Lately I’ve been saying that walking around in a 40-year old body is like driving a car that’s turned over 100,000 miles.
The upkeep is a bitch.
I’ve never been the kind of woman who bothered with much in the self-decorative realm. I want my clothes to be comfy and my hair to be wash-and-wear; sometimes I wash my face, and I put hand cream on when my knuckles start to bleed. Lesbianism has been a great haven for me, as has the progressive movement in general, and New England is home to great numbers of plain women. I don’t stand out as especially unkempt in any of the places I frequent.
And yet in the last year I’ve begun to despair of the growing list of daily maintenance tasks I must perform on this body. Worse, I’ve begun to wonder if I ought not to be doing even more. There’s the special nightly mouth-guard to keep me from grinding my teeth to nubs and the special toothpaste to repair the damage already done. There are the eye-drops to replace the tears I don’t produce and the other eye-drops to soothe the irritation that comes from not making enough tears. The knuckle-bleeding has gotten serious enough that I keep hand lotion by every sink and in my handbag.
I wonder where the spring in my step went and then I remember squandering it on the dojo floor and in thin shoes on the sidewalks of New York. I used to stretch to increase my flexibility; now I stretch to survive my workouts and keep my feet from feeling like blocks of wood on the floor. There’s the stretch to keep my spine supple and the other one to put my shoulder back where it belongs; the one that corrects keyboard crouch and the other one that attempts to release my buns of steel. (I tell my clients all the time: do you really want buns of steel? Because I sit on a hard, unyielding ass all day and I have to tell you, it kind of sucks.)
On the playground or at the grocery store I look at other women my age wondering how they do it—how do they add the hair removal and make up and fashion on top of the existing minutiae? I swear, I do not have time for that crap. Then I look in the mirror and see the silky dark hairs of my mustache tugging down the corners of my lips and think, all I need is a black housedress to look like one of my Italian grandmothers. I’ve always been a hairy feminist and I’m OK with that but I don’t really need another shadow on my face, another way to look downcast and dreary. The dark hollow circles under my eyes would tell the story on their own if my grey and grainy complexion didn’t kick in its two cents.
So I find myself reaching for the tweezers or the lotion or, god help me, some makeup, in an attempt to make every day look like a day a decade or two ago—one of those magical days when I could do next to nothing to care for my body and show no sign of the disrespect.
I know this is not the compassionate way, the path I advocate of love and respect for the perfect, fallible human body. But it is the lazy response to the truth that my body is aging. It distracts me from the bigger question of what I am doing with myself, now that I am in the transition between “stay at home mom” and “the rest of my life.” Somehow I understand, in a way I didn’t use to, that my time here is finite. And it grips me with sudden panic—What am I doing with my life? I mean—what am I doing with this precious, exact moment?
The answer is rarely what I hope my life is about: walking the spiritual path or soul-nurturing or working the plan, but nearly always cleaning something disgusting or desperately trying to sleep if I could just stop being so neurotic. These days I don’t have a baby anymore so sometimes the answer is standing around stupidly with all the other moms waiting to pick her up from ballet/karate/church choir.
Because whatever the work of our lives is, an alarming number of our precious moments are spent in the grocery store check-out line, shaking our heads over the discolored grout in our bathroom tile or flossing our teeth. An alarming amount of our life is spent in maintenance—of our bodies, our homes, our property and our jobs.
I drive myself to distraction with all of those tasks as well—keeping up the ancient rattle-trap house, saving the pennies, trying not to forget my oil changes. It sometimes seems that this is what my life will boil down to: another load of dishes, washed by hand. Another sack of outgrown toys sorted and removed. Another week of groceries planned, purchased, cooked and cleaned up.
And yet: the one person I know without question cleaned her gutters, fully funded her IRA and catalogued her photographs died suddenly at the age of 52 this year. She did those things, but her life wasn’t about those things. She wasn’t postponing or missing her life with faithful maintenance; she was stewarding it.
I am chastened and humbled by this example. I am trying to learn this lesson. As I am trying to commit to what Cheryl Richardson calls extreme self-care. I am not an uncritical fan of Richardson’s but I’ve resonated to this concept since I first heard it. We can put the things we care about—ourselves, our lives—at the very top of the to-do list. Why wait for burnout or illness to force you into emergency self care when extreme self care can be your way of life?
Stretch for the love of movement. Fold the body’s necessities into a routine of relaxation and pleasure. Care for the corporeal self. Know that maintaining the business of life is walking the path. The body’s wisdom—its hairy, graying, stiff-jointed wisdom—is to bring us into the present moment.
What am I doing with this exact, precious moment?
I’m living it.
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Thursday, February 19, 2009
Mind Body Mama: Beginner's Mind
A Unitarian Universalist I love posted to her Facebook page a few weeks ago, “I hate how I make mistakes when I’m doing something for the first time.”
“Beginner’s Mind, Grasshopper,” I quipped.
At the School of Love—the feminist karate school where my spiritual home, family-of-choice and fierce movement discipline come together—we just love beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is free of expectations; beginner’s mind is open to all possibilities. Beginner’s mind is not clouded by prior experience; beginner’s mind is not attached to outcomes; beginner’s mind is in the here and now.
Beginner’s mind is a hell of a lot harder than it looks.
The Small One mastered the fork this week, to the great relief of her parents. It was not that long ago that we realized that we had completely forgotten to teach her how to use a fork. In our defense: not every kid needs fork handling broken down for them. A good number figure it out by mimicry; one of our sweet friends had it nailed at age two. But Small squandered her precocity on reading. I have no idea how she did it but she taught herself her letters at two and by four she was plowing through Little House on the Prairie and leading dinner time discussions on various textual themes. “Did you know that it was very different for boys and girls in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s time?” she might ask. “For example, girls could not wear pants and boys could not cry.”
Having plucked the skill of reading out of the ether, seemingly without effort, Small continues to excel at all things word-related. This apparently includes the bulk of the kindergarten curriculum. “What is work-time?” I asked her recently, demonstrating appropriate, if belated, interest in the K-kids’ daily schedule. “Work time is when they hand out papers that I already know the answers before I even glance at them,” she told me wearily. Despite an incredibly fabulous and responsive teacher Small is getting reinforcement for the fact that a lot of things come easily to her.
We know that Small is not good at everything and we’ve always talked about how everyone has things that they’re “good at” and things that they’re “working on.” Recently we realized that she was not really “working on” her fork handling—she totally sucked at it and required a hard-core intervention. This was after she nearly drew blood biting herself, finally bringing Sweetiebaby-honeylicious’ and my attention to her incredibly maladaptive hand position. Mealtime occupational therapy immediately ensued, replete with lots of bargaining: “You can eat all the green beans with your fingers if you eat all the tofu with your fork.” And also lots of tears.
One day Small just looked at us and said, “It’s not fun to practice something you’re not good at.”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” is what my parents would say to such truth-telling. It was one of those statements that should be accompanied by the ping of the meditation chime: “Pay attention to this one, it will come around again and again if you open your eyes to it.”
And that has been the case. In the same week I had a streak of personal training clients who refused, or forgot, or just didn’t feel like doing the exercises I had prescribed to strengthen the weak muscles in their bodies. Each cheerily reported practicing their favorite exercises instead—naturally, those that worked the the already strong parts of their anatomy.
