Sat, 11 May 2024 14:48:49 -0700WeeblyMon, 23 Nov 2015 19:08:55 GMThttp://bigbluerevival.com/blog/and-then"six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.” 
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See


Then the world starts in on us. That is probably my favorite line from the book. I was born blue. There was no children's hospital and so my grandparents drove me down the street, wrapped in a swaddle, to the children's hospital. That was before there was ambulance transfers, etc... I actually remember this. My grandmother wasn't super physically affectionate and I remember her holding me a little bit away from her, like a fragile package, and looking up at them in their car. It was boxy and beige. They were rushing and worried and hardly looked down at me. I looked mostly at their worried faces and their chins. I guess it is my first memory.

Then the world starts into us. 
 ]]>Fri, 20 Nov 2015 18:03:15 GMThttp://bigbluerevival.com/blog/mitochondria“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electrical swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.” 
― Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

All living cells have mitochondria. They are small little threads and are the energy producers inside the cell. mito- means thread. As I understand it, mitochondria merged with cells in the ancient biological soup because they worked better together. Before they were part of a cell, they were bacteria that developed a complex symbiotic relationship with cells. Now, as things have evolved, they have merged in to one thing and are "the powerhouse of the cell". The cell and the mitochondria work together to make more energy. (mitochondria does so much more, however, I just don't have the time to explain it all here)

Nature is a clever problem solver and it is always in action, that is one of the most amazing things about it is its pulsing and constant motion, layers and layers of complex motion and interaction, dance. Most of which is invisible to the eye. In yoga this morning, I decided to be in constant motion, no matter how subtle, I tried to keep a flow of movement, mostly with my eyes closed so I wouldn't feel self-conscious.

I see dancing as a deep form of listening. I find solace there. Constantly moving in yoga settles my mind. I have never really taken dance classes in a meaningful way, but I know in beginner music lessons, they always teach first about meter and rhythm and once that becomes internalized then the music can begin. The meter is the pulse, and first you must get quiet and find that pulse, then everything can happen. You can always see the real musicians tapping their foot inadvertently and constantly. It's a form of deep listening. It's the thread, or backbone, of the music. If you're playing music, you are following that thread, I think the same if you are dancing, yoga. 

Though I have never taken a dance class, I would assume that is what they would say, internalize the pulse of the music and let go. The moment you think about what you are doing, you lose the connection. The moment you think the anxious thought, you lose the connection. As for dancing, yoga, writing, anxiety, I am mostly failing but always trying my hardest. It's just that way with life, I guess, and it's the loneliest part of the dance for sure. You reach out and there is nothing. Maybe that's why I always feel so cold. 

“Writing fiction has developed in me an abiding respect for the unknown in a human lifetime and a sense of where to look for the threads, how to follow, how to connect, find in the thick of the tangle what clear line persists.” 
― Eudora Welty

The Night Dances
Sylvia Plath
A smile fell in the grass.
Irretrievable!

And how will your night dances
Lose themselves. In mathematics?

Such pure leaps and spirals –
Surely they travel

The world forever, I shall not entirely
Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

Of your small breath, the drenched grass
Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.

Their flesh bears no relation.
Cold folds of ego, the calla,

And the tiger, embellishing itself –
Spots, and a spread of hot petals.

The comets
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off –

Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given

These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair

Touching and melting.
Nowhere.

]]>Wed, 18 Nov 2015 15:09:41 GMThttp://bigbluerevival.com/blog/pythagorasChoose rather to be strong of soul than strong of body.
-Pythagoras


The Pythagoreum Theorem states that the square of the hypotenuse (the side opposite the right angle) is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. He too was a mystic and a scientist. The soul is the foundation for the body. The hypotenuse, the base of the triangle. The soul must be strong for the body to be strong. The same metaphor works for yoga and running. When doing inversions, it is the base that has to be strong and a strong base doesn't seem to necessarily have anything to do with physical strength. Running is as much about your soul's will as it is strength. These days, not feeling my strongest, I have a lot of work to do on all fronts:(

The writing helps.

]]>Tue, 17 Nov 2015 15:52:20 GMThttp://bigbluerevival.com/blog/skinny-2“The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

"This is water."

"This is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.” 
― David Foster Wallace

One thing about being a woman and losing more and more weight is that people think you look more beautiful and they tell you that again and again. Less is more, it seems in our culture. To be a size 0, what does that even mean? It's actually a really sick aspect of our society. It was the opposite in Nepal. You were praised for being more full figured because to be this meant to be hungry. I miss being hungry.
I was in a restaurant out of town a few weekends ago and I sat in there for over an hour before I noticed that there was a robin's nest tucked in a hole in a brick pillar with eggs in it. It was directly in front of me the whole time but I didn't see it. It was a sweet detail. 
]]>Mon, 16 Nov 2015 15:32:48 GMThttp://bigbluerevival.com/blog/lamour-est-tout-ce-quil-fauttranslation- Love is all that there should be.

