the push of gore and hatred in our media.  Everywhere, they're in our faces, pushing horror stories like drug dealers with candy-colored pills.  I see it on the morning news, I see it on the front page of every newspaper, and I'm subjected to it through my email provider. All the while, as they spill the blood-letting details, they say, "Isn't it awful? Look at that child's mother crying. Aren't you glad it's not you?"


I remember that Eckert Tolle called for us to stop the perpetuation of hatred and ugliness by choosing our thoughts wisely. If we are allowing ourselves to read ugly stories and watch horror movies and let those thoughts seep into our consciousness, then we are actively promoting these acts of violence in our society. Why? Because...


Thoughts become things. 


If we want to break the cycle of hatred and violence, then we have to break our cycle of interest in these things, too, even the seemingly innocuous act of taking a peek to say, "Gosh, isn't it awful?"


Here's to more compassion and a self-regulation of media that doesn't serve to better us unless it's making money.

"Date Night" version 2.0

Thanks to my dear mother-in-law, Raf and I had the opportunity to get away last weekend for a quick overnight trip.  Now, one thing I've learned since having kids is that any time away from the needs of other people - particularly those that you've created yourself - is a vacation.  So, from the moment we shut the garage door behind us and made our way down the hill of our driveway, I was on vacation. No matter that we only went 45 minutes north.  No matter that we would be home exactly 24 hours later.  It was time away from our usual daily routine and that seemed like a vacation in itself.


After we'd checked in and gotten used to the lovely luxury of our room, we sat by the fireplace for a good long time, staring into the crackling red flames, growing increasingly attached to the quiet.  We didn't talk for a little while, just settled into the comfortable contented quiet of being alone with someone you know so well that you don't need words to be together.  I thought we might feel a bit out of sorts - you know, we're so used to being 100% available to our kids that being away from that "job" might seem weird - but it was really rather... amazing. 


At some point, I looked at Raf and thought, Yeah, this is what it's all about.


People can say all they want about marriage taking the spark out of love and attraction, but I don't buy it for a second.  It occurred to me as I sat there that one of the worst things for married people is "date night" - not the idea of getting away, really, but the idea that you can leave your house and pretend that you are dating again, that you're the people that you once were, when you were both single and giddy and had energy and didn't really know what else you wanted from your lives.  


For one thing, we're not the people we were when we were dating.... and I don't want to be. We like to talk to each other about our kids. We actually  look forward to getting back home again, even though we know it will instantly be as chaotic as it was when we left.  I love getting away together - for an hour, a day, whatever - because it reminds me that we are both still there, together, as the people we've become, with the life that we've built together. 


So long, old date night. Hello, version 2.0.

Gathering

Four years ago this month, in a darkened hall of a religious center in Encino, I nervously tiptoed into a gathering of writers who met once a week to write together for a few hours.  It was not a workshop; there were no expectations or obligations, you didn't have to lug home someone else's shit to read and make notes on, you didn't need to critique anything, and you didn't have to sit through other people's "constructive" feedback (which, in some workshops, has proven to simply halt my work, progress and general spirit).


Instead, this was a gathering of people who were busy and just wanted a safe place to write freely and try ideas and sometimes find a new thread for a character or plot, and sometimes just make a list of whatever showed up in their heads that night.  And then go home.  


It seemed too easy to work, really.  We all brought writing prompts to share and then, after one was presented to the group, we'd all scratch out ideas for 10 - 15 minutes, then go around in a circle and read our stuff, then move on to the next prompt.  Two or three cycles later, we'd end with a 5-minute list-making exercise, read it, then chat a bit and go home.  And it went on like this, for nearly 2 years, until we all got busier and less able to commit to a weekly gathering, though every single one of us found ourselves waxing poetic about those cold winter evenings in the belly of the Ba'hai center, thoroughly engrossed in our writing, codependent for each other's progress on the page.


On Tuesday I received an urgent email: WRITE WITH US THIS THURSDAY!  I had a billion excuses: too far, too late, school night, blah, meh... But a tingle of excitement shuddered over me as I typed back: Okay, I'm in. And then the reality of the evening settled in last night, the beautiful relief of gathering together around a table, sharing our words, laughing, letting time slip away... It was like magic, like no time had passed.


As on that very first night four years ago, I had to suppress a deep down feeling of awe at the writers gathered around me.  When I hear the words that they've written -- for the very same prompt, in the same paltry amount of time as me -- I fear that I am an impostor, a hanger-on, that there's no way I should be sitting in the same room as these thinkers.  You call yourself a writer? the inner voice pesters as, one after the other, these writers immerse me in the fully realized worlds that they've created right there, sitting next to me.


And yet... I'm grateful for the gathering, for the opportunity to sit surrounded by greatness, to muster my own courage and use my own voice and to be heard and received, to hear about the lonely struggles of other observers and add to the overheard conversations of daily life.

Dawn Patrol

This morning, I woke up at 5:15 and gathered myself together, took a tall gulp of coffee, and headed to a morning yoga class. It was a level 1-2, so it blended vinyasa flow with stronger poses like crescent and (my favorite) half moon, culminating in inversions and (another fave) handstand.  


As I lay in savasana just after 7 a.m., two things came to mind.  The first was a poem by Rumi:

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don't go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want. 

Don't go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don't go back to sleep.

The second thought I had, laying there in the Tiffany blue of the room, bathed in the soft tapestry of skylight and candlelight, was I'm not an early morning yoga person.

Well, I Never... (But Yeah, I Probably Have)

photo by Teena Vallerine via Flickr via Pinterest

I went to a bridal shower recently and they played an icebreaker game that I'd played before called "I've Never..."  You're supposed to say something that you've never done and then all the people who have done said thing will put money or buttons in a jar for the honored guest.  It's a "getting to know you" sort of game.  I'm sure I've made people play it at showers I've hosted.


Anyway, this shower was for a very good friend of mine and I was with two other good friends and it was all very lovely and pink.  The room was filled with pale pink balloons, champagne and finger sandwiches for our tea.  Cookies.  Lip gloss.


The games hostess passed around a jar of buttons and asked each of us to take 10 buttons - any that we liked.  Since many of the ladies are crafters, I may have been expecting some sort of crafty fun and so I excitedly scooped up a handful of bright buttons.  And then the game began.


At first, it was benign.  "I've never had a child." Plunk. "I've never been to Paris." Plunk.  "I've never been drunk." 


"Excuse me," I asked, smirking, "do I need to put in a button per time I've been drunk?" Gales of laughter.  Plunk.


Here's the thing: I was shoving buttons into the jar at every turn, like I didn't even have an "I've never..."  I think the only thing that spared a button for me was "I've never been skydiving."


Then, as we ran out of things to "I never," someone said, "I've never smoked pot."  We all looked around the room sheepishly and I stood up and plunked my second to last button into the jar.  


I won't even tell you the one that I lost my last button to - but suffice it to say that I had a very well-rounded collegiate experience.  And I was the very first to lose all my buttons, by a bit of a long-shot.


"Yikes," I said to my bride-to-be friend, "you didn't know I was so skeezy, did you?"


"Aw, it's okay," she said.  "I'm sure I woulda been all skeezy with you."  Which made me feel a little better. 


When I got home, I told Raf about the game and how embarrassed I was that I hadn't lied to keep my buttons.  Secretly, I thought he'd regret having married me, a skeezy girl with a checkered past whose oats were obviously well-sown.


Instead, he shrugged in that way that he does and said, "Geez, I feel bad for all those people.  Who'd want to get to the end of their life and still have all their buttons?"