Life Coach Jillian—one of Small’s godmother’s and one of my favorite people in life—offered me some coachy jargon on the same topic, which came down to this: it’s easy to have beginner’s mind when you don’t know that you’re clueless. You don’t know what you don’t know, so you don’t care. And it feels great to to have such mastery of something that you don’t even have to think about the skill. For example, being able to think about dinner at dinner-time, instead of thinking about how to not bite or stab yourself. Or being able to teach a kick-ass karate class at a moment’s notice because you have a black-belt – or two – and teaching has become as familiar as breathing over a decade’s practice.
But what feels crappy is knowing that you don’t know something: practicing something you’re not good at. We were straight up with Small that everyone has “working on” things, but we didn’t exactly say how scary it can be to work on them, how little and unsure and uncomfortable you can feel, and how much easier it can be to retreat back to your comfort zones.
And you know I didn’t say anything about making mistakes. That’s not somewhere I ever want to go. I was proud when one of my business advisors recently told me, “You are the most risk-averse person I’ve ever met!”
This whole blogging exercise I’ve set myself upon feels like an opportunity to practice beginner’s mind. My risk-averse self is freaking out at having been launched into something without complete control and mastery. What if I make a mistake; is it OK to forge ahead without knowing everything; can I put myself out there without being perfect? And in fact, I’ve already made a mistake. Close readers will notice that the original title of my column was going to be Black Belt Mama—until the brown belt who blogs under the name Black Belt Mama smacked me down and asked me to back off her territory. I had discovered her a while back, when I was securing the domain mindbodymama, but I forgot about her when I moved along to this project. So I had to concede that she was right; I had to admit that I had made a mistake when I was doing something for the first time.
I hate that.
The great thing about beginning something new at midlife is how it much bigger it makes your life. The passions of my middle life—mothering, my second career of personal training, and now writing—were unimaginable a decade ago. It is as if I am a new person and that is exciting and joyous. But the hard thing about starting something new at this advanced age is that I have lots of experience at being good at things, so I feel the difference acutely.
To keep myself from going crazy, I have to give myself lots of breaks to rest in the things I do well— like kicking practice and menu planning— the way Small spends a portion of every day visiting Laura Ingalls in the pages of her nine-volume memoir. The sanest path tiptoes between risk and comfort, between white belt and black belt, between awkward and awesome. Between the fork and the fingers.
“Beginner’s Mind, Grasshopper,” I quipped.
At the School of Love—the feminist karate school where my spiritual home, family-of-choice and fierce movement discipline come together—we just love beginner’s mind. Beginner’s mind is free of expectations; beginner’s mind is open to all possibilities. Beginner’s mind is not clouded by prior experience; beginner’s mind is not attached to outcomes; beginner’s mind is in the here and now.
Beginner’s mind is a hell of a lot harder than it looks.
The Small One mastered the fork this week, to the great relief of her parents. It was not that long ago that we realized that we had completely forgotten to teach her how to use a fork. In our defense: not every kid needs fork handling broken down for them. A good number figure it out by mimicry; one of our sweet friends had it nailed at age two. But Small squandered her precocity on reading. I have no idea how she did it but she taught herself her letters at two and by four she was plowing through Little House on the Prairie and leading dinner time discussions on various textual themes. “Did you know that it was very different for boys and girls in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s time?” she might ask. “For example, girls could not wear pants and boys could not cry.”
Having plucked the skill of reading out of the ether, seemingly without effort, Small continues to excel at all things word-related. This apparently includes the bulk of the kindergarten curriculum. “What is work-time?” I asked her recently, demonstrating appropriate, if belated, interest in the K-kids’ daily schedule. “Work time is when they hand out papers that I already know the answers before I even glance at them,” she told me wearily. Despite an incredibly fabulous and responsive teacher Small is getting reinforcement for the fact that a lot of things come easily to her.
We know that Small is not good at everything and we’ve always talked about how everyone has things that they’re “good at” and things that they’re “working on.” Recently we realized that she was not really “working on” her fork handling—she totally sucked at it and required a hard-core intervention. This was after she nearly drew blood biting herself, finally bringing Sweetiebaby-honeylicious’ and my attention to her incredibly maladaptive hand position. Mealtime occupational therapy immediately ensued, replete with lots of bargaining: “You can eat all the green beans with your fingers if you eat all the tofu with your fork.” And also lots of tears.
One day Small just looked at us and said, “It’s not fun to practice something you’re not good at.”
“Out of the mouths of babes,” is what my parents would say to such truth-telling. It was one of those statements that should be accompanied by the ping of the meditation chime: “Pay attention to this one, it will come around again and again if you open your eyes to it.”
And that has been the case. In the same week I had a streak of personal training clients who refused, or forgot, or just didn’t feel like doing the exercises I had prescribed to strengthen the weak muscles in their bodies. Each cheerily reported practicing their favorite exercises instead—naturally, those that worked the the already strong parts of their anatomy.
Life Coach Jillian—one of Small’s godmother’s and one of my favorite people in life—offered me some coachy jargon on the same topic, which came down to this: it’s easy to have beginner’s mind when you don’t know that you’re clueless. You don’t know what you don’t know, so you don’t care. And it feels great to to have such mastery of something that you don’t even have to think about the skill. For example, being able to think about dinner at dinner-time, instead of thinking about how to not bite or stab yourself. Or being able to teach a kick-ass karate class at a moment’s notice because you have a black-belt – or two – and teaching has become as familiar as breathing over a decade’s practice.
But what feels crappy is knowing that you don’t know something: practicing something you’re not good at. We were straight up with Small that everyone has “working on” things, but we didn’t exactly say how scary it can be to work on them, how little and unsure and uncomfortable you can feel, and how much easier it can be to retreat back to your comfort zones.
And you know I didn’t say anything about making mistakes. That’s not somewhere I ever want to go. I was proud when one of my business advisors recently told me, “You are the most risk-averse person I’ve ever met!”
This whole blogging exercise I’ve set myself upon feels like an opportunity to practice beginner’s mind. My risk-averse self is freaking out at having been launched into something without complete control and mastery. What if I make a mistake; is it OK to forge ahead without knowing everything; can I put myself out there without being perfect? And in fact, I’ve already made a mistake. Close readers will notice that the original title of my column was going to be Black Belt Mama—until the brown belt who blogs under the name Black Belt Mama smacked me down and asked me to back off her territory. I had discovered her a while back, when I was securing the domain mindbodymama, but I forgot about her when I moved along to this project. So I had to concede that she was right; I had to admit that I had made a mistake when I was doing something for the first time.
I hate that.
The great thing about beginning something new at midlife is how it much bigger it makes your life. The passions of my middle life—mothering, my second career of personal training, and now writing—were unimaginable a decade ago. It is as if I am a new person and that is exciting and joyous. But the hard thing about starting something new at this advanced age is that I have lots of experience at being good at things, so I feel the difference acutely.
To keep myself from going crazy, I have to give myself lots of breaks to rest in the things I do well— like kicking practice and menu planning— the way Small spends a portion of every day visiting Laura Ingalls in the pages of her nine-volume memoir. The sanest path tiptoes between risk and comfort, between white belt and black belt, between awkward and awesome. Between the fork and the fingers.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Mind Body Mama: Germ Warfare
The Small One stands firm in her opposition to kisses. For a while now she’s been refusing them, or grudgingly accepting them only to wipe them off immediately. “I’m wiping the love into my heart,” she’ll tell me, but I don’t buy it. She can’t get rid of those kisses fast enough.
