What do you practice?

monday practice: ginger snaps

Lately I've been thinking a lot about practice.  It's just been this perfect confluence of inputs lately -- one part the whole Anusaga; an equal, if not greater, part reading -- and so I've been stirring these questions of what I practice around and around in the bowl of my mind.  I'm feeling particularly lucky that on top of the book I just finished, there have been so very many blogs and posts recently reminding us, exhorting us, to just practice.  Just unroll our mats, take our seats, inhabit our steady practice and breathe, making like Sri Pattabhi Jois:

Practice and all is coming.

I hold this truth to be self-evident: Practice doesn't make perfect.  Practice is perfect. 

A favorite blog this week was from the School of Yoga, the new home of Christina Frosolono Sell, Darren Rhodes and now Noah Maze.  In Please Practice, Bridgette writes:

Time to get back to the mat. Roll out our mats alone, with friends, with strangers. Doesn’t matter where, with who or what we call it. But, for the love of God, please practice.

I've been getting a lot of reading and writing done in the past couple of months, as I live through my second herniated disc and as I've not been practicing on my mat.  This continues to be such an adjustment, really, since for years now I've devoted hours and hours each week to being in class, to taking my place with my friends and teachers, to sitting , moving, breathing and laughing together.  It's amazing how much more shit you can get done when you're not in 5 classes a week + travel time, how much more clarity I can sustain about my larger goals and plans when I'm at home so much, doing a very different practice.

Even though for the past 9 years my most visible practice has been that of asana, physical yoga is not the only thing to which I've been devoting myself.  And now that my mobility is impaired and I'm in pain, bam, I'm so much more aware of my other areas of practice -- thank goodness for those.  Who says yoga is all the body, anyway?  

Towards the end of Martha Beck's latest book Finding Your Way in a Wild, New World, she includes a section on the 10,000 hours, aka Tracking Your True Nature. You know this idea, the one that Malcolm Gladwell popularized a few years ago, that true mastery of anything requires the investment of on the order of 10,000 hours.  A neurological study Martha references, of the brains of truly adept music students vs. regular ho-hum students, revealed absolutely no biological basis for this difference in skill -- the only difference is practice.  Passionate, deep practice for years and years and years: 6 hours a day for 5 years, 3 hours a day for 10 years, 1 1/2 hours a day for 20 years, 12 hours a day for 2 1/2 years.  I think I've written about this before, since it's an idea that entrances me.

I love that the book includes exercises, invitations for me to write in the margins and fill in the blanks.  I knew, from the start, that this was a book I'd be keeping, never surrendering, so have been annotating all along.  And behold, the opportunity to think about, then write down Things I've Deep-Practiced for Ten Thousand Hours.  Oooooh, a List.  You know how much I love those!  Even better: the point is that the items on the list constitute "hot tracks" left by your true nature -- these are "part of your art, the way your true nature expresses itself in the world of Form." Looking at where you have invested 10,000 hours of your time gives you crucial clues to what you love, what drives you, what you've been practicing.  Who you are.

Because yeah, what you practice is who you are.  As I wrote last week, what you do is who you are.  Your practices make you in this steady accretion, like corals secreting layers and layers of skeleton, all the while building the reef of You.

What, you ask, have I been practicing all these years?  Check it out:

I know, I know, I'm kind of a scribbler, so in case you can't read it, it's pretty simple 1) yoga; 2) writing; 3) reading; 4) hiking, walking, being in the woods.  5 - 8 (not pictured) go like this: loving, watching, learning from dogs; gardening; social media; and finally, animals, animals, animals. Of course yoga is #1 on the list, since it's the item commonly referred to as a practice and it's the area where I seem to apply my nerdy counting skills the most, keeping a running tally in my calendar of how many hours a week I've been on my mat.  When I'm on my mat, that is.  

But the rest, really: those, except for social media, are all things I've been deep-practicing for ages -- being obsessed with nature, with dogs, with animals, with being in the woods, with going to the zoo and staring at tigers, feeling the lion's grumble in every fiber of my being.  The gardening is an extension of this same essential passion: to be outside, to be inside the workings of the outside, to recognize the pattern that's on my insides, too.  That's what I practice.  That's what I am.