"You know, I sometimes think, how is anyone ever gonna come up with a book, or a painting, or a symphony, or a sculpture that can compete with a great city. You can’t. Because you look around and every street, every boulevard, is its own special art form and when you think that in the cold, violent, meaningless universe that Paris exists, these lights. I mean come on, there’s nothing happening on Jupiter or Neptune, but from way out in space you can see these lights, the cafés, people drinking and singing. For all we know, Paris is the hottest spot in the universe." 
-Owen Wilson 


When I was in college I took a class on the French poet Baudelaire. I dug up my book this morning before I meditated and found one of my favorite poems from his collection. I lived in Paris for a short time in my twenties and my heart mourns very deeply for that beautiful city and its people. 

N'importe où hors du monde
Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit. Celui-ci voudrait souffrir en face du poêle, et celui-là croit qu'il guérirait à côté de la fenêtre.
     Il me semble que je serais toujours bien là où je ne suis pas, et cette question de déménagement en est une que je discute sans cesse avec mon âme.
     " Dis-moi mon âme, pauvre âme refroidie,que penserais-tu d'habiter Lisbonne ? Il doit y faire chaud et tu t'y ragaillardirais comme un lézard. Cette ville est au bord de l'eau ; on dit qu'elle est bâtie en marbre et que le peuple y a une telle haine du végétal,qu'il arrache tous les arbres. Voilà un paysage fait selon ton goût, un paysage fait avec la lumière et le minéral et le liquide pour les réfléchir !
     Mon âme ne répond pas.
     " Puisque tu aimes tant le repos, avec le spectacle du mouvement, veux - tu venir habiter la Hollande, cette terre béatifiante ? Peut-être te divertiras-tu dans cette contrée dont tu as souvent admiré l'image dans les musées. Que penserais-tu de Rotterdam, toi qui aimes les forêts de mats et les navires amarrés au pied des maisons.
     Mon âme reste muette.
     " Batavia te sourirait peut-être davantage, nous y trouverions l'esprit de l'Europe marié à la beauté tropicale. "
     Pas un mot. - Mon âme serait-elle morte ?
     " En es-tu donc venue à ce point d'engourdissement que tu ne te plaises que dans ton mal ? S'il en est ainsi, fuyons vers les pays qui sont les analogies de la Mort. - Je tiens notre affaire, pauvre âme ! nous ferons nos malles pour Tornéo. Allons plus loin encore, à l'extrême bout de la Baltique ; encore plus loin de la vie, si c'est possible ; installons-nous au pôle. Là le soleil ne frise qu'obliquement la terre, et les lentes alternatives de la lumière et de la nuit suppriment la variété et augmentent la monotonie, cette moitié du néant... Là, nous pourrons prendre de longs bains de ténèbres cependant que, pour nous divertir les aurores boréales nous enverrons de temps en temps leurs gerbes roses, comme des reflets d'un feu d'artifice de l'enfer!
     Enfin, mon âme fait explosion et sagement elle me crie : " N'importe où ! n'importe où ! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde ! "

Translation-
Anywhere Out of the World
     
This life is a hospital where every patient is possessed with the desire to change beds; one man would like to suffer in front of the stove, and another believes that he would recover his health beside the window.
It always seems to me that I should feel well in the place where I am not, and this question of removal is one which I discuss incessantly with my soul.
'Tell me, my soul, poor chilled soul, what do you think of going to live in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and there you would invigorate yourself like a lizard. This city is on the sea-shore; they say that it is built of marble and that the people there have such a hatred of vegetation that they uproot all the trees. There you have a landscape that corresponds to your taste! a landscape made of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!'
My soul does not reply.
'Since you are so fond of stillness, coupled with the show of movement, would you like to settle in Holland, that beatifying country? Perhaps you would find some diversion in that land whose image you have so often admired in the art galleries. What do you think of Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts, and ships moored at the foot of houses?'
My soul remains silent.
'Perhaps Batavia attracts you more? There we should find, amongst other things, the spirit of Europe married to tropical beauty.'
Not a word. Could my soul be dead?
'Is it then that you have reached such a degree of lethargy that you acquiesce in your sickness? If so, let us flee to lands that are analogues of death. I see how it is, poor soul! We shall pack our trunks for Tornio. Let us go farther still to the extreme end of the Baltic; or farther still from life, if that is possible; let us settle at the Pole. There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternation of light and darkness suppresses variety and increases monotony, that half-nothingness. There we shall be able to take long baths of darkness, while for our amusement the aurora borealis shall send us its rose-coloured rays that are like the reflection of Hell's own fireworks!'
At last my soul explodes, and wisely cries out to me: 'No matter where! No matter where! As long as it's out of the world!'
]]>Fri, 13 Nov 2015 16:40:21 GMThttp://bigbluerevival.com/blog/skinny-part-2The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.
— Friedrich Nietzsche

