plea to a muse (Yoga for Writers workshop report)
The thing I always wonder, on all those websites and in all those books and in all those workshops and speeches, the ones tell you to stop right now, to make your life the life you want and how to make your dreams come true one step at a time, that it’s hard but you can do it, is this:
What if you don’t know what your dream is?
DING DING DING DING DING
follow your bliss. do what you love, love what you do. etc etc etc.
sure, if you’ve been dancing ballet since you were 4 or always dreamed of writing a novel or reeeeally love woodworking, i can see how this kind of advice is useful for people who have passions. real passions. things they dedicate themselves to. things they lose sleep over, get up at dawn for, give up everything else for, cash out their 401ks to fund.
i am now 35 years old and after attempts at various endeavors in business and the arts, i still have no idea what my “bliss” is, which makes it difficult to follow.
last sunday morning, i attended a 3-hour Yoga for Writers (Y4W) workshop with one of my longtime favorite irreverent SF columnists, Mark Morford (so much so that i’ve had a blog category devoted to him since 2004. god i’m such a fangirl.) Mark is also a yoga instructor, and after many years of regarding them separately in his life, he recently learned that combining them is double the pleasure, double the fun. so when i saw the workshop announcement i thought hey! i’ve been doing lots of yoga and writing for over a decade too! so i should go - this is for me! maybe this will unlock some of my confusion around what AM i doing with my life??
prior to, my mind had totally been occupied with all the Occupy stuff all week. endless reading about economics and tax models and discussions about consensus and active democracy and rights and all kinds of dense things. so i hadn’t really thought much beforehand about the workshop or what i was going to work on, writing wise. so i was a little mentally exhausted and a little unprepared.
in the opening minutes of the workshop, Mark talked about reasons why we might all be there, as writers, and how the physical and mental practice of yoga can be used as a tool to unblock our creative energy and really let go of our egos in order to write freely, fluidly. and i immediately recoiled, because, as far as i can tell, i don’t have that problem. i’ve never really had ‘writers block’. in fact, i have the opposite problem: SO MUCH TO SAY SO LITTLE TIME. i wasn’t quite sure how to reframe what he was talking about to fit that problem, and so i was like “oh, shit. this workshop is not for me.”
and then he talked about how so many writers live too much in their heads and neglect their bodies, these pale weaklings who never leave their basements and spend days in their sweatpants. um, also not me. see: the 2+ hours of exercise i get most days, and all the dancing i do. i am WELL AWARE of how much body movement affects my mind: my best blog posts are written while biking/dancing/yoga-ing.
so what was i doing there?? i started to fret.
the thing is, i am trying to figure out WHY i write. and whether i should be trying to channel it into something more productive than blog posts and facebook screeds. the idea of “monetizing” my blog has always caused me to wince, and writing under deadlines for someone else’s umbrella also seems painful. to date, my writing has been purely CATHARTIC. and i have always been happy with that. it gets things out of my head. and occasionally, someone else tells me that they appreciate it too, that something i wrote really resonated, or they were glad i wrote about something they were too scared to say. and that has always been enough.
but right now i am going through what some might consider a “transition” phase in my life, and one of the ideas embedded in that is i am considering *gasp* graduate school. and one of the programs i have been looking at is Writing focused. so, this means i really do need to consider the question: do i want to be a Writer, and how?
and so it was that i found myself in a writing workshop, not so much trying to be a better writer as trying to figure out What The Hell I Was Doing There.
one of the pieces that Mark handed out was this, from Teachings of Rumi:
There is one thing in this world that you must never forget to do. If you forget everything else and not this, there’s nothing to worry about; but if you remember everything else and forget this, then you will have done nothing in your life.
It’s as if a king has sent you to some country to do a task, and you perform a hundred other services, but not the one he sent you to do. So human beings come to this world to do particular work. That work is the purpose, and each is specific to the person. If you don’t do it, it’s as though a priceless Indian sword were used to slice rotten meat. It’s a golden bowl being used to cook turnips, when one filing from the bowl could buy a hundred suitable pots. It’s a knife of the finest tempering nailed into a wall to hang things on.
You say, “But look, I’m using the dagger. It’s not lying idle.” Do you hear how ludicrous that sounds? For a penny, an iron nail could be bought to serve the purpose. You say, “But I spend my energies on lofty enterprises. I study jurisprudence and philosophy and logic and astronomy and medicine and all the rest.” But consider why you do those things. They are all branches of yourself.
