All those words I can't contain

Once Erika (click on that link!  watch her book trailer!!!) started an email with What a day, what a day...

It's a line from an Erykah Badu song.  In the frenzy of  my response, all those words I can't contain--I don't know if I ever got to the part of mentioning how often I find those words singing through my own head.

Under the palm trees in the dark, sweet breeze tonight.  In my car, sunroof open, just past 11.  On Instagram, which I tool around with at the strangest times....like standing in the middle of my room after a bike ride next thing for 10 straight minutes everything else but this damn dumb little phone dissolves like my brain has wires hooked to it, or I'll be on my feet in the kitchen ignorant to the dogs or my roommates me on my phone screen waiting for tea water boil.  In my car, after the longest most eventful day ever, in the front seat after the lights and engines are off tonight.  Smelling the cool, sweet breeze.  Hearing the palm leaves fan.  Tooling around on Instagram.  Thinking What a day what a day.

Sometimes, it just feels nice to turn your brain off.  To hit a button and then space.   My ears were wet after Shavasana tonight.  Seeping little leaky tears.  D rang the gentle chime to pull us from meditation and I realized it was my last class with her here in Huntington, and I thought of when I started in March and my intentions for healing my body and strengthening, and how strong I am now.  I laid there feeling my heart open from the center, feeling my energy running up and down the course of me smooth as if my spine were train tracks in a long looping line.   Mandy's wedding invitation came in the mail.   And this too, this too.  So much else.  These sisters of mine.  Me, single, alone.  Not at all alone.  Them.  Never at all.  This too, this too my god this too.  I can not even register today.

Life I thought, yoga tears wetting my face.  I don't get you.  Happy, grateful tears, and compassionate tears.  Some of each, so close to the same.  This too.  So many different this-es, so many, many too-s.

What a day what a day~

Her true essence.

After yoga, which was with a different teacher tonight and one of the sweatiest, most energizing workouts I have ever had, my body was craving fresh veggie pasta with every vibrating cell.  I walked to Mother's and bought ingredients and came home and cooked myself a feast.  And decided I'm gonna chill and watch tv.  

So You Think You Can Dance.  It's the first time I've watched prime time in my house in Huntington but today on the phone mom said I needed to.  It makes me miss her.  This was our show.   When we lived together two falls ago she got me hooked.  I forgot how deeply dance moves me.  Good dance pangs my heart, catches my throat, covers me in chills.  Makes my eyes fill.   It makes me ache for Baltimore and home because Artscape, all that magnificent street art and dance, starts this week.

My kids are doing so well!  They are not kids by any means but some days like today when I give them a project and look up from my attendance book to see each of them concentrating I swell with something like parental pride and adoration.  In my eyes, it's true, they can do no wrong.  After school I applied for a second job.  It's a mile from my new house.  I can ride my bike, so I hope I get it.

My new house!  There is a hiking trail that leads up the canyon it starts in my neighborhood!  God I am thrilled.  Muller's coming down this weekend and Jason who I haven't seen since Kevin and I were 16 and 15-years-old.  Samba tomorrow night then Long Beach with Alison and who knows who else for dinner and dancing Friday.  Today is the new moon.  My meditation each morning has gotten more and more strong and the journaling has me really self-connected.  We were chanting in class tonight and my soul was so still, so engaged and filling up the vessel of me so presently that all I could think of was Hannah at Earth Activist Training when we did our New Moon ritual.  This was up in the Cazadero Mountains in January.  She said how connected she felt to the moon in her dark phase, when she isn't obliged to reflect the sun and can simply be her whole, pure self.  Her true essence.  That line came back to me on my breath tonight, it filled me whole with my self, it filled me strong as the two weeks of silence at Vipassana did, whole as Cazadero and the Permaculture kids.  I am feeling so sweetly quenched on the gratitude in my heart, on the walking blessings of my life, so excited to be here and on the verge of so many amazing changes.   So alive.  The checking in daily with me is paying off.

I am grateful, aware.  New moon sets a new cycle in motion, our own personal start anew.  Yes yes and thank you.

Breathe. Smile. Go Slow.

Yoga tonight, it was great, Derryne's mantra for practice was Breathe.  Smile.  Go Slowly.  On our last few rounds of sun salutations she really had us go deep in to our breath, which I would do all of class if I could (and wind up on my own endless bliss planet, Planet Kel.)   She said imagine you are moving through honey.  I did.  It made me smile, a lot.

Told my class today that the reason I call them my little chickens is because I am the Mama Hen.  I tried to explain what this meant.  Mama Hen doesn't translate so well.  I caught the Japanese girls calling me The Big Chicken.  With genuine affection in their voices.

This has made me laugh until I am wet-eyed no less than six times today.

Mom's birthday today, Beth yesterday, Paul the day before.   Season of Cancer, Mother Energy.  Talked to ma and grandma.  Thought about men, how I was raised to believe men behave.  What my experience has affirmed or changed of those ideas.  What ideas still need adjusting.

Thoughts are with Erika.  My novel's moving.  Grad school apps are close to complete--ahhhhh and so instead of writing this afternoon when the rare Southern California rain showed up I laid down on my bed and got snuggly and listened to the way the rain sounds in the alley right out of my side window.  Just like I used to love to do in Ocean Pines, the smack noise of rain on tree leaves on to the ground.  Ahhhh.

Tiki Bar last night.  Dancing in the parking lot at midnight. Cute.  I love my life.  Breathe.  Smile.  Go slow.

Check in.

Begin Again

Mmm.  Vampire Weekend not crazy about this band never have been.  But this certain song from Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist is on and not only is it fitting my whimsy but I like the Eleanor Rigby instrumental.  Now I am reminded to rent that movie next time my legs need movement and my breath fresh air so that I walk to Blockbuster a couple blocks from here.

