yoga

Barely Writing


After a blockbuster run on the keyboard, words trickled grudgingly this week. I managed two post for Care2, though one was nixed for not being “newsy” enough.  My assistant editor really liked it, however, which is a slight consolation.  The civil rights piece was a first for me, but I worry about writing stuff like that for this audience.  Many of them are a hair’s breadth step from being Fox Mulder and don’t need paranoia-feeding.  Oh, and I turned in a lame mommy thing to 50 Something which goes up next week, I think.

It was spring yoga cleanse at the studio. Yang-yin every morning. Yang in honor of the spring. In the fall and winter, yin rises. Coming off a training weekend, I had my doubts about energy levels, but I surprised myself, dug down and found quite a bit of strength and vigor.

Back to running too on the treadmill.  Intervals.  Pounded out 35 minutes without breathing heavy which is an encouraging commentary on my core fitness, but it made yoga a bit tricky.

I hadn’t thought about it before last weekend, but running undoes my yoga.

We were standing about after a practice teaching lab with Kat, the instructor, and discussing the various fitness routines – in addition to yoga – that we had and someone asked her what she did.

“Um, I do yoga,” she said, in a tone and with an expression that implied that the question itself hardly needed to be asked*.

“You don’t run or bike?” Puzzled looks all around.

“Well,” she said, “friends ask me to hike or bike and I usually don’t because those things ruin my yoga. They tighten my hamstrings and glute’s and quads. Too much could undo all my work.”

I ran this by my regular teacher, Jade, and she concurred.

“You’d need a good thirty minute post run stretch to counter the tightening, ” she said. “Also, you were a runner, so your body has learned to be tight and will want to go back to that more readily than it wants to loosen and lengthen.”

Yikes.

But I think I will keep on with intervals at the very least, just need to balance.  And I am so all about the balance.

*Kat is an uber-yogina. She told us the story of a guy she worked with in L.A. who told her she had a fierce “game face” when she practiced – ashtanga – which she hadn’t realized. Our faces are supposed to be relaxed, no tension.

“Yeah,” he told her “it’s like – fuck off, I’m doing yoga.”

I love that.  It should be on a t-shirt, integrated into a lotus design. Patanjali would not approve though.

I Outed Myself


Sigh. I don’t lead with my widow foot. There was a time when I would if I thought there was some advantage to it. I was all about easing my burdens through any means necessary through the caregiving years and right after Will died. But these days, I am vague about my status.

Vague?

I talk about Rob, the fact that I have grown step-daughters, that he and I are raising a seven year old still and that we’ve only been married for going on three years. I don’t elaborate on the how’s, why’s or huh’s – because the math could lead a person to speculate all manner of options leading to the bottom line that is my life.

It’s not that I am ashamed or even overly worried about the effect that my having been widowed once – a while back now – has on people. It can vary but normally people are a bit taken aback and by the time they find words – if they are inclined to words at all – I’ve moved the conversation along.

I do that because I don’t feel new people need to offer me condolences or feel sad for me.

But yesterday at yoga, in the course of being drawn out about my writing, I got backed into a bit of a corner – mostly because I’d tried to talk around the topic of my memoir instead of just laying it all out – and I revealed, in as few words as possible, the whole widow thing.

Later, during a discussion of the vritt’s – I posted about them recently – I used going through the motions after the death of a spouse as an example of how sometimes sleepwalking through life is not a bad thing but is instead a cushion to help a person get by. I framed it in light of my own experience.

One of the great things about moving away from Iowa was leaving behind those who knew about Will. People who could bear some witness to the me of that span of time. It was nice to be shed of them in a way.

Gradually I have revealed this part of my life to people, but as I talked about my memoir to the women in my training, I admitted that what keeps me from finishing it is the fear of it being published and widely read. Mostly, because I don’t want to be known as a widow. Someone who went all “boot-strappy” on her life and overcame … adversity? Is it really adversity if it’s a normal life event that everyone will go through at some point or another if they partner up and stay together?

“Some people find my life interesting,” I told the group at one point, “but I don’t want to be a guru or self-help maven. This is how I did it and have someone think it is the right way, the only way instead of just a way.”

Someone commented here once that I was her grief guru. That is something I can’t be. I believe only in the process of life under which all the details fall and one of them is coping with death and moving on with life at some point.

Ach, I am rambling. I don’t know what to say to people anymore about grief, which is another problem with finishing the memoir. I feel removed from it though never safe from it, if you know what I mean.

Time to hit the showers, me thinks.