Remember the deep root of your being, the presence of your lord. Give your life to the one who already owns your breath and your moments. If you don’t, you will be exactly like the man who takes a precious dagger and hammers it into his kitchen wall for a peg to hold his dipper gourd. You’ll be wasting valuable keenness and foolishly ignoring your dignity and your purpose.
and my God if that didn’t make me immediately anxious and depressed. IT’S TRUE. I AM DOING A THOUSAND THINGS BUT NOT THE ONE THING. FUCK. WHAT IS IT???
in the end, i still don’t really know. when i walked out, i felt like the balance was definitely tipped more in favor of Yoga than Writing in terms of things i am really into doing right now. would the workshop have been different for me if it were framed as Writing for Yogis instead of Yoga for Writers? maybe.
anyway, i have no conclusions, but in the spirit of the workshop, letting go of your ego and not caring what anyone thinks about what you write and letting it just come out, here are the (mostly unedited) things i wrote in the workshop for the 3 writing sessions we did in between bouts of yoga. i’m not too personally impressed with them, but here you go:
Filed in autobiographical, blogging, morford worship, not poems | Tagged with mark morford, rumi, yoga for writers | Comment (0)i agree with Glenn Beck
“I’m not saying God is, you know, causing earthquakes — well, I’m not not saying that either. But I’ll tell you this … There’s a message being sent. And that is, ‘Hey you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.’ I’m just saying.” — Glenn Beck
~via Glenn Beck is a Message from God
i agree with Glenn Beck. “Hey you know that stuff we’re doing? Not really working out real well. Maybe we should stop doing some of it.”
like cutting social welfare programs and laying off teachers while launching missiles at Libya. not gonna work out real well.
or evangalizing misinformed political theories your television show. maybe we should stop doing that too.
whether “God was punishing Japan” is ….well….my belief system doesn’t allow for those theories.
anyway, the irony is, that the thing that makes me agree with Glenn Beck – agree that America is no longer what it once was, that American culture is (hopefully reversibly) fundamentally flawed – is that GLENN BECK IS ON TELEVISION and PEOPLE LISTEN TO HIM. that’s what makes me agree with Glenn Beck about the f*d up state of the world and humanity, albeit from polar opposite worldviews. that Glenn Beck exists. proof in the pudding, right there.
Filed in culture and random linkage, morford worship | Tagged with glenn beck | Comments (3)h8rs gonna <3
“the more ridiculous, tiny, arcane or completely irrational the object of your outrage is, the more you know you have attained ultimate freedom. You are living the real American Dream, hereby defined as being endlessly upset and miserable about totally meaningless bulls–t for no valid reason whatsoever because you have everything you could ever want or need in this life, ever.”
–mark morford
every once in a while someone who i don’t see in person very often but who keeps up with me online will note that my public/online persona is often very much a hater.
i am aware of this. that’s why i bought myself this t-shirt!
my excuse, and i think many writers will agree with me here, is that it is more often only things that make your blood boil that move you to express more than 140 characters. i know that this is not a good excuse, and in fact believe that more expression of the positive is needed in this world, that all this media and cultural negativity is somehow deeply traumatizing us, individually and collectively. (aside: something the other day prompted me to think for a minute how awesome it would be to have a positive-news-only channel/newspaper).
this is the part that is maybe not obvious, which i want to enunciate: even when i am hating on something, i’m reveling in whatever absurdity i’m finding there, either in the thing itself, or often laughing at my own hating on it. most often this is music, fashion, or art. i try very hard to have more compassion and less judgment about other parts of people’s lives and their choices. well, except for politics and religion, but that’s a whole other thing there that we’ll not even get into right now. but music, fashion, art: they are put out there as a language, as a message for interpretation, and so i feel ok about critiquing these things, even though, yes, these things are also often very very personal. even when i am at my most critical, and i’ve said this before, i will support creatives until the end of time in their endeavors in these realms, but that doesn’t mean i also love their art. sometimes the output of a brilliant concept really viscerally sucks. it’s kind of like loving your 5-year-old’s kindergarten drawings. of course they suck. but look how much creativity and love!
[it's true that there are some things i just can't get behind and personally support. like sports/fans. but i'll take the cue here and "stop Eeyoring" and this will be the only time i say a word about the fact that "my home team" is in the World Series and no, I DO NOT CARE. but everyone who does care ("bandwangoneers" and "real fans" alike) should LIVE IT UP AND have fun! i mean it! i will not hate on the Giants or the related ridiculousness going on around here right now.]
back to the more important point: there is no apathy here. i care deeply about fucking everything. i am one of those who revels in darkness as much as light. i walk the line. just because i am not espousing positivity and puking rainbows does not mean i am unhappy (anxious, maybe. unhappy? no.) or that i do not find joy in the world. in fact, i still SQUEE over the simplest things, one of the most common being dogs with their heads out the windows of cars on the freeway, their faces into the wind, mouth open, surely getting smacked by bugs and detritus and dust and tiny rocks, GRINNING. I LOVE THAT THEY DO THAT. almost enough to make me want to get a dog. flowers, also. and trees. and moonlight. a simple girl singing a simple song. people’s eyes, reflecting forever.
so please don’t get me wrong. i love humans. i just find human nature wildly incomprehensible sometimes, and the levels of relative absurdity are often overwhelming enough to make me spew.
