Category Archives: On My Mind

On My Mind

Schatz

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The first person to call me a treasure lied to me.

The second had just met me but somehow saw me.

The third loved me.

It’s a funny thing, love, and you know it,
don’t you, you know it because it makes people do
crazy things
they wouldn’t otherwise do,
or so they say.
But it’s not magic, you know, as much as we might like to
think;
it’s hormones, not magic
neurotransmitters
chemicals
and that makes it even more infuriating because you know exactly,
exactly
how it works and
why
and why it still gets to you is beyond you. But
well, it’s gotten to everyone at sometime or another.

Or not.

And it’s funny because what swells the heart now is not love,
actually,
but a dream of what could be
what isn’t
what might
what isn’t a dream but sometimes a
wish
hope
dare you think –
prayer?

Easier to skip it.
Easier to skip it and move on and
“one way ticket ’round the world”
like you said
because if you don’t want any part of it that’s
fine that’s
fine. That was clear from the start.

It’s a mantra, a meaning, a purpose
and it doesn’t even exist,
not yet, not today, not with you, but it’s a
it’s the
it’s like they asked, “what do you want most?”
and “what are you afraid of?”
and you smiled and hedged and then
answered the second question to answer the first.
They asked the questions and
you knew the answers more deeply than
you’ll ever admit
to anyone but yourself
because you’d be naked without the armour
and you’ve been there before.

A sudden wave of clarity and you’ve slept better since.

A sudden wave of clarity and it’s easier to laugh and to think,
well, at least it happened
at least there was a minute
at least you got lost for a while.

The paper is still there, after all, and it’s a shame,
really, a shame
because that could have been, well, a dream.
They (who?) say that when you know, you know,
but all I’ve ever known is that that’s what they say.
And you?
Because it’s not fair to you either, is it?

The English language really could use more variation on
“you”.

After all you’re no longer –
you’re not –
flip the pages on the calendar –
more pages than you’d thought.
I’m glad I found you.

And you?
You know the neurochemistry and you know
that look and sometimes –
but you can’t go there
won’t go there
and in the end don’t want
to go there because
if you did,
you’d be there already. That’s just
the way you are, you said,
and when you know,
you know.

Schatz is the German word for “treasure” and it’s used as a term of endearment. I like this word very much and I’ve been familiar with it for a long time, though it came as a shock when I encountered it again after many years away. There are certain things we’d simply rather not remember, associations we’d rather not have.

The English language doesn’t tend to use “treasure” in this way. In English, pirates, children, and some playful adults search for buried treasure, but it’s rarely something you’d call somebody. I certainly never have. The fact that I can count three occasions in which this word was used says something about it. Not common. Reason enough to remember.

I have a funny relationship with this word, simply because I have had three very different experiences with it. I would assume that everyone prefers some terms of endearment over others, and that we all have such words that we’d rather not use or rather not hear. Our experiences in friendships, romantic relationships, and long-term partnerships shape how we approach new people and the ways we interact with them. These experiences shape the choices and decisions we make, and what we will or will not accept in others. One thing I have learned about myself is that I know who I am and I am not looking for anyone else to affirm that. In some ways, this makes me much more vulnerable because I’ve already lost what I had to lose, so I am more open than I might otherwise be. In other ways, I can feel the walls I’ve wrapped around myself because I’d really rather not go through such loss again. There’s a constant balance in shades of gray, and if I’m honest, I’d rather not balance. The language of interaction matters, and language is not only words.

I’ve been called a treasure three times.

Perhaps I was a different person each time.

Perhaps all of those versions of myself are somehow contained in this self.

And perhaps, just perhaps, there is another word.

Weimar, Germany – February 2022
On My Mind

On Yoga and Writing

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Today I thought that maybe I write for the same reasons that I practice yoga. It’s a way of accessing another part of the brain, another part of the body. Perhaps, if you’ll allow me the liberty, another part of the soul.

I was introduced to yoga over ten years ago and have maintained a regular practice since the beginning. It has evolved over time, naturally, and I have written at length on this blog about my experiences with yoga. It tends to come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I practice both yoga and meditation, light incense, look for the spiritual. By this I mean, yoga is a way of accessing, through the body and breath, a different outlook on the world. It is a way of reaching, physically, to parts of my body that I might not fully notice otherwise; it is a way of reaching, spiritually, towards both energy and stillness, towards forces in the universe I cannot explain.

Towards forces in the universe I don’t need to explain.

Maybe I write because writing is a way of expressing what lives in the body, the sensations of being alive on this planet and looking up at the sky. Writing is a way to capture the pulse of energy that sweeps you away when you let it it. Writing brings sensation back to a foundation, back to a centre where it can be grasped, felt, explored.

I write because I am feeling and I practice yoga in order to feel.

Sometimes, and certainly the case in much of my journal writing, I don’t understand what I feel until I write it down. Moving from sensation to articulation requires a conscious slowing down, letting go, a certain objectivity that reduces an emotional component, or at least requires me to detach from it just enough to inquire into it, unpack it. This is what I mean when I say, as I have known to be true for a long time, I think better on paper.

