The parts vs. the whole.

Growing up an athlete, I learned my body in component parts:

I needed lean biceps to rein in my horse.  Or, I needed powerful quads to propel myself off the wall after a flip turn.  Strong shoulders were essential for thousands of yards of freestyle and butterfly.  And calves tight and clenched as fisted hands helped push me that last mile further down the road during a long, arduous jog.

It doesn’t help that, growing up a woman, I was also bombarded by magazines that explained how exactly I could firm up my abs, or how I could obtain that high, well-rounded bottom, or how I could make certain I’d rid my triceps of flab, or how I could play up just my eyes with makeup while leaving the rest of my face clean, “natural.”

Bits and pieces, I was told—work on one bit and one piece, isolate one muscle group, hone in on one, lone sliver of limb, dramatize one feature, and work it right, and make it perfect.

Rarely did I think of my body as one, complete moving thing.  Rarely did I think of how all those component parts actually worked together, let alone fit together.

Until yoga.

There, I learned the inhale fuels the stretch and the exhale feeds the compression.  I learned how, by tightening my quads, I could loosen my hamstrings.  I began to understand how my forward bends built and strengthened my backward bends.  I was taught how the ankles line up to the knees, which line up to the hips, which line up to the spine, to create a clean, solid line of muscle and might. It took a good two years before I began to fully understand how what I put into my body—from fluids to food to too little sleep—grossly influenced what it was able to put out.  I learned the body followed the eyes; the breath led the heart; and the mind, sometimes, needed let out to pasture to rest, to recover, to rebuild while the rest of the system worked for awhile.

Yoga taught me that one thing builds on another to create a whole—the same way one thing can topple everything, and break it apart.

Tonight, in a particularly sweaty and soul-twisting class, the teacher kept reminding us that we don’t come to yoga to gain anything—not strength, not flexibility, not peace, not a better waistline.  Because, in truth, we have everything we need already within us.  The yoga just strips away the excess, the unnecessary.  Yoga sweeps out the clutter.  Yoga helps us see and appreciate the whole of ourselves.

Yoga wipes clear the misperception that we are not whole to begin with.

I thought this lesson fascinating and quite fitting, given I haven’t been feeling all that whole or even semi-put together these days.

Case in point: When we set our intention at the beginning of class, my goal was “be strong and love myself.”  Usually, my intention is to let go or to forgive or to try or to relax.  Fairly basic.  ”Be strong and love myself” even gave me pause—but I knew I was thinking that because I’ve felt frayed, separated, my heart in one place and my head in another, my knees hurting while my elbows kept cracking, and all the while, berating and blaming myself for a seemingly endless series of disappointments.

I spent the entire 90 minutes of class awash in sweat, breath, heat, and energy.  I took every instruction and applied it.  I listened to every last word.  I broke when I needed to break, and I powered through when I least expected myself able.  I paid attention to and doted on every last fiber and inch of all 5’11″ of me.

When I walked out of the studio, I suddenly remembered my intention.  And I thought to myself how I have always been strong—I will always be strong.  It is innate within me.  As is love.  Simple as that.  The fact that I thought I’d lost or needed a replacement of either is a testament to the intensity and pressure of these last few weeks.  Perhaps even these last few months.

The truth is this, though:  It takes more than one yoga class to repair the damages, of any kind, but I am convinced that we keep going back not because we want our arms to show more sculpt and our butts to show less bounce or our cheeks to grow more hollow.

No—we go back because we begin to crave that clean mirror, that sensation of fullness, of completion, of a whole self seen and appreciated.

We come back to our yoga, time and time again, because it reminds us of who we really are, underneath everything else.

And it is our choice:

Are we brave enough to stand and embrace the all of her?

Yes.  I hope the answer is, always, yes.

We, as you never knew us.

We, as sisters—

We were blond-curled and brunette-topped, we were long and skinny, we were muscled, tight, wiry, and working, always working: to do better, be better, to please, to make happy, to make proud, to succeed, to show: we can do this, oh yes, we can, just you watch and see.

We were excited easily; we were rarely frightened—we were protected.

We were pink little girls, we were dirt-brown tomboys, we were bejeweled gypsies tripping in our mother’s wedged heels, tangled in our mother’s 1970s bangles and beads.  We were taught how to weed and how to wash floors and how to clean windows and how to peel potatoes.  We learned how to read poetry aloud (slowly, carefully, thoughtfully, honestly). We were young women, gowned, glistening, ripening, restless, ready.

We were athlete, equestrian, captain, dancer, tumbler, flutist, pianist, soprano, writer, poet, painter, rebel, social butterfly, senior prankster, collegiate graduate, master of English, a J.D. recipient, and, finally, mother to our own.

