Day 54 Listening to the Mountain
It’s warm and sunny today, which means I get to spend a few hours digging in the dirt, before I do my yoga for the day! Give me a wheelbarrow and a couple yards of bark mulch and I’m happy. Give me a vacuum cleaner and a floor mop and I’ll tell you exactly what you can do with them.
Our backyard is a rocky slope, made up of fill that has, over the past nine years, naturalized with mostly native grasses, thistle and blackberry.
Pastoral from a distance, but close up, it’s an eyesore. So I’ve been working on turning it into something beautiful, but still natural and low-maintenance.
My plan is to cover the wild and weedy area on the northside of our house with landscape fabric and bark mulch, continuing what I started around the west side. I call it my 20-year project. But hopefully this season I will make it across to the east side, nearest our neighbour, who has been patiently and kindly ignoring the overgrown mess adjacent to their manicured outdoor entertainment area.
Mine is no namby-pamby white-cotton glove affair. It’s a put-your-back-into-it job that usually leaves me with pleasantly aching muscles, cuts and scrapes from brambles, sweat and today at least, mud.
When I began this project, I should say, way back when we first looked at this lot, my mind began whirling with the possibilities and potential. We could have Butchart Gardens, right in our own backyard, I thought!
Then I realized I was being ridiculous.
Minter Gardens. Maybe.
“I’m strong and creative,” I told my husband. “I’ll make this into a showcase.”
“As long as you can do it all yourself,” he answered, “because we’re house-broke.”
So, that’s how it started. I’m strong, creative and Mennonite, babe. You won’t believe what I can do with nothing. Tillers of the earth, ya’ know.
“What’s your plan?” hubby asked, dubiously, when the biggest change was an enormous, and unsightly, pile of dirt.
“I’m not sure,” I answered. “A path through here, I think. Unless I hit a rock. Or a big stump.”
“Then what?” he persisted, the line between his eyebrows deepening. “Terraces? Steps? Retaining walls? How are you going to keep the weeds out? Won’t the deer eat everything you plant? How long will it take? This is going to cost $70,000, isn’t it?”
Unless he costs out a project himself, he believes all endeavours will run either $700, $7000 or $70,000. It’s just where his brain goes. Either that or “and we’ll all die.”
“I have to buy bark mulch and fabric,” I admitted. “But it won’t cost much.”
“Maybe you can draw out a schematic for me,” he said. “With estimated completion dates. So I know what to expect.”
I took a deep, cleansing breath, straightened my shoulders and looked at my mountain. It’s not going anywhere. If I put the right plants in the right spots, work with what I have, I can bring out the natural beauty of this slope. If something doesn’t work the first time around, I’ll try something else, until it feels right. Maybe not Minter or Butchart. But right.
I looked him in the eye. “Honey,” I said. “I’m listening to the mountain. I’ll do what works, and I’ll be done when I’m finished. Don’t worry. It’s going to be beautiful.”
I was remembering this conversation while I was doing my standing postures in class today. Despite a morning of hard, physical, dirty work, my practice was strong and smooth. Even Standing-Head-to-Knee! Not perfect, far from it, but… better.
It seems that, as with my landscaping project, there’s a limit to the control I can exert over my muscles, my body – my 80-year project, hopefully. And I have to focus on the potential, instead of the potential problems, to find the right way. My right way.
The name of my favourite standing meditation pose?
Tadasana. Mountain Pose.
Day 52 Frequency, Intensity, Precision
These are three ways to improve your yoga practice, according to guru Ida Ripley, who nearly killed me last weekend, in her hot-hot-hot Master Class. I can’t really increase my frequency of practice, seeing as how I’m going every day, and I’ve already experienced a double-class day for the first and last time.
Intensity, well, I’m pushing about as hard as I can in my postures. Since I’m feeling pretty strong this week, I’m working into deeper backward bends and I can feel it.
