Mantra – arrive on the mat

Posted on August 22, 2013 by betsybeadhead | 3 Comments

My current yoga mantra is “Arrive on the mat.” It is the same as “be here now.” It isn’t an intention or prayer. It is a reminder.

It is like “return to the breath.” It is so easy to get off center, off focus, off kilter, just off. It is so easy to get distracted and discombobulated. In those times we need to remember to return to our breathing, because it will bring us back to ourselves.

We plan on one thing, and then another thing comes up. I hate it when I’m trying to do tree pose and the teacher keeps talking. I can have the most awesome “drishti” (focus point for my eyes) but the more she keeps chattering about how to keep my balance, the less balance I have.

So maybe “drishti” isn’t about an external thing to look at. Maybe it isn’t finding a spot on the floor or the wall to stare at. Maybe it is about finding that still, small, quiet place inside me that is calm and centered. Maybe it is about being at the eye of the storm, rather than in the storm.

The eye of the storm is right in the middle of everything, yet it is calm. That sounds good. Well, not being in the storm at all sounds better, but I’m not seeing a way to avoid that. Work, bills, family, chores, retirement plans, homework – there is a lot going on. We can’t just chuck it all and run away. Sometimes we do run away. We go on a vacation, but then we come back everything has piled up just a little more.

Some people leave everything and become monks or nuns or hermits or hippies. Some people leave literally, some just leave mentally. There are many ways of leaving. You can be there but just not care because you’ve chemically altered yourself.

I don’t want that. I did that for years. My problems didn’t go away, they just got fuzzier, and I just didn’t care about them as much.

That is why my mantra is “arrive on the mat”. The mat is like an altar. It is a sacred space where I prepare myself. I shape myself into a calm, centered person. I mold myself into a vessel for the Spirit. I remind myself that I must take care of this gift of my body, this house of my soul.

I want to be here, be present, be open to the opportunities that life offers. I don’t want to miss a thing. I want to observe but not obsess. I want to be there in the good and bad, in the rich and poor, in the better and worse, in living and in dying.

Because to arrive on the mat is to be there, as you are, right then. Shaggy hair, ragged toenail polish, unwashed face, or clean and scrubbed and fed. Either way. There. In the moment.

Let us begin.

In memorium.

Posted on August 21, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

Should we grieve more for one person and not another?

Is the death more tragic if it is a young mother, or if it is an old spinster?

Is it more sad if a child dies or if an adult dies having never really lived?

Is it more tragic if a famous person or an unknown dies?

All deaths are meaningful. All deaths are sad. All are different. The homeless woman’s death is just as important as the Queen’s. Death will take us all. Death is the great equalizer. Death wins.

We can pretend that death is far away. We can pretend that it will happen another day, to another person. We are special. We are different.

We aren’t. All of us are going to die, one way or another. Like it or not, you can’t escape it. You can’t take your toys with you. There are no guarantees of life, no do-overs.

Tomorrow never comes.

Until it does. Don’t take it for granted. Take it as a gift. Don’t waste it.

Every day is a new gift. Every day is another chance. Make that phone call. Write that book. Start that search for the job where you feel useful and needed and worthwhile, where you get to do what you feel called to do. Go back to school. Whatever. Or learn how to be happy where you are.

One of my friends from high school died today. She was in her mid 40s. Young. With children. A beautiful soul. We hadn’t seen each other since then, and had only recently found each other in the past few years on Facebook. She had brain cancer. Cancer is a terrible way to go. It eats you up, slowly transforming your cells into cancer cells. The treatment is barbaric. Slash and burn, poison and cut. Sometimes the treatment is worse than the disease.

Sandy and I first knew that we had something in common while we were in Economics class. We were bored. We were sitting several rows apart. Somehow I caught that she was quietly singing a Violent Femmes song with a friend of hers. I knew it – and I started singing along. “I take one, one, one cause you left me, and two, two, two for my family…” I knew it, and I was in. I had the secret code that let her know I was weird. Once you were in, you were there. We were great friends after that. The last thing I remember doing is going trick-or-treating with her and two other friends. We were too old to go, really, but we went anyway. Sandy drove, and we picked the rich neighborhoods for our hunt that night. We did well.

