yoga diary - day twelve

Down day.

I don't mean that in any bad sense but if you're a woman, there are going to be two or three days a month where some things are out of your reach. For me, today, it's yoga and the sweat lodge I had hoped to attend.

For the sake of anyone who reads this and only knows the news stories about "sweat lodges," that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about a traditional First Nations sweat held in the country, supervised by Elders and not ever arduous much less harmful. If you can't take it, you can leave the lodge. You do not fast for days in advance and you feast afterwards. It is a kind of cleansing and it's tied deeply to the land. Women in "their moon" are filled up with energy that is powerful and pretty chaotic so traditionally we do not participate in sweats or other ceremonies when that's going on.

Same is true of yoga. That's enough said about the nitty gritty. The question for today becomes then, how do you carry on a daily practice when your body has limitations?

I don't want to go entirely without it in case I break the habit and lose ground, however there is no question that physically it's not something I can do today. I slept in for one thing. Then fooled around much more than I should have on the computer. Had breakfast, talked to a friend and then finally settled in here.

The lack of discipline in every aspect of my life except yoga is beginning to eat away at me. Working for yourself, you can go through phases where you do exactly what you have to do and not much more. This leads to anxiety and all sorts of other complications - the mind gets noisy and you end up desperately seeking peace anywhere you can find it and at the same time being sort of garrolously eager to pounce on social and potential networking situations. It's uncomfortable and unattractive. (And I had cake for breakfast so I feel doubly gross and lazy.)

Alright - no yoga to help me so I have to do the yoga in my mind and in my breathing.

Singing helps, to a point. Doing all the mundane household stuff helps too. Trying not to worry though, well, actually getting beyond worry, that helps the most. Singing can get my beyond worry for a while and if it's challenging enough it helps my breathing. But worry will stop me dead in my tracks.

I'm not thinking of yoga in terms of moving anything but the weight off my body. I like the idea that it is calming and so far, my muscles seem a bit more defined but people do ascribe an awful lot to the practice and so far, to be honest, all I seem to have gotten from it that way is a sense of guilt and alarm at how easy it is to slide into being unproductive.

Maybe I'll come back to this. The desk isn't helping.

yoga diary - day eleven

It was hard again this morning and my first thought was, "oh no, not another angry yoga day."

Why isn't this getting easier? It was hard to get to the mat but I got there. Once there, I expected to be rewarded for my efforts with some good feelings, maybe some more graceful stretching but the first moves of my practice were harder than they have ever been.

It was hard to get my knees anywhere near the floor when I sat down, honestly, I don't think they would have been lower than my hips if I'd been sitting with my butt on a chair, much less a pillow or a rolled up towel. Then the first bends and stretches? No way, the backs of my thighs were resistant to the point of pain. It was harder than doing this on the very first day.

I still don't know why that is but what I did about it was to decide, fine, if it's going to be this hard, I'll take breaks, I'll make it easy, I'll cheat but I won't stop.

Red tide is immanent, it's natural for me to be impatient and angry about everything. This is the point where Kali energy peaks and destroying things, especially things that will shatter, is an attractive thought.

So I gave myself that permission and carried on.

About halfway through this difficult practice I started noticing the instructor's breathing was not perfect, she would say four more breaths and then actually instruct two or she'd say "deep inhale" then wait for solid 30 seconds, (and breathe the whole time) and then finally "exhale slowly." Not possible, I would have passed out.

She sometimes gave instructions twice. "Take one more deep breath and then lower your leg to the floor, now one more deep breath and lower that leg to the floor" speaking of the same leg.

Then I realized I wasn't reacting the way I expected. Instead of being annoyed and frustrated I was thinking to myself, "see? nobody gets it all right all the time." It's ok for things to go wrong.

I wasn't in the usual rut.

Suddenly I started thinking about life and love and how it all starts perfectly in ease and comfort and how we resent effort and resist it all the time and really? who wouldn't effort is pain, it's hard, it's sweat. Then I started thinking - what's the opposite of sweat and effort? It's ease and comfort and stillness, ultimately it's sleep. But sleep can be disturbed so I suppose ultimately it's death - which is like before birth, which is perfect and contained and still and (for the most part) solitary.

