Beloved friends,
It's been more than a decade now since Amanda Moore came to my yoga class for the first time. The skills that I have cultivated most deeply in my work are love and curiosity: I need to understand how someone ticks in order to support their living, and to care in order to understand. Amanda met me with the same; she is a curious, loving, generous person. She was having cancer treatment when we met, so we went right to the nitty gritty in our friendship. It's funny to realize that we really haven't spent a ton of time together in person – a string of afternoons, now over a decade ago – but those powerful moments graced us with an enduring connection of love and respect. I was, therefore, over the moon to hear from Amanda about my newsletter last week.
You might remember me raving about Amanda's National Poetry Series winning book Requeening in 2022. I said, "Amanda looks back on her life, on being a woman, a sister, daughter, wife, mother, teacher, surfer, beekeeper, poet; her gaze is unflinching, honest, exquisite." Based on the metaphor of the beehive, it is a book of emeshment and complexity; I don't find it an easy one from which to pull a line or a poem to show you why I cherish it so. A single bee or a single nodule of honeycomb is a small thing; in the hive lies the glory; it's about the interconnectedness, the whole. That said, I realize that it isn't likely you will reach out for more of something you haven't tasted at all, so below are some of my favorite lines. Every time I read them, my body dances with goosebumps; the way that Amanda reveals the shine of the normal, the humility of her wisdom, oh! Having described that she's setting the queen cage from her beehive on her desk and what that means to her, she says:
"I hope no one will see it there and ask me about it, though, because I hate how I sound when I say things like, 'Yeah, I keep bees in my backyard,' or 'Yeah, I surf most mornings,' 'Yeah, I'm a poet,' as if I'm any good at any of it. I don't really know what I'm doing most days. I just like to touch fear."
In order to spend years at sea, I invested years beforehand in learning to distinguish between fear and anxiety, soothe anxiety, and first tolerate and then, to my astonishment, savor favor. I fell in love a bit with some things about fear: the way time dilates as our brains seek to pay very careful attention, the brightness of our sensory perceptions in those moments, the zest that it brings to our living, the power I found in learning that I could tolerate my fear as a companion. It's transgressive to say that one loves fear in our fearful culture these days, and yet it is a companion in many of our most powerful experiences with nature, with growth, with living.
In last week's newsletter I shared a significant shift that has taken place over the past few years in my expression and philosophy: I have replaced the yogic principle of nonattachment, vairagya, with the language and practice of curiosity. You can read that here. Deep bows and great thanks to Amanda for her permission to share her response to me about that and for helping me to make this a wider conversation among us. I'd love to hear from you, and will never share our conversation without your enthusiastic consent. Amanda said:
"The subject line of your email alone lit a spark in me, and I love love love this rhetorical shift you are giving yourself permission to make, to own. When I was most struggling with my illness, reckoning with my mortality, and reading everything I could get my hands on, one of the concepts I most struggled with was nonattachment. I felt so very very attached to my life, to my people, to this earth, to what would happen to us all, and I struggled to understand the various doctrines and writings that cited attachment as one of the sources of suffering. To me, any 'suffering' due to my attachments felt so worth it because I was always discovering such deep love, acceptance, and comfort (among many other things!). I knew I must have been misunderstanding something about nonattachment, but the word really just shut me down whenever I encountered it. I became distinctly UNcurious about what nonattachment was and what it could offer me, and I never really found any footing there. One thing I have considered endlessly though is curiosity, and for me it is a mark of engagement and being alive to the world. Students, friends, family members, and public people who are curious really motivate and inspire me."
Both curiosity and nonattachment bring us to a spontaneous, wide-open, nonjudgemental state of presence in our living. What I love about curiosity is how it brings us present in a way that is connective rather than disconnective. I wish to embrace in my living and teachings both freedom and belonging, to know myself and all that is as utterly interconnected, as we are. We belong to life. We are life. We are the life of the universe. How holy this is! How utterly normal! How sacred is this moment, every moment. Because they are. Ahhhhhh.