Body autonomy is central to our self-defense home-training, so kiddo gets to make the call on whether we kiss her or not. But it grieves me not to be able to do it. Sweetiebabyhoneylicious is not much of a kisser either, so I am all puckered up in a household refusing to kiss me back. Back in the day I spent a good part of my life kissing, and that day started a lot earlier than you might imagine. By the time I was Small’s age I was already known for my kissing chops. When the folks took me to Hawaii the first time (age 4), the neighborhood big kids noticed two things about me immediately: I had a giant winter coat and I kissed everyone. This may or may not have contributed to my later social difficulties (kindergarten, first grade, junior high school). Memory fails here.
Flabbergasted that anyone could dislike kissing with the same intensity with which I was born to enjoy it I finally inquired of my kid: “Why don’t you like kisses?” The answer stunned me.
“Because they’re disgusting.”
It’s impossible to convey the sing-song certainty with which this proclamation was conveyed. Naturally, I probed for details.
“They spread germs. We’re not allowed to kiss at school.”
I had to run a timeline on this line of logic, and it ran afoul of reason. Small shut down the kissing machine sometime during pre-school, so public school’s prohibition on germ sharing is newly developed justification for a long-standing predilection. But now she won’t budge; kisses: disgusting.
So we’ve entered a new truce, one in which I am allowed—even encouraged—to kiss her. But to every peck she replies, “Disgusting.” It’s reflexive; even reading or half asleep she is not too distracted to mutter her judgment— “disgusting”—the moment my lips meet her soft skin. She’s discovered something more compelling than her own distaste and that is contradicting her mama. Mama loves kissing; I can disagree with her a hundred times today. The tone in which she delivers her heartbreaking review is light, candid, confident, and mocking. “You think this is charming and delightful,” it says, “but you could not be more wrong. It’s just gross.”
We’ve had to clarify the self-defense conversation in light of this development. “It is still OK to say, ‘No kisses, please,’” I tell her in my strongest Strong Voice. “You are the boss of your body. But you cannot say, ‘Disgusting’ when your grandmother kisses you.”
We haven’t had any slip-ups yet on that front—that’ll be a fun conversation with my mom, I tell you. And I’m taking my cold comfort where I can: even Small’s favorite person in the whole world, the superhero formerly known as my karate teacher, is not immune to having her love rubbed off when she’s not looking. This preference is as bone-deep as Small’s legendary distaste for mashed potatoes. Since she was six months old she’s not been able to get smashies off her tongue fast enough. It’s who she is—she’s no kisser! And I can live with that.
It’s the delight she takes in the discrepancy of our preferences that worries me most. This is the first step on a long road of our differences of opinion and something tells me she’s not going to get any kinder in her delivery. We were warned: motherhood is just one heartbreak after another. I just didn’t expect the unrequited romance to start quite so soon.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Body autonomy is central to our self-defense home-training, so kiddo gets to make the call on whether we kiss her or not. But it grieves me not to be able to do it. Sweetiebabyhoneylicious is not much of a kisser either, so I am all puckered up in a household refusing to kiss me back. Back in the day I spent a good part of my life kissing, and that day started a lot earlier than you might imagine. By the time I was Small’s age I was already known for my kissing chops. When the folks took me to Hawaii the first time (age 4), the neighborhood big kids noticed two things about me immediately: I had a giant winter coat and I kissed everyone. This may or may not have contributed to my later social difficulties (kindergarten, first grade, junior high school). Memory fails here.
Flabbergasted that anyone could dislike kissing with the same intensity with which I was born to enjoy it I finally inquired of my kid: “Why don’t you like kisses?” The answer stunned me.
“Because they’re disgusting.”
It’s impossible to convey the sing-song certainty with which this proclamation was conveyed. Naturally, I probed for details.
“They spread germs. We’re not allowed to kiss at school.”
I had to run a timeline on this line of logic, and it ran afoul of reason. Small shut down the kissing machine sometime during pre-school, so public school’s prohibition on germ sharing is newly developed justification for a long-standing predilection. But now she won’t budge; kisses: disgusting.
So we’ve entered a new truce, one in which I am allowed—even encouraged—to kiss her. But to every peck she replies, “Disgusting.” It’s reflexive; even reading or half asleep she is not too distracted to mutter her judgment— “disgusting”—the moment my lips meet her soft skin. She’s discovered something more compelling than her own distaste and that is contradicting her mama. Mama loves kissing; I can disagree with her a hundred times today. The tone in which she delivers her heartbreaking review is light, candid, confident, and mocking. “You think this is charming and delightful,” it says, “but you could not be more wrong. It’s just gross.”
We’ve had to clarify the self-defense conversation in light of this development. “It is still OK to say, ‘No kisses, please,’” I tell her in my strongest Strong Voice. “You are the boss of your body. But you cannot say, ‘Disgusting’ when your grandmother kisses you.”
We haven’t had any slip-ups yet on that front—that’ll be a fun conversation with my mom, I tell you. And I’m taking my cold comfort where I can: even Small’s favorite person in the whole world, the superhero formerly known as my karate teacher, is not immune to having her love rubbed off when she’s not looking. This preference is as bone-deep as Small’s legendary distaste for mashed potatoes. Since she was six months old she’s not been able to get smashies off her tongue fast enough. It’s who she is—she’s no kisser! And I can live with that.
It’s the delight she takes in the discrepancy of our preferences that worries me most. This is the first step on a long road of our differences of opinion and something tells me she’s not going to get any kinder in her delivery. We were warned: motherhood is just one heartbreak after another. I just didn’t expect the unrequited romance to start quite so soon.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Mind Body Mama: Clarity Through Chemistry
I’ve been really down about the demise of mamazine.com. It was so flattering that other mamas liked Raising a Strong Voiced Girl, and so exciting to see my work in an explicitly feminist publication. It’s unlikely that I, personally, exhausted the bright and energetic mamas who have been editing this venture for the past three and a half years—but it is possible that my puppyish enthusiasm was the final straw. I e-mailed them about errors in my piece before they had finished posting the issue, for god’s sake. And even though I hadn’t pulled it together, I’m sure they were steeling themselves for the pitch I was about to throw for my ongoing column: Mind Body Mama.
It was going to be a swell column—one week addressing age-appropriate self defense education, the next describing how an athlete’s highly trained reflexes respond during a child’s bout of projectile vomiting. Anger, theology, ambition, poetry, pop culture and exercise—it was all going to be grist for my mill. I had a good fantasy going, one with a lot of Pierce Brothers coffee, a shiny new laptop and readers who posted their comments right on the blog, instead of on Facebook. And then Amy and Sheri decided to stop publishing.
So I’ve moped around for the past two weeks since I got the news. Spent an afternoon surfing through other mama-related writing sites online, looking for the clone of mamazine. Lots of good stuff out there, but nothing with exactly the same sensibility of course. And more than one friend has suggested that I take over editing mamazine if the current editors are burnt-out. (If I haven’t freaked them out already, I’m sure that level of enthusiasm from an unknown, once-published author would do the trick. “Hey, remember me? Can I have your magazine?”)
But today, hopped up on cold meds, I had a better idea—which is the obvious idea anyway: I’ll write the column here. In fact, I’ve decided that An Open Letter to Rachel Maddow was the first installment. Once a week I’ll submit an entry, cultivating the voice of Mind Body Mama. Blogging is good writing practice—I got that first-rate advice from the funny, prolific and delightful Martha Brockenbrough, one of my role models. I don’t entirely understand what I’m up to with this endeavor but I’m sure I’ll find out. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
It was going to be a swell column—one week addressing age-appropriate self defense education, the next describing how an athlete’s highly trained reflexes respond during a child’s bout of projectile vomiting. Anger, theology, ambition, poetry, pop culture and exercise—it was all going to be grist for my mill. I had a good fantasy going, one with a lot of Pierce Brothers coffee, a shiny new laptop and readers who posted their comments right on the blog, instead of on Facebook. And then Amy and Sheri decided to stop publishing.