And that's the point.  What I am is what I should be doing. Not just as hobbies but as the essential work of my life.  The good news is that I feel as though for the first time ever, in a way I've been growing toward for years and years, I'm doing it.  Finally.  Even though it takes getting up at 4:30am (Fuck Yeah Early-Early Wake-Up Time!) in order to have enough time to read and write and hike and think before the job-day begins, I'm doing it.  Finally, finally, I'm doing what I've known I needed to do all along, the thing that Paul Greenberg told me, long before he was the author of the James Beard Award winning New York Times bestseller Four Fish, when we both worked for the same non-profit mentioned a few days ago.  Sitting in our shared apartment kitchen in Sarajevo in 1998, in his suit and tie, early early in the morning, at his laptop, cup of instant coffee at his side, he said, when I commented on his discipline, on his devotion to his practice, despite the work-day ahead of us: "Writers write."  

Amen, brother.  That they do.

Also lately, though it's not on the list above, making cookies.  It's possible I've spent a total of 10,000 hours in my lifetime making cookies, experimenting with recipes and flavor combinations and ensuring a steady supply of this sweet dietary staple in the house.  It's such a friendly little food, the cookie -- the perfect delivery system for just the right amount of delight.  And, in times of trial, of challenge, of misery and death, oh really, the cookie is just right.  So I've been practicing that a lot lately, too.

What's most wonderful for me right now, even as I am benched and unable to play yoga with my friends, is how much I can re-direct that time and energy into my other practices, and the way I feel them growing in strength as a result.  How satisfying to devote the non-asana time to words, to the blog, to the newsletter, to the idea of the book, feeding all that fuel to the flames of a different practice.

Flames fueled by deep-practice.  And always cookies.

I wonder what you practice, what you have devoted 10,000 hours to, what it says about who you are.  Think about it, write it down, comment below. If it helps you to make cookies first, like it does me, then go for it.  If not, I've got enough to share over here, and anyway, come tomorrow, I'll bake more.

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Asparagus: vegetable, miracle

In Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle -- the story of her family's one-year experiment with "deliberately eating food produced in the same place where we worked, loved our neighbors, drank the water, and breathed the air" -- she, her spouse and their two daughters spend a year eating what grows.  Not just buying what's available at the supermarket, but looking around, waking up to what's actually growing at any given time, and eating it.  She writes about the notion of a genuine food culture, by which she means an affinity between people and the land that feeds them.  This affinity, this genuine food culture, is a sequence of steps people can take, like this: 

Step one, probably is to live on the land that feeds them, or at least on the same continent, ideally the same region.  Step two is to be able to countenance the ideas of "food" and "dirt" in the same sentence, and three is to start poking into one's supply chain to learn where things are coming from.

I'll be honest about a couple of things right off the bat. As a small-time suburban farmer -- I refer to my place as a "farmlet" -- I have loved growing food and composting and digging in the dirt for a long time now, regaining what I think my French grandmother knew all along about growing potatoes and pansies and looking out over rows of pretty plants while the birds sing their song, something about peace and simple satisfaction and good taste.  Next, even though I had every intention of doing so, I haven't finished reading Kingsolver's book -- held up by two things: first my sense that the book itself should take a year to read, to track along with her and her family, month by month, all that they learned through their experience; next, that the tendentious preachy parts (which I skip) do tend to turn me off.  YES, Amen sister-girl on the need to buy organic, on the need to stop spraying.  YES, gotcha: now stop that sermon and rhapsodize some more about vegetables.

Because vegetables, vegetables are a miracle to behold.  And that's enough for me.  I LOVE reading about someone else's experience, their falling into love with the smell of soil, with the pea pods on the vine, the funny parent-like emotion at seeing a plant bud out (My baby is growing up!!).  But I'm a little impatient with the preachy, as much as I appreciate that it needs doing and that somebody needs to hear it.  Somebody will read this and their life will change utterly.