Resources
We are Not Alone
A new study posits that the way that humpback whales create and manipulate the bubble nets they make for fishing together should lead them to be considered tool-wielders. When I was a child in the 70s, we were told certain things that made humans unique among animals and elevated us about the rest of the life of the Earth: our ability to use language and tools, our emotions. How I adore watching these assumptions proved wrong; oh, how good it is to feel at home among the wider life of the Earth and cosmos. Thanks to EarthSky.
We are Better Together
David Marquet is a retired U.S. Navy Captain and a speaker about leadership based on the radical approach he took to running his submarine, an approach that led a review of that sub to get the highest marks awarded to any ship ever. He did this by empowering the people he was leading: sharing power made his community tremendously better at what they did. This 10 minute video on the topic is a powerful lesson on Intent-Based Leadership; I watch it again every time I share it with someone and am delighted every time. Thanks to Aimee.
Yoga and Aging
I was tickled to read in the Washington Post that a new study showed yoga as excellent protection against cognitive decline. I was even more excited to read the study itself. In modern U.S. American yoga, it is common to reduce yoga to mindful movement, but that was not what took place in this protocol. The study used a Kundalini Yoga practice consisting of: tuning in (5 min); warm up (15 min); breathing techniques (15 min); Kirtan Kriya (12 min)(Dahlia notes: this is a meditative chanting practice); final resting pose (10 min) and closing (3 min). In short: 15 minutes of movement in the 60 minute session. Fascinating, and a beautiful affirmation of the value of the full breadth of yogic practice we have long shared in my classes. The Soft Animal still meets on Saturdays 9:15-10:45 via Zoom and I'd love to see you there!
Grief, Glory, and Wholeness
Thanks to Aimee who reached out to say, "That Nick Cave video is one of the most beautiful things I've seen in a while." about the conversation between Nick and Stephen Colbert which I shared last week. Really, this is the good stuff, folks. Yes, in our weird attention economy, 23 minutes is a long time now. I believe this 23 minutes will reward you in all of the most difficult seasons of your life.
Poetry
This summer my friend Aurora invited me to collaborate with her and her partner Lilith on a performance at a campout. I met Aurora at this campout when she was a child; now she is an adult. We have met and danced and sung and swam and fed each other among friends for many of the last 15 summers. Time is such a mystery.
My part of our performance was to be meditative invitation in sections of Aurora's DJ set which she had left without vocals, while she and Lilith danced around the altar Lilith had created. I imagined it would be like what I do in my work and only as I arrived for the performed realized this was not so. In my work, people are paying attention to me. This performance was one thread among many on a summer afternoon in the forest: people chatting, playing games, preparing dinner, swimming. I realized that I would need to speak in a way that would be a gift in fragmentary perception. I improvised a set of contemplations upon our relationship to that place. What is written here is and is not what I said; I spoke in in loops and whorls, with extensive repetition and long pauses in which I let the music flow along. I took these notes afterward to preserve a bit of the sweetness. Jam is not a fresh strawberry, but both are a treasure. I share them with you in appreciation of this sweet final tail of summertime and the long contemplation of place and wholeness and belonging which we share.
On the Lawn, Again
Does this place
remember us,
expect us at a certain time of year
like butterflies or geese
passing through
again
and again?
Does the fox
lie in their den
in the winter chill
and reminisce
about hot dogs
and marshmallows?
If you swam in the lake
when you were a child
does the water remember you?
Do the deer
tell their children
that in the summer
when the grass turns golden
there will be apples
and dancing?
The trees exhale
oxygen
and inhale carbon dioxide
that we exhale
and we
inhale that oxygen.
We co-respire.
Atoms that I am
were a redwood tree yesterday
and I
am that.
If you were here years ago
and you cried
that is the soil
these trees.
Who is the soil?
Who is the lake?
Do the deer
tell their children
that in the summer
when the grass turns golden
there will be apples
and dancing?
Do the young deer wish
they could join the dancing?