So I’ve moped around for the past two weeks since I got the news. Spent an afternoon surfing through other mama-related writing sites online, looking for the clone of mamazine. Lots of good stuff out there, but nothing with exactly the same sensibility of course. And more than one friend has suggested that I take over editing mamazine if the current editors are burnt-out. (If I haven’t freaked them out already, I’m sure that level of enthusiasm from an unknown, once-published author would do the trick. “Hey, remember me? Can I have your magazine?”)
But today, hopped up on cold meds, I had a better idea—which is the obvious idea anyway: I’ll write the column here. In fact, I’ve decided that An Open Letter to Rachel Maddow was the first installment. Once a week I’ll submit an entry, cultivating the voice of Mind Body Mama. Blogging is good writing practice—I got that first-rate advice from the funny, prolific and delightful Martha Brockenbrough, one of my role models. I don’t entirely understand what I’m up to with this endeavor but I’m sure I’ll find out. Thanks for coming along for the ride.
Friday, February 6, 2009
Worship: Readings to Accompany Fear and Grace
My family lit the chalice for this service, and Alice recited the chalice-lighting words from memory, because she is an odd and fabulous little kid. They are from the Sufi mystic poet Jelalludin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks:
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
For the opening words (read responsively) I chose a excerpt from the Reverend Victoria Safford’s meditation Map of the Journey in Progress, from her book Walking Towards Morning:
Here is where I found my voice and chose to be brave.
This is the place where I said NO, more loudly than I’d ever thought I could, and everybody stared, but I said NO loudly anyway, because I knew it must be said, and those staring settled down into harmless, ineffective grumbling, and over me they had no power anymore.
Here’s a time, and here’s another, when I laid down my fear and walked right on into it, right up to my neck into that roiling water.
Here’s a place, a murky puddle, where I have stumbled more than once and fallen. I don’t know yet what to learn there.
On this site I was outraged and the rage sustains me still, it clarifies my seeing.
Here is where I began to look with my own eyes and listen with my own ears and sing my own song, shakey as it is.
The first of the two readings was a story from the Buddhist writer Pema Chodron from her book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.
Once there was a young warrior. Her teacher told her that she had to do battle with Fear. She didn’t want to do that. It seemed too aggressive; it was scary; it seemed unfriendly. But the teacher said she had to do it and gave her instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student warrior stood on one side, and Fear stood on the other. The warrior was feeling very small, and Fear was looking big and wrathful. They both had their weapons. The young warrior roused herself and went toward Fear, bowed three times, and asked, “May I have permission to go into battle with you?” Fear said, “Thank you for showing me so much respect that you ask permission.” Then the young warrior said, “How can I defeat you?” Fear replied, “My weapons are that I talk fast, and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don’t do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me, and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don’t do what I say, I have no power.” In that way the student warrior learned how to act, not controlled by Fear, but with an understanding of Fear that leads to greater respect and compassion for oneself and others.
The second was a definition of grace from Christian author Anne Lamott found in her book Travelling Mercies:
…grace in the theological sense… [is] the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.
For the closing words, I used a meditation written by Alice:
Courage Instructions
Make the wisdom of your hope.
Don’t be afraid.
Help yourself to whatever you must do.
Help the world and do your best.
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
For the opening words (read responsively) I chose a excerpt from the Reverend Victoria Safford’s meditation Map of the Journey in Progress, from her book Walking Towards Morning:
Here is where I found my voice and chose to be brave.
This is the place where I said NO, more loudly than I’d ever thought I could, and everybody stared, but I said NO loudly anyway, because I knew it must be said, and those staring settled down into harmless, ineffective grumbling, and over me they had no power anymore.
Here’s a time, and here’s another, when I laid down my fear and walked right on into it, right up to my neck into that roiling water.
Here’s a place, a murky puddle, where I have stumbled more than once and fallen. I don’t know yet what to learn there.
On this site I was outraged and the rage sustains me still, it clarifies my seeing.
Here is where I began to look with my own eyes and listen with my own ears and sing my own song, shakey as it is.
The first of the two readings was a story from the Buddhist writer Pema Chodron from her book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times.
Once there was a young warrior. Her teacher told her that she had to do battle with Fear. She didn’t want to do that. It seemed too aggressive; it was scary; it seemed unfriendly. But the teacher said she had to do it and gave her instructions for the battle. The day arrived. The student warrior stood on one side, and Fear stood on the other. The warrior was feeling very small, and Fear was looking big and wrathful. They both had their weapons. The young warrior roused herself and went toward Fear, bowed three times, and asked, “May I have permission to go into battle with you?” Fear said, “Thank you for showing me so much respect that you ask permission.” Then the young warrior said, “How can I defeat you?” Fear replied, “My weapons are that I talk fast, and I get very close to your face. Then you get completely unnerved, and you do whatever I say. If you don’t do what I tell you, I have no power. You can listen to me, and you can have respect for me. You can even be convinced by me. But if you don’t do what I say, I have no power.” In that way the student warrior learned how to act, not controlled by Fear, but with an understanding of Fear that leads to greater respect and compassion for oneself and others.
The second was a definition of grace from Christian author Anne Lamott found in her book Travelling Mercies:
…grace in the theological sense… [is] the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually grateful as you are to be there.
For the closing words, I used a meditation written by Alice:
Courage Instructions
Make the wisdom of your hope.
Don’t be afraid.
Help yourself to whatever you must do.
Help the world and do your best.
Sermon: Fear and Grace: Lessons from the Martial Arts
Sermon delivered at the Our House of Worship, July 13, 2008.
“The first principle of a warrior is not being afraid of who you are.”
Several months ago this congregation had a meeting to discuss the Society’s budget, as we often do. A proposal had been put forth about which I knew I had very strong feelings. My partner and I talked about the proposal at great and dramatic length (the word “ranting” comes to mind); I fell asleep or woke up more than once thinking about the issue; I sometimes talked to myself about it when I was driving alone in my car. But I didn’t really know how strong my feelings were until I got up to speak at the meeting. When I started to talk, I discovered that I was terrified. And adding to the simple challenge of speaking clearly to a complex issue, I was also crying. I honestly can’t recall any words going through my mind as I realized that I was going to weep through my entire turn at the microphone, but I can sum up the familiar feeling of tenacious surrender with this phrase: “Oh well, here we go again.”
This summer I will celebrate my twentieth anniversary as a student of Okinawan martial arts, and a month later, my 40th birthday. My martial arts practice is, in a very real sense, the story of my adult life. It is the place where—among many, many lessons— I learned to accept Fear as the great teacher that it is. And it is where I experience, again and again, the incredible Grace that comes of being present to Fear, of walking “into those roiling waters,” and coming out whole.
It might be reasonable to presume that the scariest thing about being a martial artist is the fighting part—the “getting hit” part, and maybe also the “hitting other people” part. The recent growth of the extremely violent spectacle that calls itself “mixed martial arts”—which I hesitate to even call a sport—enhances the perception that martial arts practice is about the exchange of body-damaging blows. My practice could not be more unlike this brutal combat activity. In practical terms, the two karate schools at which I have studied practice ju kumite or “soft sparring.” Light contact and control of one’s own body are respected skills which students work hard to master. Sparring practice is playful, joyous and often full of laughter. What then, is there to be afraid of? In a word—everything.