I’m grateful to have known her. I’m sad, not really for me, but for her family. I hadn’t seen her in many years. We’d grown apart, like people do. Her loss won’t hurt me as much as it hurts them. But I hope to remember something of her spark, her spirit, her smile. She was funny, and snarky, and smart, and beautiful in all the right ways.

Rest in peace, Sandy Scott. May your memory be a blessing to all who knew you.

Organic food is just a start.

Posted on August 15, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

One advantage to eating organic food is that you feel like you are making a difference. Whether the benefit is all in your head or real, you feel healthier and more vibrant. I feel like I’m doing something good for myself and the planet. I think also that if more of us eat organic food, then it will get less expensive.

I don’t eat a lot of organic food because of the cost. I have a low level civil service job with the government, so I’m paid very little. I feel like I’m being paid in a future pension and in health insurance rather than in wages. But that is part of the package. Government jobs aren’t get rich quick. They aren’t get poor slow, either. They are middle of the road.

Currently I eat organic oatmeal and apples and hummus. It isn’t much but something is better than nothing. You have to start somewhere.

The disadvantage to eating organic food is you retrain your taste buds. I had some regular oatmeal this morning and it tasted terrible. I felt like I had a coating of chemicals in my mouth. I felt a little dizzy too. This was the same flavor as the organic version, so there isn’t a flavor issue I’m dealing with. Perhaps it was artificially flavored as well? Generally maple and brown sugar flavor isn’t messed around with. Dang it, I just checked. “Natural and artificial flavors”. Bleah.

It reminds me of when I switched to drinking water instead of sodas. I used to drink Mello Yello every day, several times a day. Lots of caffeine and sugar and fizz loaded in that. Let’s not forget the artificial coloring too. I hated drinking water at first because it is so boring. But then after a month of water, a soda tasted terrible. I burped a lot from the carbonation. The sugar was too much and made me feel weird, or maybe that was the caffeine. Or maybe it was both.

I started to wonder why I even drank that stuff to start with. Now I wonder how I could eat regular oatmeal. I’m starting to dread finishing that box in the pantry.

I’m wondering what else I’ve come to think is “normal” that isn’t normal at all.

This isn’t just about food. I’ve been looking into everything I can and trying to uncover and unveil what I’ve ignored. I’m trying to open my eyes and my mind. What am I missing? What have I always assumed? What have I not questioned? This applies to education, healthcare, government, religion – everything.

There is a lot to studying other ways of doing things involved in this. Different ways of communicating, eating, thinking, believing all factor in. There is a lot to learning different traditions and faiths. The more I question why “we’ve always done it that way” the more things open up.

The bad part is that the more I become aware, the harder it is to fit in. Perhaps there are others who are faking it too. Perhaps by just talking about it, we can start to change things. Wouldn’t it be nice to go into a restaurant and have everything on the menu be not only tasty to eat but good for us and the planet? Wouldn’t it be nice to go into a doctor’s office and be told how to prevent our illnesses by eating the right things and exercising properly?

I want everybody to be awakened and empowered.

This is the day…

Posted on August 10, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

One of the advantages of being human is that we have memory. We can do the same thing over and over again, making tiny adjustments, until we get it perfect. We can use this time and our awareness to make something really awesome occur.

One of the disadvantages of being human is that we forget. We do the same things over and over again, and we think we are doing them the same way and we aren’t paying attention at all. Our routine becomes mindless repetition.

I was in the middle of my yoga practice this morning. Currently it includes a warrior series – warrior one, two, and peaceful warrior. They are pretty predictable, but there are a lot of little adjustments I can make to improve them. In the middle of the practice I remembered that I needed to set an intention for my practice today. An intention is kind of like a prayer, but it has a little more focus.

