Today the air is clear and dry and tinged with the scent of fruit. It is spring, according to the cherry blossoms and the mornings alive with birdsong, the sunshine bursting forth over Mt Hood to bathe our Portland Metro in long-forgotten light.
I wonder if you have ever had this thought while doing something you love: When will I be good enough to be seen in this?
It’s an odd thought, the idea that there are standards for being visible. And that I have to hide until I’ve met them. I’ve asked the question of so many pursuits for so long that I’ve grown accustomed to an unending list and no ready answers.
Maybe, like me, you grew up like this…
So I’ve been practicing the violin again this week and it feels like I’m starting from scratch. Scratch means scales and finger exercises and bowing maneuvers and striving. Striving to improve.
The idea of striving to get better didn’t just come up for me in the practice room this week. When I went to my local violin shop and tried out a few more instruments better rose up to smack me fresh across the face. A mother and her daughter were in line ahead of me also shopping for violins. The young violinist couldn’t have been any older than fifteen, and her mother proudly informed their sales person that she had been playing for eleven years. They took a handful of fine instruments into one of the rooms off the main lobby where we all heard the daughter begin to rip through Mendelssohn at tremendous speed.
Once, in a fit of teenaged passion, I sold the possession most dear to me to buy my first car.
That’s right, some lucky person paid pennies on the pegboard for my precious fiddle and bow, and I, being eighteen and desperate for freedom, hardly thought twice about it.
What I did think about was this: I didn’t want to be the well-behaved repressed violinist anymore. I didn’t want to push anymore toward some unattainable standard of musical excellence, and I really didn’t want to keep falling short. I wanted road trips and nights out with friends that bled into endless dawns. Gas pumps and freeways and gear shifts. I wanted my great wild beyond.
This person I thought up
This person I am
is becoming something else
entirely
The bath she fills
drop by drop
and the crumbs on the table,
new foundlings
Patterns assemble
but less fixed
more space in
the kaleidoscope’s eye,
grounding
Days are songs
their verses come hither
and loving,
alone in the bath
is ecstatic drowning
Summer in Portland—those longed for, beatific days promising dry weather for play—is as much a darling as dominatrix.
There’s the constant pressure to get outside, and then there’s the still, hot air when you do. We run for shade and we bathe our delicate Pacific Northwest skins in sunscreen from hairline to pinkie toes. Ahhh, we sweat at each other, glorious. And won’t it be an even more glorious fall?
10 plus years after my first yoga class, I’ve started a solo practice. It happened sort of organically (okay, with a small tech fail assist). One morning my Wi-Fi gave out just as I was queuing up YouTube. I really wanted to practice, and so I did. Alone. Free form.
The first time I heard the word Ahimsa—the yogic principle that translates to absence of injury or non-violence—my body was torqued into a position of considerable pain.
I stood on one leg, the other bent with foot placed on my supporting inner thigh. Arms aloft, standing ankle in a chronic wobble, whole body alternately swaying and clenching to hold the position. Sweat bled from my hairline. I hung on each second, begging it to end.
I finished a nine day cleanse yesterday, and to celebrate I walked myself around the park (naturally). This was the only movement I had any real energy for, and even then I could only manage one loop.
The temperature was perfect on my arms. I let myself feel it. The sun was as soft as warm cotton, the grass smelling of seed. The soccer kids were all practicing their artful crosses, balls sliding into goals. Perfect.
Most of the cleanse felt nothing like this.
I believe that as humans we are built for all things. All feelings. All experiences. I believe this with the fervor of someone who has swung the pendulum of experience pretty wildly for most of my 40 or so years.
Joy. Passion. Victimhood. Oppressive control. Hilarity. Co-dependency. Murderous rage. Apathy. Profound, spine-tickling inspiration. The range of experience here on earth is enormous, and we are wired for all of it.