Karate practice asks us to be present—in the stillness of the meditations which begin and end classes, in the learning, mastery and repetition of movements which are simple but rarely easy, and in the partner work where we witness one another’s human, physical vulnerabilities. Karate practice requires that we inhabit our own bodies more fully than mainstream culture ever allows, in ways that few adults remember how to enjoy. And karate practice can be very, very quiet—the rituals of bowing and standing and following instructions leave lots of space for what the author and life coach Martha Beck calls “squirrel brain”—that relentlessly nattering self talk so richly fueled by Fear—to get completely out of control.
For the very confused and sad 19-year-old that I was when I began my karate training at a feminist dojo (the Japanese word for “training hall”) in Brooklyn, NY, this call to be present was nearly unbearable. I couldn’t have told you then, but I understand now, that the dominant fact of my life at that time was Fear. My life terrified me. I was trying to come to grips with being a lesbian, I was trying to go to college—the first in my family to do so—I was trying to grow up, find my way out of a painful and lonely adolescence. On the street, the roar of my own Fear was drowned by the New York City din; the racing of my pulse and my squirrelly thoughts were matched by the City’s relentless pace. But when I entered the quietude of the dojo, I was alone with my internal brew. And I—a classic overachiever, a stereotypical Virgo who loves order and ritual and rules—could not handle the simple routines of a beginner karate class. The first year I studied, I cried in every single class. I rarely lasted for an entire session and I always left abruptly, failing to bow to partners or teachers as I tore out of the building. This didn’t lead to me feeling terribly successful about myself as a karate-ka, a practitioner of the art. Despite the admonition that “each of us is on our own path,” I constantly compared myself to the other students. I realize now that most of them were only in their middle twenties, but they seemed so old and poised and sure of themselves at the time. They asked questions, they never cried, they practiced karate at home. I just came to class and wept. But: I kept coming back.
I have been a karate teacher for a long, long time now and I am still in awe of my first teachers’ incredible depth of compassion and acceptance for the girl who couldn’t last a single hour without tears. Beginners are hard enough to teach. I appreciate now the comedy of knowing with certainty that one of your students is going to flee— but getting to be surprised each time by the exact moment that she does. My teachers, and through their example, my sister students, held a space for me where I could be present with my Fear. Some exercises puffed Fear up and made it seem even bigger and more powerful—the “hitting each other” parts were tough for me, despite our focus on control and contact, as were the “falling onto the ground” parts. But as I found power and skill and happiness in my own body, much of my practice helped Fear to quiet and move away. Kicking has always felt to me as close as the human body can come to flying—it is purely joyful. Although I think this word is overused, it is true in the most profound way to say that I was empowered by the brand of self-defense training I received—which is rooted in an anti-violent, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, socialist feminist polemic of great practicality and deep moral purpose. The moving meditation of simple karate strikes, blocks and kicks taught me to access reserves of calm from within myself— reserves that then became available to me as I moved through the challenge of “getting a life.”
It was a great relief to outgrow the screaming terror of my late teens and early karate training, and settle down as an adult growing into greater happiness and serenity. This process was incredibly gradual and of course, totally incomplete—“squirrel-brain” never really goes away, and Fear is always lurking just around the next life change, big or small. After twelve years in New York City and ten years at the dojo, the time came to move on. When my partner Liz and I decided to move to the Valley we knew two important things: there was vibrant Unitarian congregation, and a well known women’s dojo. It was clearly a reasonable place to live.
Now, I want to stop a moment and tell you what we mean when we talk about “styles” of martial arts. One of the summer reality shows I enjoy watching recruits dancers, most of who are trained in a specific style of dance such as hip-hop, ballroom or tap, and challenges them to compete in dances completely different from the ones that they know. I love this show; I really can’t get enough of it. As a viewer, you know that the hip-hop dancer who’s trying to do Latin dance is much, much, much better than you would ever be. Their training in form and rhythm and choreography is immediately useful as they learn the new dance. And yet, to the Latin dancer on the judging panel—it’s just not quite right.
This is how it is with martial arts. My New York school and my Valley school teach two different styles. Both come from Okinawa, and share influences of both Chinese and Japanese martial arts history. We like to say the styles are “cousins” and that two schools are “sister schools.” But like the hip-hop dancer trying to do a perfect Rumba, the student who switches styles is going to be “not quite right” a good amount of the time.
This is the challenge I faced when I arrived here in 1998. When we first moved I thought I would take some time off from karate, explore other types of moment and recreation, or just eat dinner at 6:00 like normal people instead of being at the dojo until 8 or later. But only two weeks after moving here I showed up at the dojo for a visit, and felt so immediately at home that my commitment to training there was inevitable. After a few months of being a welcome guest, I tied on a white belt and began the process of training through the ranks of a new style.
One of my new training sisters, a newly minted black belt at that time, said to me then, “I don’t think I could do what you’re doing.” I think she meant the re-learning, the willingness to be “not quite right” so much of the time, after ten years of dutiful study, of having been a teacher myself and having earned a black belt rank. And my friend expanded the compliment by saying, “And you do it with so much grace.”
I recall thinking at the time: “Is this woman nuts?” Because just like my first first year of karate training, I felt anything but graceful. Grace, I thought, meant cool self assurance, poise, reserve. All those things I thought I had seen in the older, wiser, twenty-something beginners of my first go-round. Grace must be the Virgo part of me, the part who could smile serenely, arrive on time, and follow instructions. I didn’t run out of quite as many classes the second time around, but I did sit in the car and weep instead of going into the dojo to practice when the enormity of loss and change was unbearable. And I was crabby a good bit of the time, with dashes of bitter and sullen thrown in for good measure, and my squirrel-brain was having a field day.
But what if doing something “with grace” doesn’t necessarily mean doing it “gracefully”? When I looked up definitions of grace I found words like “acceptance” and “approval” or (this one I especially like): “unmerited divine assistance.” Unmerited: which is to say, unconditional—like the compassion extended to me by my teachers and sisters at both dojos. There’s certainly room in unconditional for crying, and for squirrel-brain; for Fear, for clumsiness, for self doubt. Or how about Anne Lamott’s definition of grace as “the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way.” The martial arts come to us from cultures which honor ancestors, and we call our teachers, “those who have come before.” It has been my great good fortune to practice in schools where the teachers who come before us offer great love to their students, unearned, that we might learn to extend the same kindness to ourselves and our students in turn. To rise to a challenge with this kind of grace is just to show up.
And this is the secret core of my karate practice: there is no secret, I just show up. I am tenacious in the work of karate, and not just in the hard sweaty practice of it, which I also really love. From the beginning I somehow knew that karate required surrender—not to Fear itself, but to the presence of Fear. Any time I’m at the dojo, there is a possibility that I’ll leave in tears— but I have every tomorrow to try showing up again. What I knew from the beginning is still true: to do karate, all you have to do is do karate. I just keep putting myself in it, and some days it will flow like poetry, and other days it will stick like mud, but it will always be the same path.
I keep hoping that Fear will leave me alone, and Fear keeps coming around. A few years back, when I was in the home stretch toward earning my second black belt, I wished for a smooth and graceful path, but it kept getting interrupted by physical illness, insomnia, and moments of irrational, ungrounded terror. Trying to pull myself together, I recalled the night before I went into labor with my daughter Alice, when I got lost in the maze of Holyoke Hospital and sank right down against a wall and cried. When grace, in the guise of caring professionals, brought my partner and my midwife to me, the midwife—a member of this congregation—said, “If you weren’t freaking out right now, I’d be worried. You’ve got to freak out if you’re going to do this thing.” This is awfully close to what another member of this congregation said to me when I told her how scared I was to be delivering this sermon (this is the clean version): “It would be screwed up if you weren’t scared.”