For no particular reason, the worst version of my anxiety rears its ugly head today. It started last night, for no good reason, and culminated in a vicious stomach ache. I don't really understand it. Sometimes I think of it as a predatory animal that just lives nearby and is sometimes agitated and sometimes not. I always have my eye on it, tiptoeing around it and I can never predict. Woke up ready for the day to be over already though. 

I think one of the things that makes it hard for me to address it, is what underlies it. One of my friends last year talked about how when she gets stressed she just envisions herself putting her head in her father's lap and she feels secure. She is in her forties now and that is what still soothes her. She asked me what soothes me and I told her nothing and then starting to cry as the realization of that sunk in. There is nothing. 

We are all mirrors to each other as humans. Unfortunately, my family told terrible things about myself. I don't fully understand why, but I know if I had believed them, I would have been trapped. It would have been really hard. Instead, luckily, I adapted. I am a realist and I looked in the mirror and decided on my own what I thought about myself. That assessment was unforgiving in its own way but it was more realistic. The sharp edge of this quality is two-fold. Firstly, it is very difficult for me to accept compliments or praise. When people tell me things about myself, I am afraid to believe them, both the good and the bad. And then there is the loneliness which related to the anxiety. There is nowhere to rest my head. That quality which protects me also limits me. Isn't that the way it is so often. 

I think it is really important to know yourself though, to know who you are and not to believe the stories people tell you about yourself. This has been a long and deeply felt journey for me. People will tell you terrible things if you let them. One of the most cruel and lowest evils to me is when someone who knows you well exerts that knowledge of your vulnerabilities over you and knocks you down. I am watching that play out between friends right now, and it is very painful to watch. For me, there is no point in judging or hurting because in the end it is the sum of all of the love and nothing else. 1+1=2 not 1-1=0. People will teach you to hate yourself if you let them. You have to decide for yourself and it is a privilege. I am beginning to believe that my anxiety is an internal version of the same battle. My stomach hurts and I am ready for the day to be over.

]]>Wed, 11 Nov 2015 15:58:04 GMThttp://bigbluerevival.com/blog/skinny"Cut out all the ropes and let me fall"
-Bon Iver

I keep losing weight. In winter, people don't notice much because of the bulky clothes. It doesn't seem to matter how much or little I eat, how much or little I run. It just is.

The End of the Tour. I finally watched it. It was fascinating and so so sad. A lot of it is about loneliness and surrender. David Foster Wallace was so loved and so so lonely. In many ways, all of the love that people felt for him made him feel more alone. I think in many ways, the authenticity of his book and person depended on his ability to surrender to that lonely space, explore its dark corners and edge. 

My book is the same journey. I don't know the ending because I am not sure what she finds at the end. I'll know it when it comes to me. I guess I am not sure of the answer myself. I have watched good friends suffer lately at the pettiness of human interactions. We can be so cruel to one another. It is a way to wield power. All the way down to the mitochondria of my cells, i have no desire for power over anyone. Just a desire to love and to feel love. That is where my block comes. I think, sadly, like DFW, in my inability to receive love. Whenever I've really grasped for it, it mostly just slips through my fingers, so I've trained myself not to ask. If you expect nothing in return, then you are never disappointed. Plus, I am watching up close these last few weeks the heart ache between two friends of how cruel we can be to one another, for the sake of ego and power. It's sport to some people and that scares me about other people. To me, loving is to lay down. I have quoted this before, but it is truly one of my favorite quotes about love:
“Why don't you ever use your strength on me?" she said.
Because love means renouncing strength," said Franz softly.” 
― Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

]]>Tue, 10 Nov 2015 16:41:03 GMThttp://bigbluerevival.com/blog/floods-and-avatarsWhen I was driving yesterday, I followed a car with a license plate that read 'manifest", so I thought it might be a good time to continue the train of thought that I started about manifestations and avatars. 

