Cupid in full production

Completed one of my favorite tasks of the year early-early this morning: packing up a load of handmade valentines to take to the post office.  I didn't devote the amount of time to the task that I generally do, that I prefer to.  Unfortunately, my silly job interfered, eating up 4 hours of the Sunday that I had planned to devote to this crafty love sesh.

Still the Valentines are made and mostly posted.  I ran out of everything, most notably glue, so didn't produce the same quantity as in years past.  Some people who've received paper cards from me before will sadly have to content themselves with a digital version -- in order to have enough to go around.  There's probably an environmental argument in there somewhere: that it would be better for the trees in the end, if I just made one valentine and sent it out digitally for the rest of my life.  But where, oh where, would be the fun in that?

Instead, with the tv going in the background, Joe and puppy curled up on the couch, off I went with the scissors and the construction paper, with the stickers and the glitter glue, pasting up this year's rendition of the sparkly love-messages, reserved for my friends, the recipients of all of my Valentine's love.

As it should be.  Not a romantic holiday, but a celebration of the joys of friendship, the kula as we call it in yoga, that big family we make as we go about our lives.  

Valentine's Day is so my favorite holiday.  Thanksgiving is great, Christmas is delightful, but Valentine's Day is a holiday I can really feel, one that really fills me with a desire to celebrate, to make and send these little love bombs in the mail as I have done for my entire life.  This one's mine, super-sweet and good enough to eat.

You! You! You!

I heard Martha Beck speak at an Oprah Winfrey event, O, in San Francisco in October 2008. Two of my dearest friends and I made a weekend out of it: we booked a hotel, got in Friday night, had a shopping blitz, dinner, drinks and amazing conversation with strangers at our downtown SF hotel, where we barely slept a wink thanks to the almost constant sound of sirens. It didn't matter. Those were the heady days pre-election 2008, when we were so excited about the possibility of Obama as our president, our eyes wide with excitement watching history unfold around us, being a part of a historic and momentous change. And we were going to see Oprah and all of the Oprah people speak, live, in the flesh.

I'd probably watched the Oprah show maybe five times at this point though one of our party is known to fill up her family TiVo with the show. I have nothing against Oprah, but went into this, not as a fan, but more like an eager passenger being taken to a place everyone had been many times. The excitement was palpable, as we walked in the door, the lines of chattering happy women waiting to check-in long but fast-moving. What would happen? I had no idea. I had a full dance-card, having signed up to hear all these different people speak. I was most excited to go see Stacy London of What Not To Wear, since that is a show I've been known to binge on, crying at the end of each one as a precious person's life is re-made thanks to Stacy and Clinton Kelly. It's such a simple formula and it gets me every time.

And of course, Stacy was wonderful, funny, lovely and transformative.

Transformative.  That was the point of the whole weekend, and so it was moving for me to look around at all these glowing female faces of all races, everyone hungry for and open to transformation.

Those were heady times, right?  We knew we were on the brink of an enormous national transformation.  We could feel it coming.  So how not to transform ourselves, too?

I had signed up to hear Martha Beck mostly because my girlfriends loved her and I wanted at least one session with them.  I had some skepticism about her as a "life coach," even though I'm a person who loves coaching, who did a 6-month professional coaching of my own once, a coaching that profoundly changed not just Professional me, but Me me.  Duh, since it's pretty much always Me me.  From the moment Martha Beck opened her mouth, I had goose bumps.  I cried.  I felt this insane recognition of her like I'd known her all my life, like I'd been missing her without even knowing I'd been missing her.

If that sounds crazy to you, consider that that's not the first time that's happened for me.  In fact, it has happened for me with greater frequency since I started yoga 9 years ago which gave me the opportunity to meet more people.  It doesn't mean I fall in love with each person I meet -- far from it.  But sometimes, sometimes, there's this prickle, there's this strong knowing within the first 15 seconds of meeting someone.  It doesn't matter where he or she is from, what they do for a living, what they wear or drive or do in their spare time.  There is a *something* about that person and we're fast-friends, true friends, locked together like magnets from the moment we meet.  It happened when I met Michelle, it happened when I met Kristin, it happened when I carpooled to John Friend with Trixie.  It happened with Martha Beck.  Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to tell Martha this, until now, in this way, but I told the others.  I remember telling Kristin, within 10 minutes of meeting her, sitting in a tiny cafe in Oaxaca drinking cappuccinos with a bunch of other yogis, looking into her eyes and saying, "ohmygodiloveyousomuch."