An intention can be to heal yourself, or for the healing of someone you love, or for the healing of the world. You set your mind on a path, like aiming a plow at a field. Aim it well and dig deep, and you’ll reap an amazing harvest.

I said “God, I dedicate this day to you.” And then I got a strong feeling back – every day is God’s day. “This is the day the Lord has made. Let us rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalm 118:24)

All we do when we bless something is to remember. We are giving credit where credit is due. We are reminding ourselves that it came from God. We are giving back what has been given to us. We are being mindful that this amazing thing didn’t just happen out of nowhere. It wasn’t an accident. It is a gift, made for us to appreciate.

It is the same idea in giving the firstborn unblemished male offspring of the herd up for sacrifice. It isn’t the second born – you don’t have a backup. You don’t know if you are going to get another one. It is admitting that if it weren’t for God, you wouldn’t even have that one.

God’s math is different from our math.

Be thankful in all things, and in all times, for everything. The more we notice things to be thankful for, the more things we notice.

This isn’t the “prosperity gospel”. This isn’t about attracting wealth. This is about creating new eyes and a new heart. It is about creating a sense of wonder and amazement and thankfulness. When you start to look for things to be thankful for, you change. You soften, and open up. It becomes like an Easter egg hunt. You find one or two at the beginning, and then it leads you to the secret cache where you realize that everything is a gift, and everything is something to be thankful for.

That is the meaning of Easter as well – new life, new growth, new birth. There is always a chance to begin again. Why not now?

Sure, I know it isn’t Easter. It isn’t the New Year either. But the same idea holds. Every day is a good day to begin again, slate wiped clean. God offers this to us every day, and we accept this gift by being thankful.

Death story (people tend to die the way they live)

Posted on August 9, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

One of the most helpful things I learned when my Mom was dying was in the middle of the night.

Normally the nights were uneventful, but this one was a doozy. She was yelling something about the mama and the baby and the man and it didn’t make sense. I have a pretty good ability at being able to understand people who can’t communicate well, but I was at a loss here. I was alone with her, as I was during most of that year she was sick. When her sickness became terminal, we were even more left by ourselves.

She was under the care of hospice by that time, but that didn’t mean they were there. She was at home, not in a facility. A nurse would come by once a day for about twenty minutes. Towards the end a sitter would come for a few hours as well. A social worker would come out maybe once a week and say useless things like “what do you regret not having done with your life?”

The goal I suspect was to figure out if some of these unfulfilled life goals could be completed. In reality the effect was to drive home how much of her life hadn’t been lived.

This night she was wild. I called the number that hospice had given, asking what to do. The nurse decided to send someone out to the house. That was a long wait, alone in the dark with someone who was hysterical and dying. Somehow things seem more intense at night.

When the nurse came, he talked with her and listened to her and he was just as confused by what she was saying as it was. It was as if she was having a waking nightmare. He gave her ativan, which is really valium. That did the trick. He left me with some and told me how to administer them to her when she got to the point that she couldn’t swallow.

We sat and talked for a bit, and I’m grateful that he saw that part of his field of care involved me. Often the caregiver is ignored in favor of the patient. Both have needs. This was a new and strange thing for both of us.

He said this – “People tend to die the way that they live.”

This has stuck with me all this time, nearly 20 years now.

He asked if she smoked cigarettes. Yes. That was what was killing her. She smoked for half her life, and I remember that she lit up a cigarette every twenty minutes. It had become such an addiction that she didn’t want to go to the movies because she couldn’t imagine an hour or so not smoking.

That is an addiction. That is a desperate need to relax using chemicals.

Being terminal is stressful. Dying at 53 is stressful. Having not fulfilled your life goals is stressful.

It would be a miracle if she learned how to deal with her emotions not using chemicals now. So she didn’t. She was on ativan until she died, as a substitute for nicotine.

I find it funny (not funny ha-ha) that she didn’t want to take her pain medicine because she didn’t want to become an addict, not realizing that she already was one. But socially accepted addictions are different, right?