I am certain of this because it's absolutely 100% true that Joe and I were spurred along in our suburban farming by a book we found remaindered in 1990, which we both read and re-read, and which has since gone missing, loaned to someone at some point along the years and never returned.  A Small Farm in Maine, with its story of two publishing professionals who leave their careers and move to Hedgehog Hill Farm, learn to farm and make a living from their labors, filled our imaginations with possibilities.  And we've grown food every year ever since.  As I'm writing this, I just ordered a used copy of the book from Amazon for $1.89 + shipping, and learned the sad news that Terry Silber, the wife of the pair, died of cancer in 2003.  Her ashes were spread at the farm, which closed in 2006.  Sad but also, in its way, perfectly fitting.

I am convinced that the lot of every person walking this earth can be improved by the simple action of planting seeds and harvesting food, that there is little more worth knowing than the flavor of a spear of asparagus fresh from the ground. 

Asparagus is a true miracle, one which is just beginning to emerge from its patch in our farmlet, tender purple and green buds breaking the soil.  It's the beacon, the first glimpse of delicious spring. Asparagus is also the place where I know Kingsolver and I are kin.

I sweated to dig [asparagus] into countless yards I was destined to leave behind, for no better reason than that I believe in vegetables in general, and this one in particular.  Gardeners are widely known and mocked for this sort of fanaticism.  But other people fast or walk long pilgrimages to honor the spirit of what they believe makes our world whole and lovely.  If we gardeners can, in the same spirit, put our heels to the shovel, kneel before a trench holding tender roots, and then wait three years for an edible incarnation of the spring equinox, who's to make the call between ridiculous and reverent?

I'm eating this book slowly, allowing it to accompany what's unfolding in the garden around me.  I can't imagine reading April right now, in the throes of February as we are.  There's time.  In gardening, there's always time.  We're encouraged to rock back on the heels of our gardening clogs and slow down -- waiting, eyes wide, for the wonder that's inevitably coming, that can't and won't be rushed.

If you're seeking inspiration, something to spur you down the garden path or simply another way to think about food, pick up Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and check it out.  Or just come over sometime, in some clothes you're not too fussy about, get down on hands and knees, and rejoice in what the ground can do for us.

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Could you live an entire year eating locally or the food from your garden? Barbara Kingsolver transplanted her family from the deserts of Arizona to the mountains of Virginia for their endeavor. Join From Left to Write on February 21 as we discuss Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. As a member of From Left to Write, I received a copy of the book. All opinions are my own. 

Death makes bakers of us all

The day I stopped being vegan was January 8, 1997, the day a colleague at Internews Network, Chris Gehring, was found murdered in his apartment in Almaty, Kazakhstan.  I can't say that I was very close to Chris, but since we both worked for the same crazy, far-flung operation of do-gooders, we'd met, we'd emailed.  He was an acknowledged star -- a prince among men was the feeling I always got -- universally admired.  A leader.  Found dead in his apartment at 28 in a weird robbery-gone-wrong.

And just like that, my outlook turned upside-down.  I'd been vegan for 9 years, since 1988 or so, since not long after I realized that my son was allergic to dairy products, started reading about factory farms, and taken my vegetarianism a step farther.  It was a huge pain in the ass in those days to be vegan, nowhere to eat, little understanding of this dietary choice.  But we persevered, for years and years.  Even as I started traveling more for work, to parts of the world where this self-imposed dietary restriction was unthinkable, was impractical, I remained committed.  For politeness' sake, I'd eat what was offered to me in Kiev or wherever, but return to my animal-free regimen at home.  It felt right to me. 

But just like that, on the day that Chris died: my veganism vanished.  I remember walking stunned to a corner market near the office, buying a box of assorted honey-sweet baklava and distributing them one by one, desk by desk, acutely aware that this very dripping sweetness we were about to eat, Chris would never taste again.

He was gone.

Who was I to refuse the goodness of what life had to offer?  Who was I to bind myself so tightly inside this little corset of No when one day, I too would be gone and never again be able to savor milk chocolate or a bit of delectable cheese. Or a mouthful of honey.

That veganism to which I had been so passionately devoted suddenly seemed to me so silly, such a diminishment of the range of tastes and flavors and experiences that life has to offer.  I felt like I had been living in a tiny box for so long, cramped.  With Chris's death, the lid blew off.  What had I been hiding from? 