I really needed to deliver exactly this sermon, exactly this weekend. Because staring down my fortieth birthday has stirred up a whole new bout of squirrel-brain, and new irrational terror about the next chapter of my life. Once again, I find myself pretty scared, pretty much most of the time. But this time I know Fear for what it is: a travelling companion, a some-time opponent, a teacher, a party to the human journey. I can respect it, I can even listen to it—but if I don’t do what it says, I’ll be fine. And I know who my people are, the community who will help me find my next chapter—they’re the friends who say to me in word and deed, “It would be screwed up if you weren’t scared.”
For years I longed for a stronger connection to this congregation, a sense of undeniable belonging. And wouldn’t you know that crying in front of a room full of Society members at that budget meeting did more to create that connection than anything I had tried before. Committee meetings, small group ministry, making coffee—too easy. I had to love this place, and its members, and my family’s home here so deeply that it frightened me, and then I had to step into the roiling waters of that Fear and tell you all about it.
When I birthed my baby, tenacious surrender in the face of Fear turned out to be my greatest strength. I didn’t fight what my body was trying to do, and only because I had wept and raged the night before. Maybe grace requires that acting out, maybe grace can’t be achieved gracefully. I wish the spiritual path, the martial path, the path to greater connection with this community, the path to my brilliant mid-life transformation, could be walked with decorum and order, maybe with a little light piano music in the background and without ever falling down or crying. But, like childbirth or earning a black belt, the path toward grace is often scary and messy, with long stretches of hard, hard work and a pile of dirty laundry afterward. Fear’s not going anywhere soon, and I’m resigned to its squirrelly incarnations. My path, in the dojo and outside, has shown me that grace abides on the far side of Fear, if not as gracefully as we hope, as abundantly as we ever need.
“The first principle of a warrior is not being afraid of who you are.”
Several months ago this congregation had a meeting to discuss the Society’s budget, as we often do. A proposal had been put forth about which I knew I had very strong feelings. My partner and I talked about the proposal at great and dramatic length (the word “ranting” comes to mind); I fell asleep or woke up more than once thinking about the issue; I sometimes talked to myself about it when I was driving alone in my car. But I didn’t really know how strong my feelings were until I got up to speak at the meeting. When I started to talk, I discovered that I was terrified. And adding to the simple challenge of speaking clearly to a complex issue, I was also crying. I honestly can’t recall any words going through my mind as I realized that I was going to weep through my entire turn at the microphone, but I can sum up the familiar feeling of tenacious surrender with this phrase: “Oh well, here we go again.”
This summer I will celebrate my twentieth anniversary as a student of Okinawan martial arts, and a month later, my 40th birthday. My martial arts practice is, in a very real sense, the story of my adult life. It is the place where—among many, many lessons— I learned to accept Fear as the great teacher that it is. And it is where I experience, again and again, the incredible Grace that comes of being present to Fear, of walking “into those roiling waters,” and coming out whole.
It might be reasonable to presume that the scariest thing about being a martial artist is the fighting part—the “getting hit” part, and maybe also the “hitting other people” part. The recent growth of the extremely violent spectacle that calls itself “mixed martial arts”—which I hesitate to even call a sport—enhances the perception that martial arts practice is about the exchange of body-damaging blows. My practice could not be more unlike this brutal combat activity. In practical terms, the two karate schools at which I have studied practice ju kumite or “soft sparring.” Light contact and control of one’s own body are respected skills which students work hard to master. Sparring practice is playful, joyous and often full of laughter. What then, is there to be afraid of? In a word—everything.
Karate practice asks us to be present—in the stillness of the meditations which begin and end classes, in the learning, mastery and repetition of movements which are simple but rarely easy, and in the partner work where we witness one another’s human, physical vulnerabilities. Karate practice requires that we inhabit our own bodies more fully than mainstream culture ever allows, in ways that few adults remember how to enjoy. And karate practice can be very, very quiet—the rituals of bowing and standing and following instructions leave lots of space for what the author and life coach Martha Beck calls “squirrel brain”—that relentlessly nattering self talk so richly fueled by Fear—to get completely out of control.
For the very confused and sad 19-year-old that I was when I began my karate training at a feminist dojo (the Japanese word for “training hall”) in Brooklyn, NY, this call to be present was nearly unbearable. I couldn’t have told you then, but I understand now, that the dominant fact of my life at that time was Fear. My life terrified me. I was trying to come to grips with being a lesbian, I was trying to go to college—the first in my family to do so—I was trying to grow up, find my way out of a painful and lonely adolescence. On the street, the roar of my own Fear was drowned by the New York City din; the racing of my pulse and my squirrelly thoughts were matched by the City’s relentless pace. But when I entered the quietude of the dojo, I was alone with my internal brew. And I—a classic overachiever, a stereotypical Virgo who loves order and ritual and rules—could not handle the simple routines of a beginner karate class. The first year I studied, I cried in every single class. I rarely lasted for an entire session and I always left abruptly, failing to bow to partners or teachers as I tore out of the building. This didn’t lead to me feeling terribly successful about myself as a karate-ka, a practitioner of the art. Despite the admonition that “each of us is on our own path,” I constantly compared myself to the other students. I realize now that most of them were only in their middle twenties, but they seemed so old and poised and sure of themselves at the time. They asked questions, they never cried, they practiced karate at home. I just came to class and wept. But: I kept coming back.
I have been a karate teacher for a long, long time now and I am still in awe of my first teachers’ incredible depth of compassion and acceptance for the girl who couldn’t last a single hour without tears. Beginners are hard enough to teach. I appreciate now the comedy of knowing with certainty that one of your students is going to flee— but getting to be surprised each time by the exact moment that she does. My teachers, and through their example, my sister students, held a space for me where I could be present with my Fear. Some exercises puffed Fear up and made it seem even bigger and more powerful—the “hitting each other” parts were tough for me, despite our focus on control and contact, as were the “falling onto the ground” parts. But as I found power and skill and happiness in my own body, much of my practice helped Fear to quiet and move away. Kicking has always felt to me as close as the human body can come to flying—it is purely joyful. Although I think this word is overused, it is true in the most profound way to say that I was empowered by the brand of self-defense training I received—which is rooted in an anti-violent, anti-racist, anti-homophobic, socialist feminist polemic of great practicality and deep moral purpose. The moving meditation of simple karate strikes, blocks and kicks taught me to access reserves of calm from within myself— reserves that then became available to me as I moved through the challenge of “getting a life.”
It was a great relief to outgrow the screaming terror of my late teens and early karate training, and settle down as an adult growing into greater happiness and serenity. This process was incredibly gradual and of course, totally incomplete—“squirrel-brain” never really goes away, and Fear is always lurking just around the next life change, big or small. After twelve years in New York City and ten years at the dojo, the time came to move on. When my partner Liz and I decided to move to the Valley we knew two important things: there was vibrant Unitarian congregation, and a well known women’s dojo. It was clearly a reasonable place to live.
Now, I want to stop a moment and tell you what we mean when we talk about “styles” of martial arts. One of the summer reality shows I enjoy watching recruits dancers, most of who are trained in a specific style of dance such as hip-hop, ballroom or tap, and challenges them to compete in dances completely different from the ones that they know. I love this show; I really can’t get enough of it. As a viewer, you know that the hip-hop dancer who’s trying to do Latin dance is much, much, much better than you would ever be. Their training in form and rhythm and choreography is immediately useful as they learn the new dance. And yet, to the Latin dancer on the judging panel—it’s just not quite right.