Precision, that’s something I can focus on. When I actually listen to the instructions and breathe into the postures, making subtle adjustments to align my hips, keep my knees parallel, flex my thigh muscles, everything feels different. My postures are cleaner, I can feel joints releasing and ligaments and tendons lengthening.
But it is really subtle.
“Lock your elbows, Roxanne,” Anthea tells me when we’re doing Half-Moon pose. “Keep them against your ears.”
So I move them up a scant inch, from my temples, up against my ears, and what do you know, I can feel my chest open and my sides lengthen.
“Beautiful!” she says immediately. And hearing that, I can hold it for another second, just barely.
“Forehead down, Roxanne,” Randee told me in Half-Tortoise. And it made a difference.
“Heads up, look forward into the mirror. Heads up. Heads up. Roxanne! Keep your head up!” said Colin, when I was cheating in my seated forward bend, curling down, instead of keeping my back straight for a pure hamstring stretch. And, yes, it made a difference.
Frequency, intensity and precision are important, but there’s one thing that is even more important: good instructors. I wouldn’t have made it this long without their feedback and encouragement.
But some days, I still think they’re going to kill me.
Day 50 What Do You REALLY Want?
There’s an old folk tale about a woman who is cursed to be a hideous crone by day, but beautiful by night. There’s all sorts of stuff in this story: knights, kings, peasants, a peasant who gets raped by a knight, but I can’t remember how all that goes and you don’t really care, do you?
Anyhoo. Somehow or other, rapist-knight is sentenced by the king to wander the country asking the question: “What do women want?” Which has a lot of merit, as a sentence, don’t you think? He gets all sorts of answers: beauty, riches, men, men who put the outhouse lids down, rich men who put the outhouse lids down. But when he meets the hideous crone, she tells him the true answer:
“Sovereignty.”
It’s a big word. I had to look it up. Today, we’d say something like “autonomy” which is basically the ability to run your own life. Independence. Decision-making ability.
Leap forward in the story. Rapist-knight marries hideous crone (I forget how this particular merger was arranged, because I can’t see either of them working up much enthusiasm) and is given the ability to partly change her curse. It can stay as is, leaving her fugly by day but hot at night – which would work for him – or she can be fugly at night, but hot by day. This would probably further her career as a public servant, plus he’d get some arm-candy at knight events, but at home, he’d still be handing her a bag for her head. Hm. Which is better for him? Which is better for her?
But hurray! Rapist-knight has learned his lesson. He humbly says he can’t make such a decision. It’s up to his wife. It’s her life, after all. And poof! Instantly, the spell is broken! Hideous crone becomes beautiful woman, day and night, permanently. (I assume rapist-knight has by now been totally reformed into a fine, upstanding family man as well.) Butterflies. Rainbows. Happily ever after.
Although I’ve butchered this story pretty thoroughly, what I like about it is that, at its core, it’s about each of us being the master of our own destiny, the star of our own show, the main character in the story of our life.
A wise therapist told me once, long ago, that “it’s more important to know what you want, than it is to get what you want.” And underneath everything, what we want most of all is to have the power to choose, for ourselves, what is best for us.
As I continue my midlife quest to redefine myself, I come back to the questions I posed here, with permission from Seth Eisenberg of the PAIRS Foundation.
- What do I want that I am not getting?
- What am I getting that I don’t want?
- What am I giving that I don’t want to give?
- What would I like to give to you if only things were better between us?
- What am I getting that I do want?
I think the answer, for all of us, is autonomy, just like the loathly lady said. We want the power to live the lives we’ve chosen, with the people we love, doing the things that we believe in and find meaningful. Yet we often slip into days and weeks and years of obligation, going through the motions because someone else wants us to, or it’s expected of us, instead of following our own passions.
I think that, in intimate relationships, the biggest challenge is to remain a whole person, in your own right, while still being half of a couple.
So, what are you waiting for? What do you want?