Thoughts Happen

Of Mice and Maggots

In front of me on the kitchen counter are 24 perfect, dusky gray-green sage leaves freshly picked from the garden and washed, now drying on a towel. I am trying a new recipe, Sage Mice, which I’ll serve with an herb-coated chicken currently roasting in the oven.

I beat an egg white and fold it in to the flour, egg yolk and water mixture to make a fluffy batter, and as I coat the first fresh leaf and lay it in the thin layer of bubbling butter in my frying pan I am self-consciously aware of the luxury of time, resources and opportunity that enables me to do this.

Perhaps this is because I’m still thinking about the presentation I saw a few days earlier by Rancho Santa Fe photographer Susan Madden Lankford. Images of San Diego’s homeless and incarcerated linger uneasily in the back of my consciousness like the sickly smell of smoke even after the wildfire has passed.

You don’t expect a nice lady from the Ranch to be hanging around prisoners and following homeless people through the streets.

Rancho Santa Fe, the Ranch, is only one town away geographically from where I live, but several more economically, and light-years away from the subjects in the photos. Its winding roads snake through eucalyptus groves planted by settlers looking to make a quick buck in railroad ties until they found out eucalyptus cracks and splits and isn’t good for making squat. But it’s good for hiding you from your neighbors and blacking out the sky enough at night to make you forget you’re only a mile away from Interstate 5, which is good enough. The Ranch is for people with enough money to live a very long stone’s throw away from each other, people who have horses and belong to country clubs and golf leagues, not people who befriend scruffy, homeless, crack-smoking black men.

 The photographs propped up around the community room of the library where Lankford is giving her talk are from two books published by her company, Humane Exposures. “downTown U.S.A” covers her experience getting to know the homeless in San Diego, and “Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time” documents the lives of incarcerated women in a typical women’s jail in the U.S.

 One of the photos is a large close-up of a very old white woman, at least I assume she is very old. Wisps of white hair frame eyes glancing upwards out of sad-shaped glasses. Her lips disappear into a deeply lined face, like those ones you used to see carved out of apples. Another shows a tall, disheveled black man with unkempt hair purposefully pushing an overloaded grocery cart up the street, a small black dog at his side.

I am drawn to this work the way I am drawn to accounts of child soldiers or the beleaguered denizens of Sarajevo under siege. I wonder which few flaps of the butterfly’s wings have kept my soul from embodying one of these embattled lives. The barrier between us is tenuous, like old parchment, or the skin over a baby’s fontanelle.

———

I gingerly flip the sage leaves by their stems (the tails of the “mice”), browning them on the other side until they are golden and aromatic. A dash of salt finishes them off. At the table I bite into one of the battered and browned leaves, and the subtle flavor of the sage, heightened by a hint of salt, releases into the delicate crust, melting into my mouth. It is delicious.

"It's So Much Harder When You Have to Try"

I love that line, from the track, “Harder” on David Gray’s recent album, Draw the Line. Unfortunately he didn’t play it at his show last week in Valley Center, but it’s kicking around in my brain lately nonetheless.

Because after 43 years on this earth, I’ve discovered that the way I stand is no good. Oh, it served me all right for about the first 41 of those years, but after messing up my neck and having a devil of a time trying to get back to my pre-messed-up-neck state, I finally had someone explain to me in a way that I could understand that my posture is a big part of the problem.

This is not what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear that there was some device I could use, some manipulation I could undergo or some exercises I could do that would make everything right again so I could finally get back to some of the activities I’ve since given up because they only seem to make things worse.

Activities such as running, which challenges my endurance and years of self-identity as a non-athlete. And yoga, which challenges my mindfulness and my willingness to accept what my body can do right now, today, versus some ideal of what I want it to do. And tennis, which challenges my agility and my willingness to expose myself to competition.

But instead, in addition to using devices, undergoing manipulation and doing exercises, I’ve learned that I need to change the way I stand, the way I walk, and the way I sit — things I’ve done since I was one year old without a second thought. Now I have to try to do them a different way.

My premonition from a year ago, when I walked into the first of two separate orthopedists’ offices in search of answers and heard a voice in the back of my head saying, “Nobody is going to do this for you,” has come true.