Which one do I want?

I was thinking I was at some sort of breakthrough point and becoming very wise when we reached Savasana (corpse pose) the last pose of the practice, lying there still and as "dead" as possible I heard the instructor say, "this is your most important pose."

Right.

It's not all about stillness or avoiding that and it's not about all about effort and extending myself, it's about finding where I am for the day and making the most of it. In love, it's about effort sometimes and repose at others, in life - same thing.

So on what is likely to be the last day of my physical practice for the month, I am back to where I started. Stretching for balance, looking for answers, trying to get somewhere with all of this.

It's not a line, it's a labyrinth.

yoga diary - day ten

This morning I was angry. I don't want to be doing yoga by myself in Ottawa. I don't want to be plodding ahead and being brave in the snow and ice by myself, trying to prove myself worthy of whatever it is I want and am not getting. I want to be in Austin, that's a fact.

Today yoga was about throwing myself at the practice and resenting it at the same time as digging into it to use up some of the angry energy that was sparking and volting through my body like contained lightning.

I started sweating almost immediately.

That surprised me because I've been doing this for nearly a month now and expect the sweat to come into it a little later every day, which has been the pattern so far and is, I think, the pattern with most strenuous exercise. Today, I was sweating five minutes into it - and it felt good.

The practice was hard but rewarding. I leaned into it. I felt myself tighten when I reached up in mountain pose, I pushed my heart out in cobra and for a second actually did feel like I was floating upward. I never believe yoga rhetoric, I listen respectfully and I follow the postures as closely as I can, I do the breathing as much as possible but I never believe I am going to feel the way the instructor says I should feel. Their descriptive phrases are almost always over my head.

My inner body is not "radiant" it does not "pause." I don't really feel the balance - I strain and struggle and wonder why my belly always seems to be in the way and if it will ever, ever allow me to do a real forward bend. I feel my arms start to tremble in downward dog and when I am asked to twist from a position of a low lunge? Well, sometimes I think that will simply never be possible.

Just the same, I was leaning into it today and thinking only about the physical cadence of breathing and moving, surging up and folding down. I think I was learning something about making an effort even when you really don't want to when my phone rang.

And rang and rang. I knew who it was and I wanted to answer but I ignored it. That made yoga even harder. I kept going.

I wanted to stop and check my phone but I kept going and pushing through my practice, waiting to let the world start until after I was finished with my routine. I made it and felt oddly calm and angry still, both at the same time. I guess resolute is the word I am looking for. (look at all the I's in those last two paragraphs, I'm really seated in myself right now, I guess)

So what am I learning here?

A few things. My anger stays inside me until I release it. Love does not reach me without my permission. The work doesn't end. I do this every day and every day it changes but it does not end, it's a wave that ebbs and flows, not a goal to arrive at.

Both physical fitness and mental clarity are hard, they are not made any easier by deciding to reach them by means of advanced practices in difficult situations.

Winter lasts forever.
(just like the moment we inhabit)

yoga diary - day nine

Woke up this morning a little early. I was taking my time getting out of bed when the phone started ringing. It was 7:00 am Ottawa time, 6:00 am according to every time-keeper I maintain. (I am staying on Central Time, don't ask) The Fed Ex guy wanted to know if my address was a mistake and then to inform me the TV would be arriving today.

Sounds like an average morning, right? Well, I have trouble with gifts. They make me feel abandoned. When I was a kid people gave gifts when they wanted to control me or didn't want to bother being with me. Over time I came to associate gifts and gestures of kindness with indifference and cruelty.

All of this means yoga this morning had a certain element of faking it until I make it. I don't want to be controlled by other people. I don't want to have these feelings about gifts. I don't want to get to a point where I resent my yoga practice but truth be told there is some of that mixed in every single time I go through the routine.