I've never looked back.  I didn't experience any of the mythical illness or discomfort upon returning to the diet I'd been raised on -- good food: meat, dairy, sweets, gluten.  I've been healthy and strong ever since, and the burden I hadn't realized I'd imposed on my family -- my mother-in-law particularly, who, even though we never expected it or asked for it, taught herself whole news ways of cooking in order to accomodate our narrow palates -- was gone.  Eating out was easy.  I forgot so completely about veganism that when we've hosted parties since, I've almost always had to be reminded to lay out a vegetarian option for those whose choice it is not to eat animals.

Believe me: I get it, the whole argument against eating animals.  I would never debate the issue or try to talk someone out of veganism.  I get it about factory farms. I think about my purchases and choose wisely.  I grow a lot of our own food, too.  

But here's the deal: death is a part of life, for all creatures.  As a small-farmer, I'm acutely aware of this, turning the dead into the compost that will feed the fresh come spring. In the words of my teacher Douglas Brooks, "Everybody is eating somebody else."  Word.

My choice, while I can still eat, is to eat everything, everything presented, to experience as wide a variety of these flavors as I can.  For as long as I can.

Faced with my sister's swiftly-approaching death, I'm back in the same boat, feeling that same almost-desperate passion for taste, fixing pans of enchiladas, baking batches of cookies, making chicken stock -- filling the house with the smells and tastes of the Living, for as long as possible.  My sister, the foodie: this world is already lost to her. I feel like I owe it to her, to life itself, to savor it all.

We're not here forever.  And for as long as I'm here, I can promise you this: I'm eating.  I'm eating everything, transforming it all into more love for this life, for as long as I can.

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Suddenness

In the remarkable The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, with which I am currently obsessed, as I have been since its first line -- and now with 30 pages to go I am in a bit of a panic, trying to slow down and unable to stop myself, knowing soon it will be finished, the story will be done -- in this remarkable book, I read a passage this morning which is now pounding through my whole body, now that I've had the news that for my baby sister, finally, after 3 1/2 years of living with glioblastoma, now finally, Tuesday, in-home hospice begins.

We're devastated, naturally.  Despite years of knowing this has been coming, inching ever closer, still there is nothing that makes you truly ready for this.  Nothing. 

But before I continue, please let me say again that if you haven't read The Tiger's Wife -- surely, positively, one of the best books I've ever read -- DO IT.  Get a copy, borrow mine, read it.  It's so full of excellent story and animals and love and pain and war and tigers.  Elephants and tigers! Really, such an amazing effort, truly outstanding.

So, way out on Page 300, the Deathless Man says to Grandfather, a Doctor, when explaining why he is not telling a man who is about to die about what's coming -- even though he knows it and has done so before, letting people know, much to their dismay, that they are about to die:

I am not warning that man because his life will end in suddenness.  He does not need to know this, because it is through the not-knowing that he will not suffer...  His life, as he is living it -- well, and with love, with friends -- and then suddenness.  Believe me, Doctor, if your life ends in suddenness you will be glad it did, and if it does not you will wish it had.  You will want suddenness, Doctor...  You do not prepare, you do not explain, you do not apologize.  And with you, you take all contemplation, all consideration of your own departure.  All the suffering that would have come from knowing comes after you are gone, and you are not a part of it.

Speaking to my brother-in-law this afternoon, as he was making his way from the ER to a nearby cafe for a muffin, hearing all of the exhaustion in his voice, I felt how deeply this is true -- that suddenness can be a mercy.  He's wrung out, he told me, wrung out from 3 1/2 years of this cancer, of this going from one treatment to the next, surviving, loving, hoping against hope.

And now here we are.  Walking just one day at a time and not thinking ahead too much but knowing that the time for curative treatment is over.  Palliative care -- keeping my sister comfortable through the end stages of this disease -- is all we can do now.  Love and comfort and more love.

It's a horrible thing, really, to die for so long, to suffer so hard, to lose so much, gobbled steadily by cancer and a cocktail of drugs.  And yet my brave sister has survived so long, long enough to see her adorable daughter have her fifth birthday, smash open a dog-shaped pinata and rain candy down on her cousins and friends.  