At that time I was still hoping there would be a smoking gun, something obvious that had been overlooked in the previous twelve months of physical therapy, chiropractic and other mysterious manipulations. I just needed to find the right professional, who would say, “Well look at that — there’s your problem right there!”

It didn’t happen that way. The first orthopedist seemed irritated with me because my pain didn’t fit any of his predicted patterns, but at least I got an MRI out of him. It didn’t show anything wrong with me. The second orthopedist told me my problem was not nerve-related, which I pretty much knew, and gave me a prescription for pain patches, which I doled out when I couldn’t take it anymore and slapped on my neck and back like a nicotine junkie.

Since then I’ve stumbled across three other professionals, an Alexander Technique instructor, a physiatrist, and a very good physical therapist, who through a combination of diagnostics and treatments have helped me understand that although there is nothing drastically wrong with me, I am going to have to change the way I move in some subtle but fundamental ways to have any lasting effect.

So now I know that there’s no magic bullet. I’m going to have to do this for myself. Damn. It’s so much harder when you have to try.

Photo of steps courtesy macwagen via Creative Commons

My name is Louise, and I'm addicted to the Olympics

 I love, love, love, the Olympics. Not for the athletic feats themselves, but for the stories; I’m addicted. Say what you will about NBC, but I love the cheesy human interest stories they throw in to the broadcasts. I love hearing how the athletes have overcome some obstacle or another and what drives them to do what they do, skiing through pain, skating through uncertainty, laying it all on the line. If the Olympics were just filmed athletic competitions, I probably wouldn’t bother watching—it’s not like I ever watch figure skating or ski jumping any other time.

The Norwegian skier who came back from a wicked crash in ‘07 to win gold in the Super-G, the French figure skater in the men’s competition who was found abandoned as a baby in Brazil only nine days old, the Chinese pairs skaters who skated together for 18 years and recently got married, coming back to claim the gold medal that was the one thing that had eluded them, or the Canadian ski cross racer back to the sport after nearly killing himself from alcoholism who risked it all and crashed going for gold rather than settle for a bronze medal—all of them fascinate me.

And it’s always interesting to follow an athlete who’s been on both sides of the slope, so to speak, heading up and heading down. Take Bode Miller: darling of ‘02 with 2 silver medals, excoriated in ‘06 with nothing to show but a bad attitude, and back in ‘10 to win a bronze, silver and gold by skiing like he’s actually really enjoying himself. It goes along with my theory that sport is a metaphor for life, where the moments that count are condensed into a few minutes or seconds, but reflect a lifetime of choices that went before.

I think I love the stories because part of me realizes that but for the flip-flop of a few pieces of DNA (or if you believe in reincarnation) I could be one of them. What choices would I make?

Photo of Bode Miller's Bronze Medal-winning start of the men's downhill courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonwick/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Jayson Blair, the Fail Whale and a Rock & Roll Flameout

The Twitter critter affectionately referred to as the Fail Whale recently popped up on my screen, and it seemed apropos, as failure references are cropping up everywhere lately. Take Jayson Blair, the New York Times darling-turned-pariah (for rampant plagiarism) who spoke as part of a journalism ethics panel at Washington and Lee University last Friday.

Say what? You heard right. The university invited Blair to speak at the Journalism Ethics Institute as an example of failure, and this Associated Press article touts his usefulness as a failure example to today’s college students, who grew up being told that they're good enough, they're smart enough, and doggone it, people like them. But when it comes to facing the specter of failure, they are ill prepared.

I also just finished reading Jen Trynin’s “Everything I'm Cracked Up to Be,” an unapologetically honest memoir of being the Next Big Thing in Rock that wasn’t, back in the mid-’90s. As the object of stratospheric expectations in a soul-crushing industry, Trynin ultimately did not live up to the hype heaped upon her or to her own Rock & Roll fairy tale dream.