Feels like a long time since I've written.  Now New Slang is on.  Second time I've heard it today  and seriously this is one of my top five favorite songs ever.  That's a big claim I know.  Not sure why.  It just gets something inside me worked out whenever I hear it, something that otherwise is almost always wordless.  I always feel better, more like myself after I hear it.  Always.

And so that's what I'm on here to download today.  About feeling more like me.  Returning to center.  Yoga today was so awesome.  What.  A. Return.  My teacher during final relaxation said Let your outter body fall in to your inner body.  Let you inner body fall in to your core.  Now let your core fall in to silence.  It's been a long time--over a week--since I've been able to sit in silence.  Actually no close to two.  For whatever reason I've been hectic inside and missing my center.  Which is what happens all the time when I am going through changes since I'm human.  No matter how many times I live the example I will also always, always forget that taking quiet time to connect to me in the morning is literally the best gift I can give not only myself but the whole world.  I'm so much more inuitive, relaxed and also engaged then.

I stood up after shavasana--final relaxation--was over and thought yep, Begin Again.  Which is a Zazen or Buddhist line reminding us to always keep a loosely open mind.  When the chatter in mediation returns, Begin Again.  But I'm an action girl, I care about applying and walking it the most.  So to me Begin Again is just that.  So what it's been close to two weeks since I've had, or should I say in truth, believed in my practice.

It's all good... Begin Again....

And this is what I am trying to get through to him

Yes, teacher, yes... I believe you, he says, but I don't quit because we're not at his edge yet.  I go on, certain to keep our gaze fixed.

Good, I'm glad you believe it, now try it.  I promise if you practice your negatives you will be a better fighter. Understand?  I promise~

From his gaze on mine I feel his whole sphere encompass then retreat and I know I got my in--that he's heard me.  What he does with it is up to him, but without question what I have shared will sink in.  The seed it waters, that may come later...maybe back home in Brazil, maybe in conversation with his mother.  Who knows?  But the concept saturated, and that's all that matters to me in the end.

He is twenty-something, with achingly good looks, the kind you feel in your muscles. He's easy to like and uses the charm of his smile and eyes, these gifts that have given him many passes in life, to keep class light.  I like having him as part of the dynamic and so do all the ladies, which presents a whole other all the time behavior lesson of keeping male and female energies equated.  Human dynamics and being in the heat of it, I love this stuff.  I am a natural educator not by my trade but because I am always, all the time learning. If this is the case for you than you get it--you are all the time also teaching, too.

And this is what I am trying to get through to him.  Plasticity.  The stretchiness of the brain, literally.  How when we challenge ourselves to a new concept, mental, physical, emotional, the details don't matter, it's the "newness" or "challenge" factor that engages a chemistry change.  With practice, this new opening actually impacts all our current rhythms.  We can even change our muscle memory, re-establish all new patterns this way.

So what I want is for him to learn the negative forms of contractions--this area where there is a gap just subtle enough in class for only I to see.  He just quietly scoots around negatives, so that's the place I want his eyes forced open, and I am challenging him, and he is a cage fighter, obsessed with MMA, and obsession--passion--of any kind impresses and excites me so I know to appeal to this.  And I know, enough to promise, that what I am saying is right.  I hated grammar, hated it, the only reason I ever took english EVER was to write.  Now, step by step with patience and quiet I have to learn each rule so that my students can understand.  It hurts my head.   And it's made my writing so damn clean but is it that or my commitment to the new postures in yoga I am coercing my body to learn?  The connections are stunning and clear, as I write long hours away until the dark threads its rightness, its ease of night finesse right into my skin. I have whole stories in front of me or poems completed, and new ones charging to begin. This is yoga, and grammar, and human behavior lesson 101.  So I take aim and he gets it.  Learn your negatives.  It will help you fight.

When I drop his gaze he smiles a to the side smile and gives me a pound.  I get it I get it teacher...Open your mind.

He gets the concept, what he does now is up to him.

Newport. NE 10th Street & Ocean, just north of Nye Beach

It is raining and it will persist for days, I had this pang of yolk inside me that had to come here and take a big eyefull, big as I can manage, of the grey mist and white-capped sea.

Beth's yoga practice is so strong since I last was here, I tell her this but it is hard for me to vocalize it because the tears are raised in my chest. I haven't had a practice since I left, that was five years ago, too long to go that unrooted. She guides us to set an intention in the beginning of class and I almost laugh out loud because it is so clearly aimed at me~whether or not she meant it, she did. She is my sister, we speak that way. She is dear friend.

She knows what I came here with, what she took me to the labryinth with, what came out the other side. We haven't talked much of it, she hasn't forced or asked. She knows it's him.

And that's what it is, the difference. How strong her practice is, you can tell in her manner in class. It's all different: it's all shakti, it's all us as womyn, as grace as our selves full fruiting in our 30's, secure in our root system, owning what we have to own, what I mean when I keep talking to her all high about my obsession with full womanly ass. How good it feels to be my own. It's Anusara for her and watching her radiate as she comes in to her own. It's believing in roots, and truth, in reconvening with my vision, the willingness she eases me towards of letting go and the best is yet to be for me. I feel so good, so strong when it is done. So strong, but like she says and teaches soft, and open to what I was holding inside.

She gets off at two so I go to stare at the sea and wait. Drops of rain are all over the windsheild, drops of rain hit my face through the open pane.

What do you feel like doing?

Nothing, I answered myself. Listening to the wind.

Call you later, I text her. Going to bed, I need rest.