Yoga moves the sensation through the body and begins an exploration of how the body is connected, constructed, understood. I was first fascinated, all those years ago, with the shapes I could create with a breath. Perhaps years of dance training facilitated the ease with which I found my body in a new form, or perhaps innately understanding the possibility of movement in the body meant that I have always approached yoga with curiosity. Let’s see where I am in this body today. And then let go of the body and move with the breath.

Or maybe I’m trying too hard in linking these two aspects of myself together. I have had profound experiences in both contexts, that of doing yoga and that of writing. I do not aim here to explain what those experiences were or where they came from, but rather to make the bold claim that they existed. There are things in the universe we cannot explain, and the statement of such is what makes the claim true.

What is true, however, is malleable. There are days when the body and mind flow as a unit more smoothly than on other days. There are days where we walk easily, calmly, gently though the world. There are days when we are literally and figuratively bent out of shape, and we may or may not know why, or days when someone else knows something is wrong even before we know it.

I cannot write without being vulnerable enough to look inside myself and there is always the threat, sometimes realized, of finding something I don’t like. I cannot practice yoga without the willingness to sometimes feel a little foolish, or to be humbled by what my body is and is not capable of. There’s an element of letting go of control in both contexts and a requirement for honesty, authenticity, sincerity that strips away whatever masks I happen to be wearing. It’s a question of how much I am willing to give in that moment, and the question is answered moment after moment.

Maybe yoga is the physical manifestation of what I look for in writing, or maybe writing is the intellectual element of synchronizing the breath and the body. That they come together in this way is what drives the continued exploration. The satisfaction, the sensation of which lives somewhere beneath the sternum and is captured by clauses and phrases, is in the journey itself.

As for the universe, the magnificence of which is unexplained as far as I am concerned, there is no answer within reach because there is no answer to find.

On My Mind

The Sky

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The sky is changing.

My bike spent time in the shop this week, which meant I walked to work. At first I was annoyed, because of course there were things I’d planned to do on that first surprising morning and I wanted to get to work early to do them. I took a moment to be frustrated and then, because there was no other option, pulled myself out of my head and into the day.

This is when I noticed the sky changing. The gray was no longer steely and imposing, but softer, gentler. The light not hours away, but minutes. People riding without bike lights were suddenly less foolish and more visible. Morning was not long in coming, but rather already here.

Just over a year ago, when I first knew I was moving to Germany, I received photos of snow from the colleague I replaced. This was atypical, I was told, and I have since learned that snow like that, snow like the snow I grew up with, only happens every ten years or so.

When I was a child, we waited impatiently for snow days that never came, no matter how many spoons were carefully placed under pillows or pajamas worn inside out. Rochester, New York gets a lot of snow, or at least it used to, and we lived with it. The climate has certainly changed, but my parents’ photos of snow still look like I remember it. Lake effect, they say on the news, as though the type of snow makes any difference to children playing. I only remember one time when a snowball thrown contained more ice than snow and a neighbourhood boy went home crying; I’m sure that happened more than one time.

I remember climbing on the piles of shovelled snow to see the white, white world from a point higher than the lamppost in our yard. I remember the time my dad left his car at the top of the hill behind our house and hiked down, snow up to his waist. I used to keep sandbags in the trunk of my car so that I could drive through the hills leading to our neighbourhood, though sometimes I took the long way to avoid the sharpest right. There was always the danger of missing it. Cycling up that hill in the summer was no one’s idea of fun, so we never did. From the top, there was first a red barn and then fields and then sky.

Two weekends ago, a group of friends headed south into the Thüringer Wald to go for a walk in the snow. There’s usually snow there, I’m told, though it rained there this winter, too.

We greeted cross-country skiers and children sledding and kept the dog away from other dogs. We climbed the tower and were forced back down by the wind, tossed two tiny frisbees, ate delicious muffins and other snacks pulled from backpacks. The boys had a snowball fight and I played photographer as the group built two snowmen. We played in the snow because that’s what snow is for.

The sky was right there through the trees.

The house I grew up in was at the top of one hill and the bottom of a smaller hill, but a hill all the same. The cul-de-sac gave us a snow mountain that grew gradually larger each time the plows came around. As children, we named it after our street and friends from outside the neighbourhood would come over to play in the snow. Building a fort using recycling boxes was always harder than we thought it would be. My siblings and I used to dress our snowmen in Hawaiian shirts from our dress-up box; Mum always gave us a carrot for the nose.

You could see the world from the top of that hill. You could look out across neighbourhoods, across trees, and watch the leaves and the sky change. The atmosphere was peaceful well before I knew the world. Rochester is a cloudy place, a place where, on the rare sunny days, people suddenly come out of their shells. You see smiles where there were previously faces hidden in scarves or behind hoods of raincoats. People greet one another more warmly and the general mood is one of optimism and joy. I have never in my life known people so happy to see the sun.

I forgot that feeling, and then I left the equator and came to another place that is cloudy, a place where I have recently felt the sky change. In Singapore, my apartment looked out over a highway and then the towns to the north. When the sky took over the buildings in the distance, rain was coming. Sky in the tropics changes in a flash, in a second, and if you don’t look now, it’ll be different in a breath. Hours could pass watching it.

This week I saw the sky changing.

And today, clouds are moving across the sun.