Truth be told, it’s not just Those Coddled College Students that are ill-prepared for failure. I’ll admit to adhering not only to “look before you leap,” but “look before you leap, then calculate the optimum distance from the edge for takeoff, decide you need the perfect shoes for the run up, take a detour to Sports Authority, look to see if the perfect shoes can be found on sale, berate yourself for forgetting your coupon at home, buy the shoes anyway, get back to the starting line, decide the wind isn’t right ... ,” well, you get the picture.

I don’t think I would be as afraid of failure if it wasn’t so, well—terrifying. But for now I’ll start with the advice of Pema Chodron from the prologue to her book, “The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times.” She writes, “At the end of [any] activity, whether we feel we have succeeded or failed in our intention, we seal the act by thinking of others, of those who are succeeding and failing all over the world. We wish that anything we learned in our experiment could also benefit them.”

People succeeding and failing all over the world—it makes me get all goose-bumpy.

Take Blair and Trynin, who are both still plugging away. Blair has started a new venture of, err ... life coach, and Trynin is married, has a daughter and, hey—she wrote a book. According to the back cover bio, “She still rocks, when she feels like it.” Not too shabby.

Here’s to failure. Rock On.

For the curious, here's a video clip of Blair's interview with a W&L senior journalism student after the panel event.

via commonwealthchronicle.com

Simple Brilliance

Quick, who said this: “The beauty of this experience is not knowing when or where brilliance will appear.” Was it A) Deepak Chopra; B) Pema Chodron; or C) Wayne Dyer? Baaaap. Time’s up. Okay, trick question. It was D) ESPN commentator Chris Forrester remarking on the 2009 Australian Open at the close of the Men’s Final between Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer.

Of course we do expect brilliance from Nadal/Federer. (Can I refer to them as a a single entity? Because to my mind they are flip sides of a single coin—neither can exist without the other.) But what of the rest of the week? Who would have expected Australian Jelena Dokic, on a comeback from debilitating family and emotional issues, to come out of nowhere to make it to the quarterfinals? And what of Fernando Verdasco, fellow Spanish lefty who gave Nadal the run of his life in the semis?

What I have come to love about tennis is that it’s a microcosm of life itself, served up in the crucible of the arena. It all plays out in front of us—the struggles, both mental and physical, the intangible energy that ebbs and flows during a match, the uncertainty of the outcome, and yes, the grace of upwelling brilliance appearing where we least expect it.

One of my favorite matches recently happened in the second round of the US Open last year. American Ryler DeHeart, ranked 261, played Rafael Nadal, and though outplayed and ultimately defeated in straight sets, he seemed to relish every moment of his opportunity, occasionally glancing up at the stands as if drinking it all in. With amazing poise he took two games off Nadal in the second set and four in the third and won the hearts and admiration of the crowd, who cheered his exit as if he were a Top-10 champion. Those moments can’t be scripted.

There was also no script for the raw emotion we saw from Roger Federer as he tried to accept the runner-up trophy for the Men’s Final last night. Tears flowed from the man who seldom shows more than a mild fist pump during play. The one who would be the Greatest of All Time showed us his humanity, as did the Yang to his Yin, Rafael Nadal, as he put his arm around Federer’s shoulder on the platform.

Brilliance indeed.

Choosing to Succeed: The Chula Vista Nature Center

My husband recently finished reading Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel. I had him give me the Cliff's Notes version of Collapse, as I am unlikely to read either of these books myself. So what does this have to do with the Chula Vista Nature Center?  I understand one of the basic tenets of Diamond's book is that one element of how societies can choose to succeed (I love that notion of choosing our reality), is by understanding that the environment we live in is inextricably entwined with our society, and that the reasoning for preserving the habitat and the creatures around us is isn't to save them, it's to save us. All of us. There isn't really any us and them—we're all in this together. That's why I was concerned enough to write to the City of Chula Vista at the beginning of the month urging them to keep the Chula Vista Nature Center open, as I blogged about on 11/29. The Center not only preserves habitat, but it provides education to the community and schoolchildren about why it's important to do so. Keeping it open may be one very small choice, but one conscious choice can be a powerful thing.