In The Hindu Way of Awakening, Swami Kriyananda writes that:

The meaning of avatara, Yogananda stated, is not that Divine Consciousness, which has never known imperfection, appears in human form to show us a reality completely alien to our own. Krishna, Jesus Christ, and all other avatars are not only manifestations of Spirit. They are descents also in the sense of knowing, from experience, what it is to be human beings who attained oneness with the Divine. Their example shows us our own divine potential."

There are several floods in my book. Section I begins with a flood and ends with a flood. Floods are rich symbols. The flood myth is a story in which deities send a flood to destroy civilization as a form of retribution. Religious texts are littered with them, from Noah to Zeus.

Flood myths also typically contain a hero, like Noah who represents the powerful force of life. Penelope is mine. The current dialogue about manifestation seems to be pretty formulaic. Step 1. identify goal Step 2. Meditate on goal, etc... That's not quite how I see it. If you use the metaphor of the atom and think about the colossal amount of science and energy surrounding fission, then, for me, it comes into focus more. What has always struck me as a writer and in general about life is our lack of imagination. That is why I love biographies, because it shows me how unexpected and complicated life really is. We are so limited in our own visions for ourselves. Why did we go to the moon, because Kennedy said one day that we would do it. Then the scramble to manifest it began. One of my struggles with manifestation is that we are so limited in our imaginations or visions of what is possible. In that way Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 doesn't really work for me. 

For true, radical manifestation (the ones the avatars teach us about), I think that there first has to be a washing away, a flood. If you think of it in terms of a seed and all of the life potential of a seed or a blossom to bloom. Think how painful that might be to crack open and let life out. Think about how it feels to be a flower and peel away the husk to the internal bloom and then stretch it out and expose it to the world. Yoga is what has made me think it might be painful because I have experienced so much real pain on my mat breaking through the layers and layers of protection. 

Like Noah in the flood, with manifestation, what do you bring with you and what do you leave behind? 

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures."

William Shakespeare

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than darkness.

Robert Fulghum





]]>Mon, 09 Nov 2015 16:57:56 GMThttp://bigbluerevival.com/blog/dancingWhen I'm dancing, I'm not thinking about anything. I am here. I am totally there. You know? And the feeling is a sensation of being away from myself.
Paulo Coelho

The arts section of the New York Times is filled with pictures of dancers. Every week, their lithe forms arc across the pages. It is even beautiful to see them captured in stillness, a flash of a moment. It's total surrender to the art form. I find it captivating. 

My dearest friend was a prima ballerina in her twenties, and I find the way she moves through the world equally captivating. 

I love to dance. It is one of my favorite things in the world. I got to go dancing this weekend, which I love, for all of the reasons that Coehlo talks about. 

When I was young my parents felt that I was too sporty to be graceful, so though I asked for dance classes, they always signed me up for t-ball, or soccer, or basketball and tennis. My sister was the dancer. My father would say, you are too quick on your feet to dance, you should run and play tennis. Then in college, I signed up for a Indian dance class where we would have learned all of the mudras of classical Indian dance. Not enough people signed up, so the class was canceled. So I found rock-climbing and it was a lot like dancing to me. It requires the same stamina and flexibility and strength. Yoga is like dancing too. 

When I was younger in my twenties, I used to like to go alone and not talk to anyone, just go and dance and leave. On Saturday, before I knew it, it was 2 am. There was a natural pulse, and I found it and lost a sense of time and place. For me, it is a real feeling of being away. ]]>Thu, 05 Nov 2015 20:43:04 GMThttp://bigbluerevival.com/blog/caves“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek.” 
― Joseph Campbell

I'm revising the Lotus Eater section of my book. I re-read one of my favorite parts of The Life of Pi yesterday for inspiration. It is this complex and beautiful part of the book where they land on a carnivorous island. It's magical realism at its best, saturated with symbolism and rich imagery. That scene has hung with me for years. And its what I am trying to accomplish roughly in the Lotus Eater section of my book, except Penelope's place is not an island but a cave. 

“We believe what we see.’...What do you do when you’re in the dark?” 
― Yann Martel

In my yoga practice, I have started closing my eyes a lot, especially when I am in a group setting and inverted. It has been powerful for me. However, I noticed the other day that more powerful than the flow of movements with my eyes closed is the vibrancy of what I see out the window when I open them up again for just fleeting a second, the light rushing in.  Caves are great metaphors for the inner journey. Your eyes adjust to the darkness, which makes the light then all the more potent once your eyes blink open. 

“The blackness would stir and eventually go away, and God would remain, a shining point of light in my heart. I would go on loving, loving, loving, loving.
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi
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