So I practiced half-consciously and it was entirely a physical workout. Harder than usual, in fact, because I went into it a little unwillingly.

Fact is, if I want to be comfortable doing anything else in the rest of my life, for the rest of my life, I am going to have to do at least this much yoga every single day for the rest of my life. It's not a New Year's resolution, it's a change of life. And if I am realistic, I have to admit, I am always going to wish I didn't have to do it. I went into this feeling like I was doing it to get to a goal but the goal is to be healthier - that means stepping it up is an option, actually it's probably going to be a necessity but stopping once I reach a plateau? That will never happen. Does it happen in life? I used to think so, now I'm not so sure.

Today I am fed up with Ottawa so that's not helping. It's snowing (still, again) and outside all there is to see are crows, asphalt, white sky and snow. I suppose I should see the humor in my being born in the winter and yet not interested in winter sports. It has been that way all my life. I'm not a winter person. Having to saddle-up in coat, boots, scarf, sweater, heavy socks, mitts, hat and bag full of just-in-case supplies, pockets full of tissues for the never-ending runny nose and the awareness that no matter what I do my fingers, toes and nose are still going to get burned by the cold every time I want to go outside is not ok with me. Still, here I am, in Canada in the absolute dead of winter and so it shall be for the next few months.

Lesson for the day? Yoga can't fix everything. You still have to go through the painful parts.

Maybe it's good that the TV arrived today.

yoga diary - day eight

Last night I was up unexpectedly late. I don't have much of a problem sleeping, as a rule but the people with whom I am most deeply involved always seem to have, at best, a tortured relationship to sleep.

I don't understand insomnia. I know people suffer terribly and I try to be compassionate. The few times I've really had trouble sleeping it was an utterly miserable feeling. However, it must be said that my sleep problems, when they do arise, have invariably been self-inflicted and usually self-inflicted in the service of drama.

This results in There are times when I find other people's insomnia annoying and during those times, in the back of my head I admit, I sometimes find it difficult not to consider it attention seeking behavior. I am that way about physical processes. I believe your body will do what it needs to do when push really comes to shove and if you truly are sleep-starved, your body will knock you out where you sit, it won't wait for your permission to do it. (Actually, I've seen this happen on many occasions)

Anyway, it wasn't insomnia that tripped me up last night, rather it was the fact of someone else's insomniac habits catching up to them and their body ambushing them making them late and tipping the row of dominoes that made me late too.

The result of this was that I stayed up too late and then overslept. Physical things, it seems to me, are all math. Our bodies work to achieve a zero-sum game and we either notice and cooperate, making it easier to be more than just physical creatures, or we don't notice and refuse to cooperate, making us unwitting slaves to the physical process, slaves who are ironically irrational and convinced of our own sublimely unique and ineffable waves and patterns. I swing between these two extremes all the time. I assume everyone does. It's when I think I am the most special that I am really about as average and predictable as it is possible to be.

This morning I was late getting up. Yesterday left me with very little accomplished. The last thing I wanted to do was set myself back another hour to do yoga. The body may have a will to health but the mind is something else altogether.

Somehow I managed to override the desire not to get to my morning practice, tell myself that one hour spent in yoga buys me three hours of productivity in every other aspect of my life (which is true, always.) and got myself to the mat.

Parts of my practice were harder than I expected, parts were easier; the first half of it was practically unconscious. Starting out, I felt like it would take forever to finish. This despite the fact that I use a DVD and it always takes exactly the same amount of time.

I have modified one part of the routine, the lizard pose, which I find too demanding, always have. Now that I've modified it, it is one of the easiest poses in the series. I still dread it.

Observing all of this rolling around in my head something occurred to me; it is not only my practice that influences my life, my life, my thoughts, my resistance - those things influence my practice just as much as my practice influences those things.

When I do yoga daily and eat properly, or at least get five to seven servings of fruit and vegetables every day, my mind clears and I am better able to see the issues that need resolution in my life. I am a more efficient machine serving a mind and soul that are liberated to do their transcendent work.

