Quarantine Awakening

There is something so electric about the sunrise. The way the light slowly increases to illuminate the landscape, revealing all that was shrouded in mystery. I feel more capable, wise, like I understand things a bit more clearly.

We made it through the night again to face another day. ⁣⁣
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I slept on the couch last night so I could awake with the sunrise on this snow capped hill across from my window. I feel like I’m finally waking up, I’ve been so tired for such a long time. ⁣⁣
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That’s what I’ve been doing during this time of isolation, I’ve been resting. At first I could hardly get off the couch. I figured I was stressed, depressed, overwhelmed, afraid and triggered from ptsd for a variety of reasons in this situation.

While all that was valid, I then recognized I was exhausted from the move and the last year of getting Philip settled into college, then before that from 20 years of parenting. Then I thought, wow, I’ve been running since I graduated high school! Then I realized I have been going since way before that. As long as I can remember I’ve been running. And I was starting to falter in it too. I really needed some rest. ⁣⁣
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So I have been. Resting. When else have I ever been given the time and space to finally, fully rest? In the beginning of this I spent time purposefully allowing myself to be as slow as I wanted. I am always being rushed in life; I could finally go at my own pace. Maybe nothing has ever felt this good.

I stayed in bed as long as I wanted. I took naps anywhere and anytime. I didn’t make myself leave the house if I didn’t want to. I let go of any pressure to get anything done. I let myself be. So much underlying static rose up and was processed or released, or both.⁣⁣
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I have been spending a lot of time in a liminal meditative space between wake and sleep where I allow a free flow of thought while retaining consciousness. My tolerance to retaining presence in any state is increasing and a sense of adaptability and underlying peace is stabilizing.

Much insight into things that have plagued me is arising while I am also coming to terms with what I can’t know and don’t have the power to fully control. In doing this I start to see what choices I do have and where I can have an affect.

I am not doing all this but just being and allowing it to rise and process.⁣
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I’ve gone from perhaps the most afraid and triggered I’ve ever been (as it was the culmination of a lifetime) to feeling that the perspective of this lifetime is the most integrated it has ever been. Because I finally have the space to let myself be. ⁣
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I know this isn’t everyone’s experience. Many are working harder than ever before, many are in unsafe conditions without enough resources. Many appear to be struggling with being alone and not being able to get out or be entertained while others are suffering from being with the people with whom they are isolating. Some have been terribly sick or losing loved ones. There are usually many sides to each experience.

I may have been sick too, maybe with a physical illness, certainly soul sick and exhausted from a lifetime of trying to keep up. All I know is the mist is clearing. We are all going through something right now. ⁣
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We are all in this together, sure, but we are not all in the same situation. Each have our own life tragedies born from this and otherwise and each will learn what we learn. ⁣
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I could tell you my tragedies but you already have your own. Instead today I chose to share some of the beauty that I am experiencing. ⁣
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Waking up inside the parable of my life and learning to let myself be. Slow and steady like the sunrise, until suddenly, when everything is illuminated.⁣
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No matter your story, perhaps you will experience some of this too.⁣
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We made it through the night again to face another day.
♥️

Guided Meditation – Processing Experience and Sensation like Water

I thought I would share this as maybe it will help you clear your mind and body before you sleep. It is not really a video but a guided meditation, but so far with what I know a video is easier to share than audio. It is raw, not perfected or polished. I blow my nose, I have a cold, I sit up in a wonky way. It is taken from the end of a online Zoom yoga session with a private client. I have been wanting to share some guided meditations, when I teach it is pretty much all guided movement and stillness meditation. I don’t have a plan or use a script. I tried recording some with a script I wrote, and while I like what I said, it sounded like I was reading from a script. In this what I say is not exactly right, yet it sounds, at least to me, more authentic, albeit a little slow and with a stuffy nosed voice. I like it better than the script though. In 14 years of teaching it is the first time I have recorded myself and listened to the recording as a meditation for myself…I tend to be more ephemeral than documenting. I think it will help me get better at this to do this, record myself in real time rather than scripted and then experience myself as a student. It is fascinating. I am different on the outside than I am inside of me, it seems so far, and as I watch myself I have extreme compassion for this little woman that I am, in the same way I have compassion for you when I see you in real life. I will likely record a similar guided meditation and at that point perhaps delete this. Yet in the interim I am sharing what I have available and maybe it will be of interest to you.