This is how it is with martial arts. My New York school and my Valley school teach two different styles. Both come from Okinawa, and share influences of both Chinese and Japanese martial arts history. We like to say the styles are “cousins” and that two schools are “sister schools.” But like the hip-hop dancer trying to do a perfect Rumba, the student who switches styles is going to be “not quite right” a good amount of the time.
This is the challenge I faced when I arrived here in 1998. When we first moved I thought I would take some time off from karate, explore other types of moment and recreation, or just eat dinner at 6:00 like normal people instead of being at the dojo until 8 or later. But only two weeks after moving here I showed up at the dojo for a visit, and felt so immediately at home that my commitment to training there was inevitable. After a few months of being a welcome guest, I tied on a white belt and began the process of training through the ranks of a new style.
One of my new training sisters, a newly minted black belt at that time, said to me then, “I don’t think I could do what you’re doing.” I think she meant the re-learning, the willingness to be “not quite right” so much of the time, after ten years of dutiful study, of having been a teacher myself and having earned a black belt rank. And my friend expanded the compliment by saying, “And you do it with so much grace.”
I recall thinking at the time: “Is this woman nuts?” Because just like my first first year of karate training, I felt anything but graceful. Grace, I thought, meant cool self assurance, poise, reserve. All those things I thought I had seen in the older, wiser, twenty-something beginners of my first go-round. Grace must be the Virgo part of me, the part who could smile serenely, arrive on time, and follow instructions. I didn’t run out of quite as many classes the second time around, but I did sit in the car and weep instead of going into the dojo to practice when the enormity of loss and change was unbearable. And I was crabby a good bit of the time, with dashes of bitter and sullen thrown in for good measure, and my squirrel-brain was having a field day.
But what if doing something “with grace” doesn’t necessarily mean doing it “gracefully”? When I looked up definitions of grace I found words like “acceptance” and “approval” or (this one I especially like): “unmerited divine assistance.” Unmerited: which is to say, unconditional—like the compassion extended to me by my teachers and sisters at both dojos. There’s certainly room in unconditional for crying, and for squirrel-brain; for Fear, for clumsiness, for self doubt. Or how about Anne Lamott’s definition of grace as “the force that infuses our lives and keeps letting us off the hook. It is unearned love—the love that goes before, that greets us on the way.” The martial arts come to us from cultures which honor ancestors, and we call our teachers, “those who have come before.” It has been my great good fortune to practice in schools where the teachers who come before us offer great love to their students, unearned, that we might learn to extend the same kindness to ourselves and our students in turn. To rise to a challenge with this kind of grace is just to show up.
And this is the secret core of my karate practice: there is no secret, I just show up. I am tenacious in the work of karate, and not just in the hard sweaty practice of it, which I also really love. From the beginning I somehow knew that karate required surrender—not to Fear itself, but to the presence of Fear. Any time I’m at the dojo, there is a possibility that I’ll leave in tears— but I have every tomorrow to try showing up again. What I knew from the beginning is still true: to do karate, all you have to do is do karate. I just keep putting myself in it, and some days it will flow like poetry, and other days it will stick like mud, but it will always be the same path.
I keep hoping that Fear will leave me alone, and Fear keeps coming around. A few years back, when I was in the home stretch toward earning my second black belt, I wished for a smooth and graceful path, but it kept getting interrupted by physical illness, insomnia, and moments of irrational, ungrounded terror. Trying to pull myself together, I recalled the night before I went into labor with my daughter Alice, when I got lost in the maze of Holyoke Hospital and sank right down against a wall and cried. When grace, in the guise of caring professionals, brought my partner and my midwife to me, the midwife—a member of this congregation—said, “If you weren’t freaking out right now, I’d be worried. You’ve got to freak out if you’re going to do this thing.” This is awfully close to what another member of this congregation said to me when I told her how scared I was to be delivering this sermon (this is the clean version): “It would be screwed up if you weren’t scared.”
I really needed to deliver exactly this sermon, exactly this weekend. Because staring down my fortieth birthday has stirred up a whole new bout of squirrel-brain, and new irrational terror about the next chapter of my life. Once again, I find myself pretty scared, pretty much most of the time. But this time I know Fear for what it is: a travelling companion, a some-time opponent, a teacher, a party to the human journey. I can respect it, I can even listen to it—but if I don’t do what it says, I’ll be fine. And I know who my people are, the community who will help me find my next chapter—they’re the friends who say to me in word and deed, “It would be screwed up if you weren’t scared.”
For years I longed for a stronger connection to this congregation, a sense of undeniable belonging. And wouldn’t you know that crying in front of a room full of Society members at that budget meeting did more to create that connection than anything I had tried before. Committee meetings, small group ministry, making coffee—too easy. I had to love this place, and its members, and my family’s home here so deeply that it frightened me, and then I had to step into the roiling waters of that Fear and tell you all about it.
When I birthed my baby, tenacious surrender in the face of Fear turned out to be my greatest strength. I didn’t fight what my body was trying to do, and only because I had wept and raged the night before. Maybe grace requires that acting out, maybe grace can’t be achieved gracefully. I wish the spiritual path, the martial path, the path to greater connection with this community, the path to my brilliant mid-life transformation, could be walked with decorum and order, maybe with a little light piano music in the background and without ever falling down or crying. But, like childbirth or earning a black belt, the path toward grace is often scary and messy, with long stretches of hard, hard work and a pile of dirty laundry afterward. Fear’s not going anywhere soon, and I’m resigned to its squirrelly incarnations. My path, in the dojo and outside, has shown me that grace abides on the far side of Fear, if not as gracefully as we hope, as abundantly as we ever need.
Mind Body Mama: An Open Letter to Rachel Maddow
Dear Rachel Maddow,
It’s been a few years now, and I know you’ve had a lot of exciting experiences in the intervening time. But you might remember me as the listener who brought her puking baby into the radio station way back in the day when you were a morning dj and I was a stay-at-home mom, hanging on your every witticism to get me through those early daylight hours. Whole Foods had sponsored a free breakfast buffet at the studio that morning; you know a little spit-up wasn’t going to keep this nursing mama from all the wheat-free vegan French toast she could swallow.
I also called in a few times; once I told you my birth story, saying childbirth was akin to sexual and religious ecstasy. You seemed shocked to hear that. I was a little surprised that I said it out loud, let alone on the radio, but the combination of prolonged sleep deprivation and the lactation hormone cocktail sure does a number on a person’s verbal inhibitions.
I misplaced the baby once when we were on the phone too. I put her down and then she crawled away and I had to run through the house looking for her while trying to answer the quiz questions. I won the coffee mug though. Right from the start of this parenting adventure I’ve been a mean multi-tasker. I’m sure you can relate.
Your meteoric—and completely well-deserved; I mean no disrespect— rise to fame has given me pause to consider what can happen in different human lives over the same span of time. For example, one person may experience tremendous professional success and find herself on the covers of magazines, while another may spend the same five years periodically drenched in disgusting bodily fluids. One person can enjoy frequent and stimulating conversations with the likes of Ted Coppell, Barack Obama and John Stewart, while another can go weeks without speaking to another rational adult.
Sometimes the mind just boggles at what can be accomplished within a five year span: Get your own TV show! Influence the political thoughts of an entire nation during an historic election! Become a Jeopardy question! My job, and I’m proud to call it that, is a little less quantifiable. But I can accurately conclude that I’ve done at least 1500 loads of laundry in the past five years, and washed dishes by hand for the equivalent of 22 straight days. Such diversity in the human experience, even among women of the same nation, region, generation and sexual orientation! It’s downright inspiring.