So upon returning from Christmas in Northern California earlier this week there was a very nice letter in my stack of mail from Chula Vista Mayor Cheryl Cox. The upshot of the letter was that the city is currently $20M short in its 2009-2010 budget and looking for cuts that would result in the least number of layoffs while still retaining public library hours and other recreation and public works services. And while not explicitly stating that the Nature Center would be preserved, Mayor Cox did note that the Friends of the Chula Vista Nature Center did receive a $125,000 donation from Sempra, and a challenge grant was issued by an anonymous donor which would match any donations dollar for dollar up to $125,000, of which $115,000 have been matched. I figured that it was now my turn to put my money where my mouth is and sent off a check yesterday. 

The matching challenge runs out tomorrow, December 31, and any donations mailed by the 31st are tax-deductible for 2008, so if choosing an environmentally stable future for all of us is something you'd like to do, consider taking the small step of mailing out a check tomorrow to the Friends of the Chula Vista Nature Center, 1000 Gunpowder Point Drive, Chula Vista, CA 91910. I'll be sure to post updates as I get them. 

Competitive Yoga

Kind of an oxymoron, huh? While I was in the first yoga class I’d taken in three months this morning, however, I realized that I have been practicing a form of Competitive Yoga for some time.

I’ve been taking yoga classes off and on, but mostly on, for over 11 years now, so I’m no newcomer. And maybe that’s the reason I started getting a little smug. I’ll admit to sneaking a peek out of the corner of my eye at how well others were doing during standing bow-pulling pose—I could raise my foot so I could see it peek out over my head in the mirror—could they? (Of course, usually when I peeked was when I would lose my balance altogether and have to start over. Figures.) And during camel pose, no wimpy hands-supporting-the-middle-back half-assed pose for me—it was full-on grab-your ankles camel or nothing, baby. 

During one particular back-bending pose the instructor always prefaces with “If you have a sensitive lower back, please support your lower back with your hands, otherwise keep your arms over your head.” I’ll admit to being very proud of myself for keeping my arms raised the entire time, thank you very much. 

But that was Before. As in Before May 14th, when I torqued my neck in a beginner’s doubles tennis game (that’s a whole ‘nother story) so badly that it left me impaired to the point that I spent many days doing nothing but sitting still at home. And I mean literally sitting still. Sitting or lying on my back on the floor with a heating pad around my neck. No driving. No cooking. No reading. No using the computer. No nothing but listening to books on tape or sitting. Lots of sitting. At least my meditation training came in handy.

It drove me crazy, but I learned a lot about myself during that time. Lots of lessons about Who am I if I can’t do my Stuff. After many weeks of physical therapy I finally felt ready to get back into some of my Stuff, which included yoga. I went to my regular class and made it about halfway through when I realized it was a bad idea. Setback. More weeks of PT. 

Then by the end of summer I finally felt completely recovered. Started tennis again. Started yoga—a new class. Bad idea. I was so ecstatic to be Exercising Me again that I ignored the signs my body was desperately trying to shove in my face. Setback. Not as bad as my initial injury, but bad enough to send me back to PT for a recovery that has been agonizingly slow. 

As the end of my latest round of therapy neared, I thought I might be ready to start yoga again. The stiffness that was creeping down my back and causing peripheral aches and pains seemingly unrelated to the initial injury might be relieved by the flexibility I gain from yoga. 

So I went back to my regular class this morning—smarter this time. When the instructor intoned about lower back issues, I gratefully supported myself while doing a gentle backbend. While the rest of the class was doing standing bow-pulling pose, I stayed at the beginner’s level, remaining upright. No triangle pose for me—I opted for Warrior II instead. And camel? Fuggetabout it. I rested in child’s pose.

During the class I remembered a favorite yoga quote, from Cyndi Lee of Om Yoga. On one of her Instructional CDs she cheerily reminds us, "Don't worry about being perfect, because at the same time you never will be—you already are." She is also the first teacher I’ve heard explicitly state that the basic principle of yoga is ahimsa, or nonviolence, meaning no competing with yourself or anyone else. You are to work with the body and mind that you have today. Not last May. Not next month. Right now.

So I was proud of myself but with a whole different mindset today. I managed to get through an entire yoga class without hurting myself. I’d call that progress, wouldn’t you?