We were creative, brave, tenacious.  We were confident: we weren’t afraid to own and deliver our authentic selves.

We were certain; we were, also, never so unsure.

We were sensitive, emotional, we were tear-streaked, we asked silent “why’s”, and we knew the answer was too sharp, too dangerous, too, too black and deep to wade out into alone, and so we were together, we were intertwined hands, we were braided hair and rubbed backs and heads resting on shoulders—we were the last pillars standing when the house fell.

We broke free, we blazed, and we left, and then we got lost, many times.

We told ourselves we needed to find our own way:  sometimes on cut knees, with torn fingernails; sometimes in silk, with polish; sometimes in nothing but the skin over our bones; sometimes in the glory of victory, sometimes in the anguish of defeat; but always together, though, we were always together—

We, sisters.

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We, as single women—

We were confident we wouldn’t always be like this.

We were brazen in our confidence, actually, because we knew we were worthy, we were beautiful, smart, we were coy, we were not easy to catch; we were setting traps long before you took a nibble.  We were engaging, friendly, witty, delightful.  We were sexy.  We were fresh, we were clean, we were perfumed and painted and poised, lips puckered.

We were so unfamiliar that we became fascinating—for a moment.

We were punching bags, we were stepping stones, we were test cases; we were one nights, we were rarely mornings.  We were ignored; we were quieted by the echo of silence.  We were rattled, we were worried, we were angry, we were sad, we were told to wait.  We were struggling to bear the badge of Optimist.

We were wondering:  why?

We were the ones our friends pitied, just a little, even though we were never so mean as to call them out plainly.

We were the ones who learned how to take care of ourselves, by ourselves.  We were the ones who tended to our own lonely wounds.  We were the ones who fought for, and gained, a great assurance of our greatness.  We were the ones who knew: If I do not have this, embrace this, strengthen this, celebrate this self, I have nothing.

We were willing to remain romantics.

But, we were hungry.  We were not waiting around for scraps.  We were not here when you came back.

We were searching, hoping, climbing ever further, reaching ever higher, getting closer.

We were patient, we were kind; we were humbled by our loneliness, and we were willing to accept our need and our want, and we were truthful in saying so. We were full-lipped and full-hipped and full of the future.

Because we were happy, loved, appreciated—not by you, but by lucky others, to whom we had given our hearts and received theirs in return.

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We, as yogis–

We were willing to do the good, honest work:  of showing up to our mats and to the mirrors of our practice; of sweating, stretching, struggling, surviving; of letting go; of believing; of accepting we were not meant to be perfect; of forgiving you.

We were of breath and of body.

We were taught a faith without using a gospel, a choir, a mandate of right and wrong in the eyes of another.

We were the best of ourselves, and the worst of ourselves, but mostly, and most importantly, we were the unavoidable and amazing all of ourselves, and we were awash in the prayer of gratitude.

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We, as lovers—

We were slow, deliberate, cautious, we were fearful of our own curiosity.  We were clumsy; we tumbled.

We were talkers, we were walkers, we were swigging beer and trading stories and pocketing memories.  We toppled tables with our heavy elbows and hardy conversations.  We buckled at the knees.  We were laughing, teasing, goading, gaming:  whose turn is it this time?

We were surprised by one another.

We were wary of one another.

I think we knew: we were breaking one another, crack by crack.

We were letters; we were music; we were details; we were young; we were late-night discussions about movies or politics or literature or third-grade embarrassments or senior-year heartaches or college soul-searchings or early-twenty-something mistakes.  We were trying to remember it all.

We were flirtation, we were stolen glances, we were tipsy on promises.  We were friends fired through with lust.

We were bedsheets tangled, we were eyes open at sunrise, we were flush, we were arches, we were caved in, our walls covered, stained, in kisses.  We were pressed against cars, curled into couches, laying atop the ceiling of the ocean. We were the long of it, the short of it, we went around the whole of it, and, still, we were wanting.

We were of the monuments and the mountains. We hiked through the woods; we drove through the country. We got lost in a bad, bullet-torn neighborhood once. We broke into empty houses; we brushed against the dream and quickly closed the shutters.

We fought, and we were both too weak with love to win, and so we lost and conquered each other’s heart instead.

We were sprawled on the banks of a river, hands beneath our heads, sun on our swollen lips, buried alive by the bright sky and the boundless hope of more of this.  We were seasons unfolded, we were holidays, we were sugared and ballooned birthdays, we were beneath the mistletoe, we were mittened, we were sunburnt and salty, we shuffled through blooms and sand dunes and scorched leaves and snow; we rang in another New Year.