I'm reading Martha's new book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, and the chapter I'm jumping around about the most so far is the one entitled, "You! You! You!"  She is describing the experience of meeting someone for the first time and hoping her expression "looks relatively normal.  Linky, beautiful and brilliant, sardonic and fierce, is not someone who seems easily disturbed, but if I showed what I'm feeling right now, it might alarm her."  Martha is having what she calls a strong bout of "You! You! You!" -- that feeling of "having inexplicably emotional reunions with dear friends I've never met before, who live all over the world and seem to have nothing in common with me."  Later on she says, "It's as if there's been a Linky Nkuna-shaped absence in my heart since I was born, a missing piece of my own soul's puzzle, and that piece is clicking deliciously into alignment."  It's that feeling of wanting to take that new person you've met by the shoulders, that person you feel you've always known and will never have to live without again, and delightedly exclaiming, "You! You! You!" Or, in my case, "ohmygodiloveyousomuch!"

This is, naturally, exactly what I've been experiencing, and what I hope you've been experiencing, too, along your way, making new friends you feel like you've always had, filling out the corners of your heart.  Martha calls it being part of the Team, meeting other Team members -- all of us on a mission, with our own role to play in saving our own lives and saving the planet.  When I heard her talk about this idea of the Team the first time, live, I got goosebumps all over.

You!  You!  You!

So anyway, that's all.  That's what I'm thinking about this morning in these spare moments before I have to get ready for work and another day of dealing with a sourpuss boss and tasks I'm not really crazy about, tasks that make me feel stupid, that bring me down from the high of the weekend until I'm standing about half my real height, which means I can barely see over the top of my desk.  I'm tucking this delicious feeling I'm having right now into my pockets, hoping I can reach in all day and remember, stay standing tall (that's a relative term, obvy), thinking of all the great friends I have, the way we are all part of something so great, the way we love each other so much even if we don't see each other enough, how we're changing the world by just being who we are and getting better at it all the time.

I'm girding for the job, but it's OK because I've got you in my corner.  You! You! You!  ohmygodiloveyousomuch!

XX

Resolutions, shared, more powerful

Woody Guthrie's resolutions for 1942 have been making the rounds for a few weeks. In case you didn't see them, they go like this.  I love that they're handwritten, along with doodles, at the middle of the book, and include beating fascism and wearing clean clothes.

It got me to thinking about how interesting it would be to see certain people's resolutions at key moments in their lives.  These people wouldn't necessarily know at the moment they wrote their resolutions that the coming year would turn out to be key, but with the benefit of hindsight, we'd all go, Duuuuuude, that was so prescient.  Like, for example, if Rosa Parks had it as a resolution in 1954 to change up her seat on the bus.  I'm making light of a huge thing she did, in fun, just to illustrate what I'm talking about.

I did a very fast search on Amazon and nothing turned up, so a book of resolutions hasn't been done yet.  Who wants to take that on?  Of course, it's now on my List of all the books I wish I had time to write, but until someone decides that they want to sponsor me so that I can devote myself 24/7 to this and other projects such as my field guide to the American Douche, then this blog is about it.

So, given my interest in reading other people's resolutions, natch I was very intrigued when I received email from Daily Candy earlier today, with the following tease:

It was definitely a let-down that clicking through just lands one on a slide-show of things the editors plan to buy this year to support their resolutions (although I won't lie: there are a couple of items that I fell immediately in love with, like the magnetic egg-cup train and the self-publishing kiosk and the espresso machine).  But still I liked this smidgen of insight.  Like I wrote elsewhere, I love hearing about other people's resolutions -- such a quick hit of what that person really cares about, really wants, like you're mainlining their essence for a sec.  