Filed in autobiographical, me myself and i, morford worship | Comment (0)mark morford: the life lessons of burning man
reposting:
Get real. Burning Man is a completely outrageous, multimillion dollar, for-profit, impossibly unsustainable theatrical megaproduction. This is, in part, why we love it. Tickets are $300 and it costs many hundreds if not thousands more in gear, supplies, transport to attend, and while you can get there and do it on a grimy hippie sort’ve budget if you leech on your friends just right, it’s basically a very expensive, meta-bohemian, chemically enhanced anti-vacation. It’s all a grand and ridiculous and temporary illusion, not at all meant to be transposed on a livable sphere.
Or is it? You may not be able to take the pseudo-economy and the neo-pagan society back with you, but what you can transpose, of course, is the sense of awe. The fearlessness. The creative wonder. You can bring back confidence. Abandon. Fierce joy. Really, what more could you ask for?
read in full: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/08/28/notes082809.DTL&nl=fix
five years in a row has indeed instilled in me this sense of awe/joy/abandon/creativity/wonder in my daily life (although it ebbs and flows). case in point: bringing these life lessons home from the playa and applying them to Our Daily Lives, the Stay Behind team has many devious plans for this coming Week Without Burners in SF, definitely not limited to Balsa Man. this is the whole point, right? take the class, apply it to Real Life? consider this year Burning Man Practicum.
Filed in burning man, morford worship | Comment (0)the sound of silence
The Earth is humming. Singing. Churning out a tune without the aid of battery or string or wind-up mechanism and its song is ethereal and mystifying and very, very weird, a rather astonishing, newly discovered phenomena that’s not easily analyzed, but which, if you really let it sink into your consciousness, can change the way you look at everything.
Indeed, scientists now say the planet itself is generating a constant, deep thrum of noise. No mere cacophony, but actually a kind of music, huge, swirling loops of sound, a song so strange you can’t really fathom it, so low it can’t be heard by human ears, chthonic roars churning from the very water and wind and rock themselves, countless notes of varying vibration creating all sorts of curious tonal phrases that bounce around the mountains and spin over the oceans and penetrate the tectonic plates and gurgle in the magma and careen off the clouds and smack into trees and bounce off your ribcage and spin over the surface of the planet in strange circular loops, “like dozens of lazy hurricanes,” as one writer put it…
it’s such a beautiful thought, and gives justification for those of us who can sometimes be found dancing in what would appear to others to be “silence”. there is no silence.
“silence” is “a relative or total lack of audible sound.”
relative. audible.
some sounds you can only feel.
i read the news today….oh boy.
i had a very distinct i hate the world moment when i read the news this morning. or, more specifically, i hate america, what with Bush completely illegally overstepping his bounadries and messing with the EPA and the American dream slowly swirling down the drain and California’s education system grinding to a halt and the financial markets dropping steadily.
i hate that feeling. the pessimism. the “i hope i die before it gets too bad” thought. the sinking pit in the bottom of your stomach when you feel helpless. i should never have read the news today, i thought, and then i clicked this and thanked the universe for Mark Morford: “How not to die, every single day”:
No, you do not escape. You cannot completely block. You merely minimize. You recognize the most dire sources and most abhorrent problems and you choose your battles wisely, as you acknowledge just how complicit you are in all of it, how much you contribute to the problem, and adjust and recalibrate your life accordingly. This is the first, mandatory, all-important step.
But more important than that, you learn to shun the paranoia. You gotta mock the relentless direness and shrug off the gods of death, every single day, even as they seem to be multiplying like rabid evangelicals at a Colorado megachurch. You gotta keep perspective, recall how man has been under deadly pressure from himself since the dawn of time. Otherwise, well, life is merely an army of demons and sins lined up and ready to take a bite out of your sweet, innocent flesh as you stroll by like a virgin at a porn convention. You know?
perspective. yes. more please.