Does that sound like the opposite of yesterday?

Isn't that interesting....

back to work.

yoga diary - day seven

That's right, skipped days five and six, not because I didn't do yoga but because, for whatever reason, I tend to slack off on weekends.

Anyway, who reads this? It's like hollering into a cave.

So I recently read an article in the New York Times about yoga, apparently there is a woman becoming quite famous on her approach to yoga, Tara Stiles has had the audacity to suggest that yoga might be more about becoming "Slim, Calm (and) Sexy" than anything else (Slim, Calm, Sexy is the title of her book.) She recommends 15 minutes a day.

Ms. Stiles is getting significant flack from everyone else in the yoga world for exposing her dirty little secret - that she's not in it for enlightenment but rather she wants to stay fit, be relaxed and have a decent sex life indefinitely.

Surprise surprise, the book's a bestseller.

Well, me too.

When I am dripping sweat, trying desperately to stretch into lizard pose or lowering myself slowly from plank pose into position for cobra, I am not thinking of enlightenment. I am thinking about how my feet won't swell when I've been trapped at my desk for four hours and how I won't get out of breath climbing the stairs and yes, how much hotter I'll look in my black wrap around dress.

Today I got dressed in some of the old clothes that were too new to toss before I left for Austin last year because they were too tight to wear regularly in my old body. Now my new body isn't what I want it to be either but these clothes aren't tight anymore, they remind me that as little progress as I think I've made, I have made progress and that progress is not toward enlightenment, it's toward being flexible, even lithe, slender - maybe, and sexy the next time I step off the airplane in Austin. That's a fact.

I've done 21 days in a row and every one has been hard in its own way, I'll keep going anyway because I've decided that's what I need to do but if I for one minute thought that nothing dramatic would change in my appearance for all this effort? I wouldn't do it. And neither would most of the smiling yoginis sitting in their half lotus at the yoga studio two hours before they go out to try the newest thing in haute cuisine or buy a new dress without worrying about the steady decline of their physical state.

The body is part of it, sexuality is part of it, why are we all so interested in people thinking we aren't into these things? Like they come effortlessly? They don't. I did my yoga today. I didn't want to, the living room was cold and it wasn't fun but what got me onto the mat was the fact that I will improve for doing it - I will become slim, calm and sexy and I want that. Hell, don't you?

yoga diary - day four

This is actually day 18 of my daily practice, I think. It's day four of writing a little about it.

Today was hard. Started sweating and not feeling great right off the bat - even had some aching in my muscles. I was very resistant. It didn't help that my alarm went off insistently halfway through.

Woke up too early and decided to take advantage of it to get my yoga done earlier and to synch up my sun salutation with the sunrise.

It was an interrupted practice, a difficult, sweaty, sometimes annoying practice and it took a lot of resolve to stick to it. I guess what this shows me is that some days it doesn't get easier, some days it's not about being in the moment and getting blissful from the practice of yoga. On days like today, it's about going through it, dealing with interruptions, finding it difficult and eventually sticking with it anyway for the pleasure of putting the X on the calendar and knowing I am that much closer to the goal.

Also - having put a hard day's practice behind me, I can hope tomorrow's yoga session is different from today which is almost assuredly will be since every day is different, even if we're trying to make it the same.

yoga diary - day three

Today my practice felt difficult. It seemed long at the beginning, hard in the middle and cluttered, busy. I got through it and I'm glad but it put me into this domestic frame of mind where I felt I had a thousand chores to do and not nearly enough time to do them.

To address this urgent and uncomfortable feeling, I gave myself the morning for chores. As I was cleaning the bathroom I couldn't help but think of my Grandmother and at the same time, notice I am still removing the final traces of my tenant's habits.

I like my bathroom to be clean, spotless by most people's standards. I don't think I'm overly careful about the floor but you would probably be safer eating your lunch in my bathroom than you would at most public tables - actually, I'm sure of that. You'd probably be safer eating lunch in my bathroom than most people's kitchens and that includes, sometimes, my own.