If people tend to die the way they live, how will you die?

More importantly, how will you live, knowing that you will die?

Death sentence (or paragraph…)

Posted on August 7, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

You never know when you are going to die. Until you do. Then you start pulling yourself together. Then you start cleaning up and hunkering down. Then life develops a clarity it never had before.

But you always knew. You always knew that this day would come. This day, the day the doctor told you that you were going to die. How long do you have? Three months? Three weeks? Three years?

Perhaps your first clue that you were mortal came from when your parents died. You were young, just out of college. Or you were middle aged, with children of your own to manage. You didn’t have time then to deal with it, but you did. You somehow managed to work in the extra work that is involved in handling an estate. You just did it, because it had to be done.

Perhaps your second clue came when you found that spot – that spot that made you go to the doctor. You thought it might be cancer, and you started wondering what you were going to do, how you were going to manage. You found out it was something simple – for now. It could be cut out or burned off or you could take a course of medicine and you were done.

But now, now there is no turning back. Now it is for real. You’ve had your second opinion. You’ve had your third opinion. Now you can’t turn away from this because it is in your face and it is holding you hostage and you feel like you can’t breathe.

And all you want to do is live.

But that is all you have done. You’ve had your life to live, and you’ve wasted it. You’ve spent it up. You’ve decorated your house and gone to tea parties and read your books and that is it. What have you done that made a difference? What have you done that has made the world better? What change have you made? Who will remember you when you were gone? Whose life was made better because of you?

Have you spent your life for yourself, or for others? Have you been true to the person you were born to be? Have you really lived, I mean really?

Because there is a difference between being alive, and living.

You say you don’t have time, but that is all you have had. Too late now to cry about it. Too late now to feel cheated. The only person who has cheated you is yourself.

Wait. Here is a reprieve. They were wrong. For now. What will you do? Back to the same old habits?

Start, right where you are. Begin. Begin again. Renew. Revive. Reassess. Strip down everything to the bare bones. Look at now, and the future.

Where do you want to be? Start heading there.

Life is short. Death is coming. Be mindful. Be awake. Be alive, really alive. Live every day with intention and meaning. Leave nothing undone. Enjoy your food and your friendships. Work on that project you’ve been putting off. Make peace.

Because one day, there won’t be a tomorrow.

Instead of this filling you with fear, let it add savor to your life. Make it add meaning. Aim for your goals.

But I don’t have time…

Posted on August 6, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

You say you don’t have time to exercise or write that book. But you do. You have exactly as much time as everyone else. The only difference is how you choose to spend your time.

Video games? Facebook? Reading fiction? Getting drunk? Watching TV?

Time is time is time.

Notice how fast it goes by. It is already August. It is 2013. Every day, every minute counts.

You can’t get out of that 40 hour a week job. But you can write and exercise at lunch. Even 10 minutes of each is better than nothing. You can use your phone and write a “note” while you walk at lunch and be even more efficient.

You can get up an hour earlier and do 30 minutes of each.

Time is limited. Our lives are limited. Choose wisely.

Take all the “I can’t” excuses and look at what you can do, and do it. Start small. Don’t say you will exercise and write every day. You’ll get overwhelmed. This is like going from juggling three balls to six. Aim for once a week. Commit to that. . Then you will eventually work up to every day.

Everything worth doing has to start somewhere. Good habits are like bad habits. You just have to remember to choose wisely. Don’t let the bad habits win.

Stained glass windows, part two

Posted on August 4, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

I’m totally opposed to stained glass windows in church. I object to the idea and to the cost.

Having stained glass windows keeps the church members focused inward, not outward. Their view is of pretty pictures, not of the world they are called to. We are called to love and serve the Lord by loving our neighbors. How can we think of loving and serving them if we can’t even see them?

The windows are expensive. Maybe the church as a whole raised the money to put the window in. Maybe a parishioner donated the money in honor of someone who died. It doesn’t really matter how the money was raised – 8 t0 20 thousand dollars was just spent on a window – when there are needy people who need help. Jesus told us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and house the homeless. He told us not to build up treasures for ourselves on this earth. Do you see the contradiction here?