Filed in morford worship | Comment (0)the bubble effect
i think mark moford is reading my blog. either that, or the fact that his current column mentions both Buy Nothing Day (aka Black Friday, the most gluttonous day of the year) and the new yorker article on synthetic crude (and connects them ohsowell), two things i’ve blogged about recently, means that the SF bubble really is so small and tight that everyone inside it thinks alike. i have to say, even when groupthink is positive, it creeps me out. i also hate that he keeps writing about all the same things that i do, but so much better.
Filed in morford worship | Comments (3)i don’t care as long as it doesn’t make my ass look big
america, the sexy fascist state : americans are more or less “meh” over surveillance cameras – do we really think the government is organized enough to make them effective? who is monitoring all those feeds? (answer: no one). all we really care about is whether we look good or not when being filmed at the ATM.
…despite the American Civil Liberties Union’s entirely appropriate ultra-cautionary stance, most people just see these cameras and, well, shrug. And then smile. And then fix their hair. And hope the camera catches their good side and doesn’t make their ass look huge or their double chin too obvious. Surveillance society? Pshaw. It’s a celebrity society, baby. Everyone wants to be on television, no matter what kind of television it is.
Filed in morford worship | Comment (0)on why you should care
“Humans are the single most dominant and destructive species in planetary history. But sentient man has been around for what, a million years? The Earth has been here for roughly 4.5 billion. No matter how you slice it, the Earth still sees us as just another fly in its bedroom. A particularly obnoxious one, no doubt, but still a fly. Isn’t that reassuring?
There are two ways to react to such a viewpoint:
Filed in morford worship | Comments (3)you may say i’m a dreamer, but i’m not the only one.
No wait, not six. To hell with that. Make it 10. Ten bucks a gallon, no matter what the going rate for a barrel of light sweet crude. That would so completely, violently, brilliantly do it. Revolutionize the country. Firebomb our pungent stasis. Change everything. Don’t you agree?
Here’s what we could do: Give gas discounts to cab drivers (at least initially) and metro transit systems and low-income folks, those who have to drive their busted-up ’78 Honda Civics to their jobs scrubbing restaurant toilets and flipping burgers and vacuuming the residual cocaine from the seat cushions of numb SUV owners. Everyone else, 10 bucks a gallon, across the board. Eleven for premium.
It would take some finessing. Maybe also give a price break to some truckers and trucking companies (so vital to the overall economy), but not so much to global delivery companies (FedEx, DSL et al.), because not doing so would force them to raise shipping rates and force you (and me) to reconsider buying everything online and hence will encourage you to shop locally once again, thus reviving a stagnant local economy.
Voilá — gas crisis, oil crisis, warmongering agenda, pollution issues, road rage, traffic congestion, urban decay, oil profiteering — all completely almost totally somewhat solved. Or at the very least, dramatically, gloriously shifted toward … I don’t know what. Something better. Something more humane, less greedy, more sustainable. Could it work? How outraged and indignant would you be to have to pay that much for gas? How long would that feeling last?
Take it one logical step further. Set up a national system whereby if you want to buy a vehicle that gets less than 20 mpg in the city, you pay a $1,000 Global Warming Surcharge and that money goes straight to a local organic farm, or school, or environmental think tank. And if it gets under 12 mpg, make it three grand, plus a slap to your face from a small, angry child. Got yourself a shiny new Hummer? You pay five grand extra, you can only buy gas once a month and all the truly beautiful women of the world will shun you like Charlie Sheen (oh wait, that already happens). See? Revolution is easy.
What, too far fetched? Too implausible? Not at all. Sure, 10 bucks a gallon would be extremely painful for a while. Citizens would wail. Commuters would scream and stomp and die. But then we would do what we always do. We would evolve. Adapt. Systems would quickly transform, habits would instantly shift. It would be easier to implement than the goddamn mess that is Medicare reform, far easier than Lots of Children Left Behind, more viable and livable than the toxic existence of Homeland Security and the disgusting Patriot Act.
But of course such an idea is also, right now, absolutely impossible. It will never happen — not 10 bucks, not six, not even a buck more per gallon — and not just because no politician anywhere on either side of the aisle has the nerve to come out and suggest that Americans might actually need to drive less and conserve and make a change in their gluttonous habits. This is, of course, absolute death for a politician. Tell Americans what to do? Dare to suggest that they’re doing something wrong, or that their behaviors are dangerous and destructive and irresponsible? Are you insane? This is America! We’re flawless!
No, the primary reason such reform won’t happen is because, simply put, we are the most entitled nation in the world, perhaps in the entire galaxy. Americans are trained from birth to believe we deserve as much as we desire of every exploitable resource on the planet, be it water or natural gas or oil, coal or salmon or steaks, Big Macs or diapers or iPods or bizarre varieties of blue ketchup….
Filed in morford worship | Tagged with economics | Comment (0)