As I scrub and rinse the white porcelain basins I think of my Grandmother doing the very same thing. I think of the spiral of water as it spins down the drain, sometimes pushed along by my hand, how it reflects the spiral of the galaxy, the whirlpool in the river, the pattern of seeds on a sunflower or a dandelion. I remember my Grandmother's hard work and today I thought about what she would have used to clean with.

She would have had vinegar and baking soda and not much else.

Now I know that is very fashionable right now but I use scouring powder (which she did have at the end of her life) and sometimes I use bleach - which she also had and loved.

People seem to think there was never any reason to move from baking soda to bleach to whatever is in the scrubbing bubbles can and that annoys me more and more.

Chemical cleansers were part of the first wave of feminism geared to the lower classes. If your Grandmother cleaned her own house, chances are she moved from spending hours scrubbing with all her might using vinegar and baking soda and yes, a brush and boiling water to using a soft cloth, hot water and scouring powder. The change cut her time and effort down by at least a half and maybe quite a lot more.

Organic does not mean magical. If you choose to use organic products you need to remember your Grandmother. Chances are excellent that she tailored her formulas and her methods to her specific place and time and also to her family and their patterns of use. She spent hours on this - you cannot get the same results by sloshing half a cup of vinegar into the sink and splodging it around. Organic cleaning is an advanced method as much as anything else and it will (and should) eat your time. It ate your Grandmother's I promise you that.

Many of us are old enough to have Mothers who are grandmothers now and even older. I noticed pretty early on in the return to organics and environmental responsibility that my Mother's response was to clean less often and conserve more water and more of other resources.

This was not done out of laziness. My Mother's response typifies the kind of response that is deeply feminine. When we recognize a solution as being too flawed to ultimately be workable we work around it. In the case of my mother, it's a kind of domestic cap and trade.

I've found I do it myself. I use cleaning products that are not organic in order to buy myself the extra hours but I don't flush the toilet after around 11 until morning and I look at other conservation measures. I don't buy plastic wrap -limit plastic products period. I live somewhere walkable and walk to do most of my errands. This didn't start out by choice but it has become my preferred method of combining exercise, conservation, frugality and eco-kindness. Anything that gives you four distinct benefits for one effort is worth it. As far as statistics are concerned, I am in the 13 per cent that eats right and gets more than enough exercise on a regular basis. This is not because I am good or smart or disciplined, it's because I built it into my life such that I really don't have any other choice.

I think we tend to expand to fit the space we're given. This applies to luxuries too. I think we eat too much because we're offered too much, we hire housekeepers and maintain distance from the detritus of our daily, (intimate) lives, because we can. People offer to take over our unpleasantness for money. Whenever someone offers to buy your discomfort - be wary. It's probably not a good idea.

We sit on the couch cause the couch is there.

For some of us it requires drastic measures to change that - it didn't for our Grandmothers because they grew into their habits over time. When an older woman is reluctant to make a change, I think it is possible that as often as not it's because the way she does things as they are has hidden benefits and the loss of those benefits would mean losses in other areas of her life.

The woman who has figured out how to use organic cleansers and doesn't want to change? Well, leave her alone. Also leave alone the woman who uses bleach and bounce and all the rest of it because I will bet you anything she's making up for it somewhere else in her life and probably doing a pretty good job of it too.

Feminism is whatever benefits women, the same is true of environmental consciousness. Just because it doesn't fit your view of it, doesn't mean it isn't valid.

yoga diary day two

It's been sixteen consecutive days I've been doing yoga in the morning.

Things seem to be going better - change is stirring/ My posture is improved. I can't, literally can not eat as much junk as I used to. And I am (maybe foolishly) trusting myself to proceed at my own pace. Which is slower than most people, I admit.

Today, I have two things to work on - the search for work and my art proposal. They'll take the whole day.

That's ok with me. Time is passing. This is just a note to mark a place. It is a place to say there are shifts occurring and nobody is more surprised about that than me.