February 14, 2018

On this day when many people are basking in the bliss of romantic love or lamenting that they are not, I would like to offer another perspective for those of us who are not partnered. Many times I have felt very sorry for myself that I don’t seem to get to have what other people seem to have and so many songs and stories say is the ultimate experience that everyone wants, the companionship of mutual romantic love. There are myriad reasons why some of us don’t find this, or perhaps don’t have it currently, and while having it can certainly be lovely, finding romantic love does not necessarily make or break a fulfilling, vibrant life. Many people hold on to relationships that have expired or perhaps were never even all that good to begin with in order to avoid the seemingly horrific potential of life without a romantic partner. Sometimes we put ourselves into situations that are not viable and at times even dangerous because we are more afraid that we need to be held in order to be okay. And many, myself included at times, miss seeing the beauty that’s right in front of us in pining for something that we imagine would make us complete and can’t seem to find. I have been without romantic relationship for many years now, with only very few unsuccessful attempts along the way. In each case we would have likely benefited each other much more to have related as friends instead. While I still get caught up in the desire for that at times, and am not closed to the possibility that at some point I may find mutual romantic love, I have also found great peace in letting go of needing to have it, in being complete in myself.

Some of the benefits for me have been: I am very comfortable going almost anywhere alone and enjoy my own company, whether or not I engage with other people on my journeys. I have come to often prefer it, especially the ability to come and go as I please without having to compromise with someone else’s desires (other than my son, but that is another situation, and also part of why I deeply appreciate my times of pure freedom). I am pretty capable of doing most things on my own, and when I’m not, I am becoming adept at finding ways to support myself to get those things done too. I am not resentful and waiting for someone else to do their part to balance the tally, I just get it done or not. I relate well with men and women and value them as beings worthy in themselves, not so dominated by the tension of being potential sexual partners or not. I am becoming more comfortable walking away when this is not respected, and am able to take it less personally through time and practice. This helps me feel safer and more comfortable in my own skin, and in my own integrity, and sometimes wakes people up to how they are limiting the ways we may be able to relate by fixating on sexuality and romantic love. I experience the transmutation of sexual energy into vitality and creative inspiration, and sexual attraction into appreciation and connection beyond just that initial potential interest. I am often able to desire without having to obtain the object of desire and enjoy the beautiful experience of the desire in itself. Which…is freedom. My identity is not confined to being a partner and I am able to relate with whoever I want, however I want, as long as it is agreeable with the person I am relating with, and perhaps their partners  I continuously discover what I think and enjoy without the influence of others defining what is possible or valid. I have come to trust myself and am my own validation.

I’m not saying these things can’t be found in the context of a romantic relationship, monogamous or otherwise, I’m just sharing that life can be beautiful and satisfying even if you don’t find romantic love. Even if that’s not what we’re conditioned to believe, and even on a day like today. If you’re feeling alone, just know you’re not alone in being alone. And that being solo doesn’t necessarily mean being lonely. There are many ways to have companionship, including the companionship of your own heart.

On this and everyday.
Love

Rebirth

…all I know is something like a bird within her sang…

The morning Miss Judy died, the cacophony of birdsong rang out across the bayou along the Tchefuncte River in Mandeville Louisiana, where I lie, not sleeping, in a hammock on the deck of the condo my Aunt Judy Porter Beier had lived in for many years.  In one of our last email exchanges I had asked Judy what Tchefuncte meant she said she didn’t know, it was just a name.  To her, it meant beautiful.

I had slept here all night, at this house that now is the residence of Judy’s daughter and baby grandson.  I came here late the night before from the house Judy had last been living in with her husband, just down river, in a one story cottage overlooking the river that could accommodate her condition as the disease of ALS progressed.  Maybe 8 years ago or so Judy and I had explored the river in her pirogues, flat bottomed bayou boats, quietly skimming up through the nooks and crannies of the bayou where the slow flowing water of the river intermingles with the twisted roots of the cypress trees, blending together into spiny marshland.  She made sounds of birds and sat quiet and listened.  She told me stories of her own mothering and womanhood and listened to my own trials and confusions.  The longer we floated the more I felt I was going to be alright.

…all I know she sang a little while and then flew on…

The morning Miss Judy died, the birdsong rang out way before the sun had risen.  As far as I could see it was still night, even though the transformation was well on its way before I could even see it coming.  But the birds, they knew, and they celebrated.  It was like a jungle spontaneously unfolding from the miles of twisted trees teaming with life just across the river from where I lay cocooned in her hammock.  My eyes open, looking into the dark of the night, filled with millions of stars.  Ever since my grandfather, Judy’s father, had died on March 7, 1984, early Ash Wednesday morning, in East Jefferson hospital in the suburbs of New Orleans, the very same hospital in which I took my very first breath, we have said the smile of the crescent moon is Papa looking over us.  And the rising star Venus our Granny, his wife, who died 23 years and 5 months later on October 8, 2007 at 3:30 in the morning, the same exact time in the early morning we three granddaughters had all been waking up suddenly for months before her passing.  Would Judy be the stars, or the birds?

