Day 66: The World Outside the Window

I used not to be the most observant person in the world.  Either I had a lot on my mind, or I was in a hurry.  Or both.  I remember once, when I was about twenty-four, I had just moved into a new apartment and a friend was picking me up to go out to dinner.  I had made the decision to break up with my boyfriend and move out so quickly that I hadn't really paid attention to what the new house looked like.  It was a cute little mother-in-law studio above a house in Greenwood, with white walls and a nice view of the street, and the price was right, and I had just walked in and said, "I'll take it."  So when my friend asked for directions on the phone, he said, "What color is the house?" I asked him if he could hold the phone for a second.  I went outside, then came back up.  "It's white," I said.

In my meditation class with Rebecca Rivers, she talked about how one of the reasons to do yoga and to meditate is to scrub off the windows that interfere with our ability to see the world clearly and to experience our highest selves beyond our professional and familial identity.  Meditation allows you to just rest in pure consciousness.  She had asked us all on the first night to answer the question, "Who am I?"  A year ago I would have said, "Duh, a writer and professor."  I knew that wasn't the answer she was looking for, or even the answer that felt true to me now, but "I am a being of light" (those words actually did come to me) sounded a little too teacher's pet-like, so I just said something about how I'm trying to learn a lot of new things right now, so the answer of the moment is "student."

But what was the answer?  No answer sounded quite right to me.  When I was eighteen I once went out with a boy who called himself a "a poet, a dreamer, and a student of life," which was his prelude for saying, "I don't do relationships," so those phrases were definitely out.

The word"purify" comes up often in yoga and meditation, and it has a scary connotation to our Western ear.  I think it's just a bad translation from Sanksrit of what happens to our consciousness, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and philosophically, when we stop attaching to ourselves the limiting identities we hold so dear.  When we are young we struggle to figure out what to do in life and once we are firmly launched on that path of vocation we know something essential about ourselves.  Decision made.  Next?  And if we are writers and artists in a culture that values commerce above all, to claim the identity of artist is almost transgressive and hence, hard-won.  Why wouldn't we want to inhabit that identity fully? 

But to cling to this idea that we are just these brains with these personalities in these bodies, to grasp onto that nexus of desire and ambition, is tiring, really, at the end of the day.  What I like about yoga and meditation is a central paradox.  That the "I" becomes less constricted, more expansive, vast enough to incorporate the universe, just as the ego drops away.  To be open to the "union" that is yoga, to join the stream of life, that force that pulses through everything alive on this earth, is to know great freedom and bliss.

Some of the most serene moments in my life and some of the most intense moments in my life have been those instances when I forgot who I was, my gender, my age, my nationality, my personality quirks: when everything dropped away.

I love being on a train or a bus watching the scenery floating by outside the window and to imagine the lives being lived in every place we pass.  In this picture below, Zoe and I were on a bus with my husband and some students coming back from Honfleur, in Normandy, and we'd had a wonderful day looking at art, walking on the beach, and eating ice cream.  Zoe had gone swimming in the sea. 

On the bus back from Honfleur, Natalia and Zoe

The other day when Tara Freeman gave me a photography lesson, we stood at the window in my studio looking out at Zoe, who was staring at the river, doing her canine meditation, utterly focused, transfixed on the play of light on water.  Tara was trying to show me how even when your subject is  flooded with light, you can still take a picture, but you have to choose an ISO with a very low number.  I remembered this moment in meditation class when Rebeca asked us who we were, and I almost cracked up.  I was so tempted to say to Tara, "I am a being of light."  She has a great sense of humor, but I would have had to explain.

When there's less inner chatter, I've noticed, there's more to see out the window.

For example, I used to spend my breakfast planning my day.  Today I noticed that there were quite a few birds at the feeder.  Then, to my surprise, I saw that there were at least a dozen tiny birds on the ground trying to get the seeds the squirrels had spilled in one of their raids.  The next step will be to open the bird identification book on the counter, but I was having too much fun just watching.  I think some of them were brown nuthatches, but to be sure, I just signed up for a Cornell bird newsletter while I was trying to find a matching picture of them on google.

the birds are close in color to the bark of the tree

there are tiny birds in here with the squirrels

The view out my window as I wrote this post

The view to the deck windows, where Zoe likes to watch the river

It's going to be really cold this weekend here in the North Country.  Highs in the single digits.  A good time to spend indoors writing and reading with a certain dog beside me, who, when it's cold, likes to stick her paws and snout on the windowsill and watch all the life pulsing out there, in our yard, along the river.