The windows are most beautiful to those people who are inside the building. The people who are inside already get the message. It is the people outside who need it. And what is that message? That God loves us, and needs us, and wants us. God made us, every one of us, and we are loved beyond measure. It is the duty of people in the church to share that message to every person. These stories of love and healing and redemption are stories that everybody needs to hear.

I propose that each one of us needs to become a stained glass window. We need to let God into our lives and our hearts and let the light of God shine through us. We need to be the way that people see God. We need to carry the stories of love and healing and redemption with us by living them out. We need to bring them to life. They need to not be stories so much as reminders. They need to be touchstones to let us know we are on the right path. They aren’t stories that happened back then – the stories are happening right now. There are still people like Abraham and David and Moses and Jonah. There are still people like Sarah and Leah and Miriam and Mary.

God still calls us.

I propose that the purpose of church is to wake people up to this idea, and to teach people how to be servants of God. I propose that a church that is all about the building rather than the people has got it backwards.

Fiction

Posted on July 31, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

People want a happy ending. This is why many people read fiction and watch movies. They want the lovers reunited. They want the killer caught. They want resolution. They want to know that everything is going to be OK. We use fiction and films as escapes from reality.

But this isn’t real. And the more you read or watch, the more your own life will seem miserable. There isn’t resolution or conclusion or ending all the time. Sometimes things just happen and that is the way they are and you just have to deal with it.

Hollywood films all have happy endings. Everybody makes up. Everything is fine in the end. Foreign films rarely do this. There is ambiguity. There is unfinished business. There are more questions at the end than answers.

Persian films are the best at this. As one friend said, in Persian films somebody is crying, or somebody is dying. They don’t end up well. They reflect the irregularity, the unpredictability of life.

But here’s the advantage – if you watch a foreign film, especially a Persian one, your own life seems much better by comparison. Your own mess is far tidier. Your own relationship squabbles are far cleaner. Your job is easier. Your future looks bright.

I had a friend who took acid. Most people try to have a really good trip when they do this. Not David. He would have the worst trip possible. He wanted to see demons. He wanted to be chased and attacked and hunted. He wanted everything horrible to occur in his head for eight hours. His logic- his own life would seem that much better by comparison.

I’ve read the idea recently that instead of going on vacation; why not create a life you don’t have to escape from?

So, extending that further, instead of reading fiction and watching movies all the time, why not create your own life to be what you want – or learn how to accept the “what – is”?

The more you escape, the more the problem increases.

Time to decide. Spend your life awake, or asleep?

Tuesday Buffet

Posted on July 29, 2013 by betsybeadhead | Leave a comment

There is a difference between seeing and noticing. We see all the time. We rarely notice. We rarely take the time to slow down and really look at what is going on. We are often in such a hurry that we take a glance and then go on, missing most of everything.

It helps to look at stop-motion animation or to take pictures of things as they are growing. I had a project once. I took a picture of the same tree, from the same spot, at the same time every Tuesday for a year. I saw the tree change and evolve, grow and decay from one season to the next. I stood in rain and snow. I changed a little when I did that project. I’d wanted to do it for a long time, and then I finally decided that it was time to start. Then I was committed to it. I posted the weekly picture on my personal Facebook page, and it turned out that my friends looked forward to it.

There was something personally transforming about that project. I don’t know whether it was because I finally got over my inertia (a common malady) or I finally actually noticed that tree, or both, but I changed. I started to look at everything this way, and wonder what else I was missing, and wonder when I was going to start other projects I’d thought about for a long time.

I almost missed being able to complete that project. The tree, a Bradford Pear, was on the lot of a Chinese buffet that I went to. I’d gone there for at least a decade. It was a fixture of the community. It was just something that was always there. Until it wasn’t. I was three-quarters through my project and they closed. They had bought the competition and moved. Now, I could no longer go to lunch there and just walk out afterwards at 12:45 on a Tuesday and take the picture. I had to go eat quickly elsewhere, and then drive over there to get that shot.