…tell me all that you know, I’ll show you, snow and rain…

On Mardi Gras Day, the day before, soon after I had arrived to see her, Judy requested, in one of her last legible communications, that I read aloud the story she had written, when her hand was more stable, about the Presidio.  I was her voice, since her voice was gone.  The story told of when Judy had traveled to San Francisco with friends and gone to see the Presidio, the former battery-now-park that hugs the San Francisco side of the Golden Gate Bridge.  As far as she knew, she had never been there before.  And yet she kept having powerful déjà vu memories of the place, knowing what she would find around each corner before she got there.  At one point she told her friends exactly what would be carved in stone on the arch above the door before they got to it, and when they arrived, it said exactly what she had foretold.  Even she was stunned.

…if you hear that same sweet song again will you know why???

Later, in a restaurant, she was talking animatedly in her beautiful Judy fashion, when a man came up to her and said, “I know you, I know your voice and your mannerisms, although you are much too young to be who I know you are.”  He had been stationed at the presidio and was sure she had been his nurse, many years ago.  He would never forget the sound of her voice, I read aloud, hearing inside myself the sound of her voice, that I too will never forget the sound of.

Later they saw each other, randomly, in a French Quarter Hotel during Mardi Gras, the improbability of running into anyone amidst the teeming life of Mardi Gras Day cementing their experience of the cyclical nature of interconnection.  And as she read this to me through my own voice on Mardi Gras Day, my sister was wise enough to note that Judy wanted us to know to look for her, even after this Judy body had passed.  That she wasn’t going to leave us.  We just have to recognize when she appears to us again.

…anyone who sings a song so sweet is passing by…

I lie there, completely open.  The light from the sun began to filter through the sky, illuminating the thin clouds stretched like cotton balls across the Louisiana sky early on Ash Wednesday morning, 2012, 28 years after our papa had died.  Birds flew overhead making tracers across the brightening sky.  A mama bird flew back and forth to the pretty little birdhouse hanging just outside the room where Judy used to sleep, where now Judy’s daughter lie sleeping with her own new baby son.  The bayou exalted.

…laugh in the sunshine, sing, cry in the dark, fly through the night…

I remembered how in many eastern forms of spirituality and religion they believe that if you think or say the name of god in the moment of death you will avoid being reborn into samsara – the cycle of death and rebirth that continues until we have learned the lessons we need to learn from this earthly life – and instead be reabsorbed into god.  Maybe I should have told Judy.

In that moment I heard and felt as clear as anything I have ever known, a joyous epiphany that unwound lifetimes of trying to understand – Aha!  She wants to come back. She wants to be with us.  And us not just her family and friends who love her, but US.  The birds and the stars.  Everything.

The whole world opened up around me, alive and vibrant, breathing right through me.  The striated clouds streaked lemon and chartreuse against the dissipating violet of the dawning horizon. The birds crisscrossing across the wakening sky above me.  The slight breeze from their wings as they hummed by.  And I was unbelievably happy.  Like a welling up from deep inside that crested, and sustained, and fulfilled me.  Maybe being reabsorbed into god is not something different from being reabsorbed into us, all of us, everything.  She would never leave us, she is us.  We just have to recognize.  I lie there for awhile, eyes open to the sky, in a very deep peace.

Her daughter opened the sliding glass doors from the kitchen and stepped out onto the porch.

“Neis, I need you to drive me over.  They just called.  She’s gone.”  I will never forget the sound of her voice either.  I looked up and our eyes met.  And held for a moment.

I got right up out of my cocoon and left the chrysalis right there on the hammock.  And played with her baby boy Preston, named after our grandfather, while she prepared to go to see the body that had been her mother, one last time.

…don’t cry now, don’t you cry, don’t you cry anymore…

As children, whenever we would leave Granny’s house, our mama’s mama would stand on her porch and wave goodbye until we could no longer see each other.  We carry on that tradition whenever we leave each other, even now, until we meet again.  As the Suburban/hearse drove away from the Tchefuncte River with the body that had been Miss Judy Porter Beier, my little sister and I stood and waved until we couldn’t see her anymore.  Then we went and sat by the slow flowing river.

…sleep in the stars, don’t you cry, dry your eyes on the wind…      

May we carry on from here.

…la da de da, daaaa….