We were mighty road warriors.  We were without a real home.  We were without real possessions.  We were never so full.

We were wrestled under by love.

And we bit back.

We were trying, we were reaching; we were closing in, we were pushing away—we were shrinking because we had outgrown the space we carved out for the “us” in our lives.  We were shavings, we were splinters, we split open, we were strewn, like scraps.

We scattered; we were unsure what else to do.

We were the great loves, one day.

And then we were done, over, finished, filed to the past, folded into the drawer of the old cherry dresser in the bedroom of the house I no longer live in but pass through, from time to time, when I need to sit within the shadows, the cool comfort, the whispering memory, of those years we spent in the wild, wonderful company of our greatness, our gusto, our glory, the all of us, in our lovely, imperfect love.

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As inspired by this.

October roads.

Each year, I wait all year for October.

The smells—cool autumn air churning through naked tree tops, and cinnamon and pumpkin and sage burning in candles or baking in ovens, and spiced cider, and the hot, buttery waft of apple turnovers and apple pie and, really, apple everything.

And the sounds—of the leaves underfoot, and the children running home from school, and the scratch of rakes gathering another year’s harvest into piles, and the slow quieting of the birds.

And the sensations—of battening down the hatches, of pulling out the wool and the cashmere and the down comforters, of feeling nostalgic, of drawing the summer shut, fully, finally, and looking forward to the last, great heights of the year: the holidays.

Each autumn, I think: this will be The Year.

This October, I am on the road.

So far this month, I’ve spent more days in Washington, DC and New York City than I have in my home state.  Each week, I pack my small bag and re-fill my toiletries case.  I drive myself to Logan Airport in the dark, before dawn.  I now have to check the monitors to make sure I know where exactly I’m going and when.  I board the shuttle flights full of red-eyed business travelers such as myself, and I wonder: Is this The Year?  Is this The October?

When it all changes.  When it all happens.

In between the flights and the hotels and stuffy, greasy taxi cabs, I try to find the poetry of my favorite month:  Listening to my niece recite snippets of the “Five Little Pumpkins” song I have sung to her at least 30 times.  Chasing my dear friend’s little boy beneath the boughs of Macintosh trees, our soles slipping on cores and twigs, our fingers sticky, his laughter infectious and sweet.

Sitting in a bar booth with my mother and my father and my sister on a rainy Friday afternoon, drinking pumpkin beer out of pints rimmed in sugared cinnamon, devouring big, steaming bowls of clam chowder, and talking, and laughing, and loving.

Taking long, patient jogs up and down the Marblehead streets, ribboned like presents in crimson and gold.  Moving across my yoga mat and hearing the cracks in my hips and my knees and knowing, with a smile, the heat and humidity of summer has left me, and now my body is tight from the cool, eager embrace of fall.

Staring out a car window and holding my breath in the dazzling splash of red and yellow and orange, thrown across the rolling wheat fields and dairy farms of Quebec, and saying we could not be North, not when the sky broke open so beautifully, so grandly, so exquisitely, like out West.  Walking in circles with you around a fountain in the heart of Montreal and thinking the leaves beneath our shoes looked like coins, like copper pennies, and I wanted to pick one up, and toss it into the water, and wish and wish and wish.

The October when it all changes, it all happens.

The wonder of living in a place with seasons is that the changes outside of us can fuel and inspire and direct the changes within us—quarterly, to boot.

My life feels, as ever, chaotic and busy and strange, but it is changing, like the world around me.  I can feel the shift in my thoughts, my priorities, my focus.  I can see clearly again.  I’m not so afraid anymore.

And I keep waiting for the tell-tale burst—of energy, of romance, of motivation–that always comes to me with October.  But, sitting here in a Washington, DC hotel room, and looking at my calendar full of New York trips and friends coming to town and family visiting at the end of the month (and, in between the trips and visits, an attempt at yoga and exercise and socializing and loving and writing), I can only smile and shrug and hope I get through it all safely, soundly, with my good health and some last shred of sanity.

Because I’m beginning to think this month is less about the burst and more about the bloom of what’s to come.

Do you ever think of me in the quiet, in the crowd?

If you didn’t know it already, this is my love—my month.

Do you know, October, how I adore you?  Do you ever think of me in the quiet, in the crowd, of the rest of the year, as I so often think of you?*

I wrote an entire “meme” on October once, and it’s a post that, years later, I still love to read.  (Sidenote: Do bloggers still do “memes”?)

In other Octobers, he told me this, and this, and this, and I did my best to listen.