It’s not like I haven’t been doing something important, though. I’ve been nurturing the soul of the next generation! Enriching my child’s life with my motherly presence! I’ve had some set-backs, but I’m sure that’s true of anyone. I know it took you a while to get that MSNBC gig. So I’m not going to feel bad that I forgot to teach my kid how to hold a fork properly. There’s no reason she can’t learn now; someday she’ll be able to eat a whole meal with utensils without biting her own hands. I can feel proud of my contribution to society, especially if I choose to forget reading that study that said kids actually want to spend less time with their parents, and the other one that said kids who go to daycare do just as well as kids who have a stay-at-home mom. And also if I disregard the economic predictions that college tuitions, currently at a dollar figure curiously close to my household income, will continue to skyrocket throughout my daughter’s adolescence.
Fortunately forgetting is not challenging for me. I seem not to have recovered the brain cells lost in the first three months of my child’s life, a time that I fondly call baby boot-camp. Just this week I lost an entire basket of clean laundry, which inconveniently contained all my underpants. Right now I can’t find the pile of handkerchiefs I painstakingly ironed yesterday. I draw a direct connection between events like this and that long-ago night when I couldn’t remember how a person could possibly tell time if they were far from a clock, pinned in an armchair by a suckling parasite. I knew there must be a method; maybe I could invent something that would be helpful, a little later, when I was not so tired? (Hint: wrist-watch.)
Motherhood is indeed transformational, and it transformed me into the kind of person who can’t recall the basic technology of modern life or keep track of inanimate objects. It was a little rocky adjusting to this seismic life change in the beginning. The nights were long but they always ended, and then your show came on the radio! You were there for me in those first days of stunning stupidity, and I’ll always be grateful.
Things are a little different now that my kid is more of a person than a parasite. Sometimes I can even form a thought, although she usually makes sure that I lose track of it with a well-timed interruption. I’ve read that you use earplugs at work so you can focus your brilliance on what you are reading and writing. If you ask me, your staff is a bunch of light-weights if they are bested by the equivilent of cotton-balls; a champion interrupter like my little darling could easily bypass a technicality like that. Have they tried climbing on your lap or breaking things around the studio? Jumping up and down right next to you is another tried and true strategy. I’m just saying.
I know you’re awfully busy now with all those radio and television shows, not to mention the book you’re writing. And I read in the New York Times that you still take the trash to the dump yourself. That’s nice. I still take out the compost most of the time, but sometimes my daughter helps now. She says it smells bad but I make her do it anyway. How many bad smells have I endured for her sake, I ask you? But I do have all that laundry waiting for me, and the disappearing handkerchiefs.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane. We should touch base again sometime, maybe five years from now? I’d love to hear what you’re up to.
Warmest regards,
Your friend and loyal fan,
Lynne Marie
It’s been a few years now, and I know you’ve had a lot of exciting experiences in the intervening time. But you might remember me as the listener who brought her puking baby into the radio station way back in the day when you were a morning dj and I was a stay-at-home mom, hanging on your every witticism to get me through those early daylight hours. Whole Foods had sponsored a free breakfast buffet at the studio that morning; you know a little spit-up wasn’t going to keep this nursing mama from all the wheat-free vegan French toast she could swallow.
I also called in a few times; once I told you my birth story, saying childbirth was akin to sexual and religious ecstasy. You seemed shocked to hear that. I was a little surprised that I said it out loud, let alone on the radio, but the combination of prolonged sleep deprivation and the lactation hormone cocktail sure does a number on a person’s verbal inhibitions.
I misplaced the baby once when we were on the phone too. I put her down and then she crawled away and I had to run through the house looking for her while trying to answer the quiz questions. I won the coffee mug though. Right from the start of this parenting adventure I’ve been a mean multi-tasker. I’m sure you can relate.
Your meteoric—and completely well-deserved; I mean no disrespect— rise to fame has given me pause to consider what can happen in different human lives over the same span of time. For example, one person may experience tremendous professional success and find herself on the covers of magazines, while another may spend the same five years periodically drenched in disgusting bodily fluids. One person can enjoy frequent and stimulating conversations with the likes of Ted Coppell, Barack Obama and John Stewart, while another can go weeks without speaking to another rational adult.
Sometimes the mind just boggles at what can be accomplished within a five year span: Get your own TV show! Influence the political thoughts of an entire nation during an historic election! Become a Jeopardy question! My job, and I’m proud to call it that, is a little less quantifiable. But I can accurately conclude that I’ve done at least 1500 loads of laundry in the past five years, and washed dishes by hand for the equivalent of 22 straight days. Such diversity in the human experience, even among women of the same nation, region, generation and sexual orientation! It’s downright inspiring.
It’s not like I haven’t been doing something important, though. I’ve been nurturing the soul of the next generation! Enriching my child’s life with my motherly presence! I’ve had some set-backs, but I’m sure that’s true of anyone. I know it took you a while to get that MSNBC gig. So I’m not going to feel bad that I forgot to teach my kid how to hold a fork properly. There’s no reason she can’t learn now; someday she’ll be able to eat a whole meal with utensils without biting her own hands. I can feel proud of my contribution to society, especially if I choose to forget reading that study that said kids actually want to spend less time with their parents, and the other one that said kids who go to daycare do just as well as kids who have a stay-at-home mom. And also if I disregard the economic predictions that college tuitions, currently at a dollar figure curiously close to my household income, will continue to skyrocket throughout my daughter’s adolescence.
Fortunately forgetting is not challenging for me. I seem not to have recovered the brain cells lost in the first three months of my child’s life, a time that I fondly call baby boot-camp. Just this week I lost an entire basket of clean laundry, which inconveniently contained all my underpants. Right now I can’t find the pile of handkerchiefs I painstakingly ironed yesterday. I draw a direct connection between events like this and that long-ago night when I couldn’t remember how a person could possibly tell time if they were far from a clock, pinned in an armchair by a suckling parasite. I knew there must be a method; maybe I could invent something that would be helpful, a little later, when I was not so tired? (Hint: wrist-watch.)
Motherhood is indeed transformational, and it transformed me into the kind of person who can’t recall the basic technology of modern life or keep track of inanimate objects. It was a little rocky adjusting to this seismic life change in the beginning. The nights were long but they always ended, and then your show came on the radio! You were there for me in those first days of stunning stupidity, and I’ll always be grateful.
Things are a little different now that my kid is more of a person than a parasite. Sometimes I can even form a thought, although she usually makes sure that I lose track of it with a well-timed interruption. I’ve read that you use earplugs at work so you can focus your brilliance on what you are reading and writing. If you ask me, your staff is a bunch of light-weights if they are bested by the equivilent of cotton-balls; a champion interrupter like my little darling could easily bypass a technicality like that. Have they tried climbing on your lap or breaking things around the studio? Jumping up and down right next to you is another tried and true strategy. I’m just saying.
I know you’re awfully busy now with all those radio and television shows, not to mention the book you’re writing. And I read in the New York Times that you still take the trash to the dump yourself. That’s nice. I still take out the compost most of the time, but sometimes my daughter helps now. She says it smells bad but I make her do it anyway. How many bad smells have I endured for her sake, I ask you? But I do have all that laundry waiting for me, and the disappearing handkerchiefs.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane. We should touch base again sometime, maybe five years from now? I’d love to hear what you’re up to.
Warmest regards,
Your friend and loyal fan,
Lynne Marie
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