Life is like that, a shine of sweets tumbling over us in sunlight, a mad scramble for joy hidden in the grass.  Big smiles and laughter, and also broken hearts.

We head into the final stages of this journey and I wonder, really wonder, about suddenness.  I'm glad my sister has lived this long, but I deeply regret so much suffering, so very much pain and loss. I wonder about the Deathless Man -- part of me knows he's right about suddenness -- but selfishly I'm grateful for every single breath my sister still draws, glad of any opportunity to see her face and hear her voice.  It's hard and awful but, in its own way, still beautiful, still sweet, sweet candy in our mouths.

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weekend plans: ho hum & so yum

The big question at the office on Fridays, especially on the Friday before a three-day weekend, is "Any big plans this weekend?"  The receptionist in our office is generally the one who asks, of pretty much everyone who crosses his path that day.  I always wish I didn't have the TGIF going so strong, but I do, so I'm always a little giddy on Fridays, eager for the break -- when I actually get one -- and delighted to hear the question asked and answered, vicariously enjoying other people's weekend activities, especially when they're very different from my own.

The truth is that this weekend, the one I'm sitting in right now, feels like it's the first "normal" one in some time.  First Joe was gone for a weekend, then we were both gone the following weekend, then the weekend after that I worked on Sunday, and here it is NOW, this weekend, and we're both here and I don't have to work.  And it's three days long.  From the standpoint of this Saturday morning, the time is unrolled out in front of me, mostly empty, fat with potential.

Joe will be racing tomorrow, his first race of this season, his first race since that catastrophic crash last March which broke 4 ribs, the right clavicle and scapula and punctured his lung. And put a hole in his confidence on the bike.  The driver's insurance company can compensate him for the destroyed frame, the medical bills, the time off work, the pain and suffering, but that hole in his confidence -- that's a tricky thing.  So I'm so, so glad he's out there, so strong right now, ready to engage in the race with his teammates, do well, have fun, feel good.  

Me?  When I was asked yesterday if I had any Big Plans for the weekend, I think I said something like No plans.  Nothing.  Just staying home and I'm so glad.  But I realize now, now that I'm sitting here with my coffee, puppy at my feet, that I was being coy, perhaps, not speaking up about what's really on my list.  Since really, when people are answering things like "going to the movies," "going surfing," "having a romantic dinner with my fiancee at X fancy-pants restau," I realize that my REAL answer is very different and I am a little shy about saying it.  Lame!

Bookworms: stand proud!  Writers: shout it out!

The real answer to what I'm doing this weekend? The Usual: Reading and Writing.  Left to my own devices, besides hiking with the dog, tending the bees and all the other activities associated with my suburban farmlet, all I ever want to do is Read and Write.  And so this weekend's To Do list features finishing The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht, reading the last 60 pages of Martha Beck's new Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, making headway in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver so that I can produce my blog post (due Monday) for my beloved From Left to Write online blogger bookclub.  And starting on a book that my so-thoughtful sister had dedicated to me and sneakily mailed, without saying a word: Invoking Lakshmi by Constantina Rhodes.  

Oh, and last but by no means least, working on my own book.  Yes, it's time.

Around all of that, naturally, will be wound some other stuff -- taking clothes to consignment, making dinner for friends, paying bills, hanging out with Joe outside, pulling weeds or staring at the sky (likely both). Taking dozens of pictures of Mr Burns and delighting in his puppyhood, his snuggliness, his ability to get along with everybody, no matter their species.

But what I am most eager for -- the secret drive that underlies everything else -- is always the words on the page, someone else's or my own, always words and stories and books.  Always this funny thing we're able to do, making these meaningful squiggles that transmit so much, working this crazy so-human magic.  Writers are wizards, truly, dunking the readers' heads in the pensieve, immersing us in the experiences of others.  I can't really think of much else that's more satisfying or delightful.

So now, getting down to it.  Wrapping this up so that I can find a cozy spot with Burnsy, him napping, me reading, coffee and pencil within easy reach.

These are my plans for the weekend.  These are my plans for my whole life, really.  Ho hum for some, probably, but for me, so yum.

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