If you've ever felt the urge to do yoga? Listen to it. You can use a DVD to start, you don't have to be a member of the beautiful yoga people, Lord knows I'm not.

I have a DVD from a studio in NYC and one from California, I think and I am going through a beginner's daily flow practice every single day. I'm finding it just as beneficial as my studio membership in Austin, maybe more so. I practice before breakfast, I spend an hour at it and I can tell I have a long way to go but even in 16 days, I think I've come further than I expected.

Back to breakfast and work.

yoga diary

You'd have to go a very long way to find someone as inwardly resistant to going with the flow as I am.

To give you an idea, I've been back from Austin for 18 days now and haven't completely unpacked. In fact, I am taking clean socks and underwear out of 2009's luggage, the largest case of which sits unzipped on a plastic tub beside my desk. Once I have decided something's happening, I don't change course. I may go over the rapids, hell - I have gone over the falls more than once but changing course is not something I do.

Still, I made a promise to myself this year and it involved creating a kind of acceptance of flow in my life. I promised something small and non-threatening. I promised I'd do some yoga every day.

It's day 18 of that promise and so far, I've kept it. It's not the keeping that matters though, it's what it's doing.

During my daily yoga hour this morning a door opened and started me thinking down logical paths, currents, rivulets - flowing toward more sane, sensible attitudes to life, letting the light back in.

I will never be a yogini by any stretch. I'm frustrated by the work of it. Every single day I come close to talking myself out of it. One of the very best ways to do that is to tell myself I don't have time.

Well, while I was doing yoga - solutions popped up, ideas popped up and a media memo rewrote itself. I saved myself about half a day's effort.

Wanted to say that before I got down to it because in saving myself that half day's work I also realized where I am in the process of work for a whole bunch of other pressing things - so, down to it.

Yoga works.

Maybe I should rethink this "flow" thing.

Poetry and being heard

Went back to writing poetry this morning.

Thought about how the man in question would have sought this kind of thing out a year ago. Now I wonder if he'll bother to look at it at all, despite its presence on my Facebook page. Really, I'll have to start keeping it to myself anyway if I want to publish again, in magazines, I mean. And I do. Giving it away gets me nowhere and I've been nowhere long enough.

It occurs to me that the purpose of writing a poem is to express a complete thought. Usually it is a complete and fairly unusual thought, something you might want to think about but would not want to discuss. Usually something that couldn't be discussed.

Peripheral issues that thought stirs up could be discussed, but not the thought itself. That's what poetry is for, it is a single, clear observation that sets off resonances that create other observations in the reader. It is not a dialogue. It is more like a painting.

Been doing the ground work for a labyrinth project, slowly, slowly. Seems I do have all the time in the world to do these things, certainly more than I want, and it has occurred to me that walking the labyrinth is like making a poem (yes, poets call it that) or a painting but doing so with your body on the earth and doing it in a way where you leave no real trace and therefore put no ego into it.

You draw a symbol on the earth with your intention and that is how the earth is moved, changed, healed - it is how time is altered. It's a single statement, an idea too complex to discuss around which all other ideas about your life are formed, how you move on the earth, what you bless by your motion and your footsteps, how you pray, your intentions made manifest.

I have fallen in love with a man who is cloudy, muddied by the material aspects of life and all the complications, he cannot see clearly and yet he would be an artist. What he doesn't seem to realize is that the reason he works with images he gathers when he is not at home is because he cannot see while he is in his own body, on his own land, in his own place. He is up to his neck in the things that build illusions of permanence yet pass even as we are maintaining them - the car maintenance, the deadlines, the family crisis - waiting for these things to pass as they sweep his life into their current and out to the river of eternity.

Not that these things aren't important, even vitally so but to see them as the only things that matter - that way lies oblivion far too early.

Of course it is all too easy for us to see the things that blind and wound others. I am equally muddied, quite sure of that but because it is all within me, I can't see it. So I carry on, trying to act and speak from my higher nature, whatever that is and no doubt failing every day.