I was committed to that time, and that place, and that day. The project depended on being consistent.

I contemplated cancelling the project. I was almost done. It was good enough. My friends changed my mind – they’d come to look forward to that tree, in the same way that I had. I redoubled my efforts and completed the project.

If I’d waited a few months longer to start the project, it would have been that much more difficult to finish. There could have been a bad storm and the tree could have been damaged, or it could have succumbed to rot and been taken out. I could have missed the whole thing before I even began.

Other things happened as well, to me. I’d suddenly had to buy a different car, and I’d had to have surgery to remove a precancerous spot. I started going to the Y. I started journaling again. Perhaps it was all linked – I started paying attention.

Here is a selection of the pictures for you. (I’ve made another change – I’ve edited this to have ALL the pictures. This is a meditation on how we can always go back and fix things. Our work doesn’t have to be “perfect” at the start.)

The first picture, 7-27-10

8-3-10

8-10-10

8-17-10

8-24-10

8-31-10

9-14-10. Missed a week because we were on vacation in North Carolina, before my surgery.

9-21-10. The day before my surgery.

9-29-10. A Wednesday. Not allowed to drive for a week after surgery, this was the first time I went out.

10-5-10

10-12-10, a touch of fall

10-19-10

10-26-10. Raining hard.

11-2-10

11-9-10

11-16-10

11-23-10

11-30-10. My birthday. My husband drove. The restaurant owner bought my lunch.

12-7-10

12-14-12, a tiny bit of snow. There was a Christmas luncheon at work, so I ate quickly and then drove here to take this picture and do the recycling chore.

12-21-10

12-29-10. A Wednesday. I was off for the Christmas holidays and forgot that yesterday was Tuesday.

1-4-11. This would have been my Mom’s 70th birthday. She died at 53 from smoking cigarettes.

1-11-11, dreary day, with snow

1-18-11. Just found out that Peter, the owner of the buffet, has bought the competition that is a block away. This location will be closing. How will I continue this project?

1-25-11

2-1-11. The Tuesday buffet special price has been discontinued, now that there is no competition.

2-8-11

2-15-11

2-22-11

3-1-11

3-8-11 The buffet has closed. I ate quickly somewhere else and then made a special trip here.

3-15-11. The Bradford pear is just beginning to blossom. I parked out of frame to reference the fact that the buffet is closed now and things are different.

3-22-11 If I’d stopped going I would have missed this glorious display of beauty.

3-29-11

4-5-11. While here, I saw another car in the lot. A lady went into the building. A new owner?

4-12-11

4-19-11

4-26-11. There was a bad storm recently and the Bradford pear has lost a branch.

5-3-11 The place isn’t being taken care of – a branch that had fallen is still there and the grass needs cutting.

5-10-11

5-17-11. A “cartoon” version from last week. I was home sick, and next week we plan on going on vacation to NC. I didn’t want my friends to miss that much so I created this.

6-7-11. Three whole weeks missed. Sick, vacation, and then a going-away party for someone at work. I was starting to think about cancelling the project. The place was sold and it was hard to get here on time every week now.

6-14-11. Back on track. Recommitted.

6-21-11

6-28-11

7-5-11

7-26-11 -and we are back around to the beginning. Not a lot looks different, but a lot has happened.

———–
Edit to add – This is the most recent picture, taken at the same spot, or as close as I can determine.

The lot is now a Zaxby’s. I’m standing in the drive-through lane. The entire building was torn down and the foo-dogs were removed, much to the chagrin of the the former owner, who wanted them back. They cost $10K each. This picture was not taken on a Tuesday at 1 pm as all the others were, because I can’t get here at that time anymore because of where I work now. This was around three on a Friday. Yet another change. My father always said “You just adjust and adjust and adjust, and then you die.”

Here are more pictures of that area, taken after the buffet had closed.

The building