Exactly two Octobers ago, I mused on turning thirty.  Not to worry—it all turned out well.

Always, we must circle back to the original “October comes” post.

And the poetry of past Octobers.

Oh, yes, and the yoga challenges of past Octobers, too.

Last October, in 2011, I only wrote three posts the entire month.  Of them, I wrote of what I loved.

And what will be of this one, this month, of 2012, the fifth time my favorite season arrives and I have this here blog to chronicle its passing?

This is the October I will watch Marblehead moving through the burning, bright change of seasons.

This is the October I will travel to Washington, DC or New York City literally every single week, meaning I will spend more time out of New England than in it.

This is the October I will see a good friend get married, and meet a best friend’s baby girl, and visit with an old and beloved high school friend, and baby-sit my niece for a long weekend so my sister and brother in law can go stay at a bed and breakfast in the Berkshires, on my dime, as thanks for letting me stay in their house for a year.

This is the October when, I think, it will all come to a head.  It must.

This is the October of music.

This is the October of release.  This is, also, the October of embrace.

October comes—that is certain.  What remains to be seen is what we do with its fine, fiery arrival.

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* Stolen lyric from “Where Are You Now?”, a new Mumford & Sons song.  Go buy their latest album.  It is, I assure you, nothing short of wonderful.

On blogging truths.

Did you think I meant it?

Did you think that was the truth?

Did you think, perhaps, I was writing about you?

I probably shouldn’t admit it, but I will.  Ready?  Here goes:

Not everything that I write here is real.  Did you think it was?  I’m sorry.  Like I said, I probably shouldn’t shatter the illusion.  But, I’m of the honest type.

The beauty of blogging, you see, is the filter it provides.  I don’t need to share all of me with you.  I won’t, actually.  But, how could you know that?  How could you discern what is the real me and what is the blogger me?

I say this because, throughout the past month, as I’ve attempted to write [nearly] daily, I have had great fun in playing with what’s real and what’s imagined in my writing again.  I’ve found it rather freeing to just write, without worrying about whether what I was crafting was a “traditional” blog post (read: update on my life, musings on my life, reflections on what X means in my life) or not.  Without worrying about piecing together a fully fleshed out personal essay or commentary.  Without feeling badly that I wasn’t waxing about yoga.  Without giving two hoots about readership or comments or whether what I was saying would resonate with anyone other than my creative mind in that exact moment.

I was much less interested in chronicling my life highs and lows and wonderings and much more interested in playing with words and scenes and ideas and the sheer sound of syllables rolling around in my mouth like candy.

Trouble is, given I’ve had “Hannah, just breathe” around for quite some time now and have devoted at least 90 percent of my time here to the “traditional” type of blog posts and have, actually, bared many painful, heartfelt truths, the readers I know—because they’re family or friends or bloggers-turned-real-life-friends—can’t always tell the difference between the real me and the blogger me.

Does that matter?

In the end, do they even need to know?

In the past couple of days, a few people have reached out about recent posts, with questions or comments or silly suggestions of what I might have meant or what my sentiments may have implied.  I’ve relished in these interactions, because they’ve reminded me of how fun blogging can be—

—when, truth be told, you just don’t care as much.

When you come here to write.  To play.  To express.  To share.  To leave a little dent of wit or wisdom or fresh perspective in someone’s day.

To fiddle with the truth a bit, to set reality aside, and to see where your imagination, where all the creativity stored there, takes you.

On what it is like to live by the sea.

When I walk to the shore, I think:

This is what it was like all those years ago, when women, children, the sickly, the elderly, were sent sea-side for recuperation, for the salted gusts blowing in from the furthest reaches of the Atlantic, the Baltic, the Timor, the Red Sea, the Tasman Sea, the Sea of Okhotsk, and blowing away illness, heartache, despair, loneliness, and regret, all with its cool fingertips, tinged with the hope and the refreshing possibility of recovery, redemption.

Perhaps those fractured souls walked this same path, wound through the rocks and the high grass of Fort Sewall, a defensive breastwork built atop Gale’s Head back in the mid 1600s.  Perhaps they, too, wandered here to nurse to health a broken heart or a splintered spirit, to cough death out, to throw to the ocean all they wanted to lose, to clear the lingering fog and fatigue of the life they left behind, back in the mountains, the plains, the deserts of their land-locked pasts.

Did they sit and stare at the horizon?  Did they watch for ships pointed home?  Did they wish they were aboard the bow of a boat headed asea?

Did they set their eyes to the stars and never again lose direction?