Someone I know quoted Mark Twain today, the one about setting sail for adventure because in 20 years you will only regret the things you did not do. Well, I have lived that way. I can say that with some certainty and although there is truth in that value there is equal truth in the fact that staying in one place, having family and friends who root you, understanding that place and loving it well, loving it fully - that is a different kind of adventure and one with value of its own. In fact, I would say one value is equal to the other. Many times it seems to me the value of being truly rooted in the love of one place for a lifetime is the greater adventure. It grants you the opportunity to see deeply into human nature, into your own nature and into the land you inhabit. None of us will ever live long enough to understand these things fully and they are worth knowing.

There is also the fact that Mark Twain never mentions the aftermath of adventures - coming home to the shut up household, the loneliness of traveling and returning alone, the longing for the people and places who are never permanent.

And what happens when you finally do find a place that stirs in you that deep love of home? The place where you could spend a lifetime and still have every day be an adventure? What happens then?

Like all travelers you cannot stay. Life itself is a temporary visa and there is heartbreak in knowing that truth. There must be much comfort in being somewhere you can say you have loved all your life and in making it your own. It makes me feel quite shallow, damaged and ashamed never to have found that before Austin and bereft to have found it now and not to be able to engage in that deeper adventure.

I suppose a part of me is in mourning and honestly - I'm so tired of hiding it.

Here is the poem I wrote this morning. Since it's already out there, there's no point saving it for paper publication.


in 2100 the dead will have a union.
or a consortium, the point is, they will speak
with one voice and keep a little money aside
enough to hire lobbyists
and make their voices heard.

they will have the vote
freedom of speech
and fair representation in 48 states

they will ask that all the bathtubs in home supply and department store displays
be hooked up to the plumbing
enough to make the taps work and the water run
but not to drain.
the flow will go only one way.

they will ask that you turn down the light
on your computer, in your living room
in the streets and alleys at night

and go to bed when you say you do, for a change.

they will ask that these things be made a part of the law
and we will see no reason not to

what reason is there?
not to grant last wishes.

They will speak as one group and define their members
only enough for us to know they were here once and they remember everything.

They will not say what it’s like to be where they are but
they will answer any question we can ask, while they hear us
if we phrase it exactly right.

They will remind us, they know where we have been
and have been where we are going
their rights will become bylaws and ritual will grow again
like weeds and grasses on roads where cars no longer go

we will wear black for a year
we will speak in hushed tones when we speak of them

we will think their earmarks and filibusters are tyrannical
but we will not say

only look at each other and see their place in our pasts and our futures
drink sometimes, dance and deny it.

And I know all this because I live in a place where it snows every day
and the snow is on the television
and in your hair

the wind blows every day

the wind is in your ears and on your telephone and it says things that are random
if you are still sane and quite specific otherwise

and those rights and regulations
in a place like this

are as close as your hand to your face
or your pillow to your cheek

on those long, silent nights when the phone doesn’t ring
and you cannot find a candle.

Back in Canada

I am in Ottawa again and looking out over a frozen landscape. It will stay that way for the next four months. I was thinking this morning, as I made my breakfast, about women and "extra sensory perception."

I do not believe there is anything unnatural or extraordinary about the way most women, if they let themselves, know what is happening with the people in their lives as it happens. This occurs in so many species, we would have to be fundamentally damaged for it not to be true of us. Distance doesn't matter, time and space are not part of the dynamic - when someone close to you emotionally and/or physically or even mentally, takes an action that will have an impact on your life, you can't help but feel it.

As I felt the tiny drop in my head - the distinctive sound/feeling of someone reading an email from me and composing a reply, I felt myself begin to brush it away and paused. It occurred to me that we are all capable of reading the future because we are all aware of the present in much deeper ways than we realize. When we say we would like to be able to read other's minds or read the future, we really mean the dramatic or good parts.

I wonder, if we let ourselves accept that we always know if we only choose to look - would it make a difference? Would our lives be any easier?