The Harvard Business Review blogger Peter Bregman had a really interesting bit in an interview that I listened to yesterday, about how most people don't keep their resolutions because  their fear of failure prevents them from making resolutions about the things they really, really care about.  Like you don't want to make a resolution that "this is the year I write my novel," because if you fail, then it means you're not really a writer.  And that scares you.  So you don't make that resolution; instead you resolve something that doesn't go straight to your heart, to your idea of who you really are, like the novel does.  Instead you resolve something about not biting your nails or being friendlier to strangers.  Something you don't really care about and which you can let go, in a few weeks, when your favorite show finally comes back on or whatever.

The key to success, Bregman says, is to make resolutions about things you really do care about.  And then to keep those resolutions right in front of your nose, integrating them into what you do every day, so that they don't exist in a separate dimension apart from your daily transactions.

For me, another key is sharing what your resolutions are, so that you're more accountable.  Saying them out loud makes them more powerful, give them form.  Volume gives them volume, ho ho ho.  But I'm kind of a weirdo who dreams of friendships in which we share things like this, things like our resolutions for the year, and then have lunch once a month and talk about how it's going.  That's my idea of dreamy: a Saturday lunch with friends and notebooks, maybe a glass of something sparkly and a tasty plate of food, listening and cheering and dreaming.  That would be sweet, indeed, and so real, so much better than catching up on details, details we can all read about on-line anyway.

As I'm completing my resolutions project for this year, I'm really taking Bregman's words into account -- really making sure that I am resolving about things that truly matter to me, that have the potential to be life-changing.  Sure, there's always the nest-egg resolution but what about the rest, the really juicy stuff?  What about the book?  What about getting paid to write?  

It's about keeping the map on the dashboard, just staying focused on what you really want.  And who doesn't need help with that?  By sometime in the middle of next week, I'll be posting my resolutions here, as a way of giving them volume.  And if you want to email me your list, I'm so your Resolution Buddy.  

Let's Go Big this year.  It's time.

XX

Cycle 6, Day 3: The bounty of friendship, another gift of yoga

After walking with Jasper at the levies this morning (big tide rushing in, harriers trolling for their breakies), I sat with Joe by the French doors in our room for a while and watched the busy-ness of birds outside. Joe had a bit of a rough night, feeling very weak today and funky, but nevertheless left for work around 8:30, which is late for him. Not sure how long he'll last there today, honestly. Even though it's the last time, it might be the worst time, his poor body weakened by all of the chemo and side-effects that came before. Hanging in there...

I continue to be amazed at the kindness and love of the beautiful people we are so graced to call friends. Last night, darling sisters Alexandra and Gillian brought us an enormous pot of delicious chicken soup tied with a red bow, warm, delicious garlic bread, fresh and delicious zucchini bread. And a handmade sweet card. We were all delighted and dazzled by their presence, so moved by their generosity and unbelievable cuteness.

Besides the sheer delight of their presence, just how lit-up they each are, what's so awesome about it, for me, is that I only met these two lovelies in April of last year, when we had the good fortune to meet and spend a week together at Laura's retreat in Careyes, Mexico. For me, it was love at first sight, in that way I've grown to expect through yoga, that the people I meet through the practice become my fast- and heart-friends. I would do anything for them and know they would do anything for me. It's as if we've always known each other, because we see and know the truest thing about each other from the very beginning. Until last night, Alexandra and Gillian had never even met Joe, but still they came, bringing all that love for us to eat.

I never expected this, to meet such wonderful people through Anusara, to rest back into the arms of such a warm and loving community of yogis and yoginis, to be so very loved and to love so very deeply, so very madly, all these new friends all the time, every day.

The gifts of yoga are so much more than flexibility, handstands, peace of mind -- all of that is wonderful, but what is the real gift, the biggest joy, is this super-connectivity to others. I am so grateful to our teacher, Laura, who creates the conditions in which these friendships burgeon and flourish, Laura who consistently inspires each of us to see the good, the light, the beauty all around us. Through these glorious friendships, I touch the One-ness of which we truly are a part. Thanks to these lovely friends, I am reminded every day, on the mat and off, that Love is all that matters, the one and only real purpose of our time here on this earth.

XX