I sit on a bench covered in etch marks and darkened by moss and rain and age. I lean my back against its dedication to a father or perhaps a townsman long dead but remembered, captured, in brass plating, by someone who probably sat here, too, in this very spot, mourning away many afternoons and evenings.  The last arms of sunlight roll over the harbor, and the boats roll over the waves, and I watch as they all rise and tip and settle, like a chorus, clattering in unison.

It is the moon that pulls the tides in, that tosses them to shore.  But, I wonder:  What pulls us here?

What pulls you and I together and apart?

I came because I no longer know.  I cannot chart our course; I lost sight of the constellations you traced for me in the sky.  We have no horizon anymore. That—that truth, that reality—is what I have come to the ocean to throw away, finally, for good.

I’ve begun to believe you cannot heal that corner of your heart that you gave to another.  Because you gave it—it’s no longer yours.  And so what you are doing, really, is rebuilding.  You are remaking the part of you that went to another and, like the shipwrecks at sea, will never come back.

From my perch atop the bluff that overlooks the Marblehead Harbor and the South Channel and the Atlantic beyond, I think of those who walked and sat here before me, those whose husbands and sons died beneath the waters below, those who buried babies, who bore difficulties I cannot fathom.

History grants you perspective.  The future allows you imagination.  The ocean reminds us of what’s most precious.

And the present bears forth moments, brilliant and redeeming, such as this:

The day’s bright end breaking over tree tops and roof tops, and the moon arching across the sky, and my heart racing with a lovestruck wonder and joy at living in such a place and living such a life, and the cold, salted splash of sea-spray sending me up and away, and down the crooked steps, and toward Front Street and the narrow alleyways of the old city.

A dog barks.  The Unitarian church bell tolls the top of the hour.

I left your letter, and our love, and that corner of my heart, shipwrecked at the bottom of the sea.

It is soon dinnertime.  The day is done.

The town is coming home again, and I with it.

On the things that we said, that I want to remember.

A yoga teacher, mid-class, mid-pose: “Accept where you’re at, work with what you’ve got, and just try.”

My sister, as we sipped champagne at a late December performance of The Nutcracker and talked of her young, growing child:  ”Every night, I get more excited about her next day.”

A dear friend, comforting me, rubbing my back with the words that I later scribbled across a hotel notepad, as a reminder, as reality: “It sounds like he’s talking about self-preservation. In which case, you say to yourself, ‘Okay then, I’ll leave you to it and will be on my way.’”

Another dear friend musing aloud about relationships over a cafeteria lunch of salads and hummus and pita chips: “Isn’t that what life’s all about? Finding the strength to love another person, many different people, and be loved in return?”

My mother, sometime in the late 90s, I think, when it all came down to just this: “Expect nothing.  Blame no one.  Do something.”

A minister, on a Sunday morning in November, in Nantucket: “Faith is the decision to keep your eyes open.”

My mother, talking about painting, but, really, in her usual indirect but brilliantly insightful way, talking about life, love, self, the world, and us in it: “There are four main things: composition, value, color, edges.”

A colleague and friend, as we sat atop a section of the Great Wall of China, warm and overwhelmed, wondering what hands laid the stones beneath our feet: “Everything is new once.  And everything gets remade eventually.”

A great love, one of my very best friends, when we were college-young: “Don’t let the ones who just want to race past you then hit you on their way back.”

A professor, of philosophy, and British literature, and the Renaissance, looking out at classroom of hopeful, naive, eager 18-year-olds: “Some people never go crazy.  What truly horrible lives they live.”

My sister, sending me a quote she’d gathered from her first Women’s Studies course via a stickered and crumbled letter, posted from Massachusetts: “Hannah, here’s a new favorite: ‘The next time someone makes you feel as though, winning as you are, perhaps you’re getting too big for your britches, say to them silently, ‘I haven’t even started yet.’  (Marianne Williamson)  Good one, right?! Thought you’d appreciate!”

My father, in every card he’s ever sent or given to me: “You are loved,” the simplest yet most profoundly important sentiment a father can share with his daughter.

And my mother, many times over in those early years, but now I feel I’ve taken it as my own quote, as my personal mantra, as the words that encapsulate the stillness of Stoneyway, and the lull of the Pennsylvania countryside, and the practical, sturdy upbringing of my sisters’ and me, and all the goodness and purity and best intention in our hearts, and the certainty that we are, always, our parents’ children: women of worth, daughters of poets and painters and hippies and dreamers and true, lasting lovers—”Be strong, brave, and true.”

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This isn’t a writing prompt, per se, although personally, I find incredible inspiration in reading others’ writing…and, clearly, saving it over the many years in whatever notebook, journal, or scrap of paper I have handy.