Day 48: Mindful Winter Walking

Yesterday when Zoe and I were across the river heading home from our walk, she stopped to study a young man ahead of us on the path.  He leaned against a tree and for a long time it seemed like he was looking for something in his pockets.  Then he took off his mittens and began a monkish walk; whether he meant to do it or not, he was doing walking meditation.  I have often imagined monks competing--although I know it's not very zen to imagine a race--to see who can walk the slowest, lowering each food down in stages: heel, arch, pads, then one toe at a time.  The young man walked just like this in his big, well-treaded black boots.  It was the first day of classes, he was dressed in his winter best, and he didn't want to fall down and spend the semester limping or in a cast.

We had an ice storm, then it snowed, then warm weather turned the snow layer to ice, then it warmed up until water was rushing off roofs and down sidewalks, and then that water froze again.  There's not much you can do about it but maybe buy clamp-ons to put over your shoes and boots, like one of my colleague has.  I'm tempted now.

I worried about two things for Zoe going into this winter as a tripod: deep drifts, and ice.  Sunday we walked for an hour with Cooper and Pat, and it was tough to avoid the ice.  By the end of that hour, Zoe was very tired.  She has to hop on her back leg and when it can't find purchase, she slides.  But she never seems to want to stop, not even to rest for a second.

Yesterday I realized that Zoe had figured out how to walk in this weather.  The path was sheer ice, and the young man did not make much progress on our watch, but Zoe led us to the snow-and-ice-on-grass-and-fallen-branches bits around but not on the path, and we made our way home safely.  She has learned to find the places that have enough texture and grit to hold her upright, and I go where she goes, if I can.

I just have to ask her, and she shows me where, and how.

Sometimes on tough days you just have to low ball it--it's a gold star day if you can stay upright, all day.  Of course I mean that metaphorically too.  I can see sometimes in a student's eyes that just getting out of bed and across campus into the overheated classroom took Herculean effort, and I want to say, Gold Star, you.  That was hard what you just did.  Winter makes us go to that deep, dark place, especially when the outside looks like the inside of a basement janitor's closet and the landscape is the color of the mop.

And I have a little problem with balance, literally.  In my thirties I went on a sprained ankle binge--three times, then four.  Yoga for me, especially a balance pose, is less about bliss than for physical therapy.  Last night when I did tree pose I could feel in my right leg that just the effort not to fall from the car to the street and around the back alley up to the yoga loft had already given that leg a workout.

I opened up my Thich Nhat Hanh, Your True Home, to this page, just before I started writing this morning, after a slapsticky slip-and-slide across my yard to the studio:

"Picture a tree in the storm.  At the top of the tree, the small branches and leaves are swaying violently in the wind.  . . . But if you look at the trunk, you will see that the tree is solid; and if you look down to its root structure, you will know that the tree is deeply rooted in the soil.  The tree is quite strong.  It can resist the storm.

 "We are also a kind of tree.  Our trunk, our center, is just below the naval.  . . . If we stay in the winds of the storm, it may be too dangerous.  We can go for refuge into the trunk, breathing in and out, aware of the rising and falling of our abdomen.

In yoga class last night I tried to balance myself from my own trunk, using my core muscles, and sometimes I succeeded, sometimes not.

At home after yoga class, coming in from the garage, I made the mistake of crossing the yard through the grass.  The warmer temperature and the heavy rain had washed a lot of ice off the path, but the lawn was now a big block of ice.  After a lot of sliding, swaying, then righting myself, I gave up.  I got down on all fours.  I crawled across that sheer, slick ice until I was home, laughing the whole way.

I told my husband about this at dinner, and when he took Zoe out for her last pee before bed, he said she sat on the deck for a full minute surveying the scene.  She wasn't sure if it was a good idea to go out there.  But then, he said, she spotted the few remaining bits of textured snow and ice, those complex, layered surfaces, and deftly made her way out and back.