Vācā - Word

 

In the preface to Night, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel explains that after liberation, he did not know how to write his account of surviving Nazi horrors, of turning his back on his own father, of becoming one of the walking wounded, because words had ceased meaning what they used to mean. There were so many words -- chimney, gas, smoke, selection -- whose meanings he'd understood differently before. But how do you function in a post-apocalyptic world where the words that other people know mean something so catastrophically different to you now? And how do you communicate your experiences to people who cannot begin to fathom the atrocities those words might hold for you?

I would not have had the strength or courage to survive what Wiesel experienced. But when I read that about the failure of words, I understood it. Words are my life -- reading them, writing them, teaching students to use them more effectively, how to manipulate words to win arguments and persuade audiences. Words are how I make sense of the world. If I ever quit being an English teacher, it will only be in order to become a librarian, a job in which I could continue to promote the value of words.

But sometimes words fail. 

When that happens, I find myself desperate, becoming increasingly agitated as I keep trying to FORCE THE WORDS to make sense, filling up pages and pages and pages with them, hoping that somehow if I put them in the right combination or break enough pencils on them, they will begin meaning something that I can understand. Sometimes I fill journals full of words, blog posts full of words, and they still don't make sense.

Sometimes the world just doesn't make sense.

A thing I appreciate about mystics (of which Wiesel was one) is that they are concerned more with Life's questions than answers. The guru from our last yoga session said Life has certain "Unanswerable Whys." 

Here is my Unanswerable Why:

Why is Will dead?

I taught him 3 years ago. He wore work boots to school everyday. He was a country boy through and through and often wore camouflage to school, as well.

Will had my class 1st hour, so he trooped in at 7:05 every morning and wrote "WORDS CLASS" really huge on the board, lest anyone forget what we were supposed to be learning in Room 517. 

Underneath that, he would write "___ Days Until ___ -Hunting Season" and fill it in with the appropriate number of days and animal he was preparing to annihilate. Eventually he left off "WORDS CLASS" and only kept the most important part -- how soon hunting season would be arriving, as if we were all preparing to hit the fields with him and equally excited.

Will was a good kid. And even though he claimed to be terrible at English and always to have failed it previously, that never made sense to me. He could write. He was a good student.

Last month, two boys from FZN died in a car crash. When I first located the news article, I was less concerned with what it said and more concerned with the identities of the students. Were they mine? 

Like that somehow made it less horrible.

Will's name jumped out from the screen. BUT. It wasn't him. It wasn't him, he was just being interviewed. I did not reach out to Will, or to the pair of brothers I taught who had lost their family in that car crash. I meant to, of course, but with switching school districts, there was so much to do, and FZ had already cut off my access to student contact information.

And then I got the text this week that Will is dead now, too. Losing his best friends had been too much for him to handle. 

I searched my Google Drive in the hopes that I could find some of Will's words, all of his words, all the words he ever wrote for me. But I'd deleted them. I erased countless words from countless students when I transferred districts, thinking that I wouldn't need their various narrative essays and thematic analyses and "All About Me" assignments. So now I have nothing of Will's, nothing to note that he existed, that he wrote and thought and laughed in my classroom.

I don't have the right words to honor him. I don't have any of the words that he deserves. Will was my student and he deserves to be remembered and valued and noticed, but that is another thing for which I have no words.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

from William Butler Yeats' poem, The Stolen Child

Guru - One Who Is Weighty & Raises Another

As we enter the last 25 hours of our 200-hour yoga certification, I can say it is probably one of the hardest voluntary experiences I've undertaken in quite sometime (although still a far, far cry from almost being eaten by bears at Wheaton). 

A few weeks ago, we had to sequence a lesson using the nearly 500-page book of poses we'd been working from. The list of requirements was extensive. Still, it didn't seem that hard until I considered that the primary goal should be to leave the practitioner feeling really good; or, failing that, at least not injure them.

I recruited Cara and her daughter Aubrey for my students. All was going according to plan until I got a series of break-up texts mere seconds before I was due to teach. I literally cried my way through the entire introduction, like a lunatic. And since Cara and Aubrey are empaths, they cried too...while it was being filmed...to hand in as evidence of my great progress as a yogi.

It might not have been so bad, but then the OCD part of my brain that always feels it has to "confess" my failures caused me to blurt out an explanation for my "wet" instruction to the teachers and my entire yoga class the next time we met. It was around that time that Yoga Elsa told us she would mostly just be looking at our introductions. So at least she got an interesting "here's how yoga relates to Life" for mine, hopefully. To be honest, I really don't know for sure because I refused to watch it and relive the experience before handing it in.

Our most recent weekend of training involved meeting with a spiritual leader and Sanskrit scholar to study the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. "Sutras" means "sutures" and the yoga sutras are the teachings which, all stitched or sutured together, form the basis of yogic philosophy. We spent most of the weekend reading, annotating, and meditating on the yoga sutras. (I sent one of the words to Priya, who's been back in India most of the summer, to make sure I was understanding it correctly you know, before I had it tattooed onto my arm or something. She asked all the Bangalore aunties and uncles, and they reached a consensus and texted me back. Apparently Sanskrit and Hindi are still pretty closely bound.)

#besties

It was very hard for me to stay focused on the spiritual leader via Zoom. Also, I was a little afraid of her. What if she was also a mindreader? Therapy Elsa tried to convince me that no one is a mindreader, but I had heard tales of the guru's formidable powers of insight and remained nervous. What if she probed my brain through the medium of my MacBook screen? I felt that spiritual people were not to be trusted, and anything was possible.

I was extremely thankful that someone had warned me the guru might call upon me to say what I'd learned at the end. After watching her sternness with one of my friends during a session, I became even MORE wary of saying the wrong thing or not having learned enough. What if I brought probing questions upon myself and/or began confessing more inappropriate things as a result!?

I guess this fear propelled me to preemptively confess things. When she got to my Zoom square, I blurted out, "When you asked us to write down all our myriad identities -- teacher, sister, friend -- I noticed that a lot of mine were negative." PlzDoNotAskMeToListThemPlzDoNotAskMeToListThemPlzDoNotAskMeTo--"I want to learn to trust my own instincts. I'm not very good at that right now."

"Interesting. It's pretty hard to trust someone who's always saying mean things to you," she observed.

"I guess." 

"You need to speak kindly to yourself, so that you can learn to trust yourself. Talk to yourself gently and focus on your good identities."

I didn't start thinking for myself until pretty recently. Frankly, it was terrifying for the first few years and required a lot of medication. It didn't seem like I should get to question my "elders" or the old white men running the churches. Honestly, I couldn't even figure out what to have opinions about at first. I used to yell at Therapy Elsa every time she tried to make me have an opinion because I legit did not know how to. 

Even now, I try to form opinions but second-guess myself so much that I constantly have to forward work emails to my Tribe or screenshot texts to ask someone else what they think the sender meant. It's exhausting. 

I'm reading this Jordan B. Peterson book right now called "12 Rules for Life" and it's really, really good (srsly, it's on these Top 10 Books to Change Your Life lists and whatnot; also, he's got a podcast if that's more your style). Anyway, one of the rules is, "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today," and that really hit home. The Elle of today may not be an All-Star. But she's a hell of a lot more balanced and insightful than the woman who first saw a doctor at 27 under duress. Or the woman who first called Therapy Elsa on a Facebook friend's recommendation. Or the person who began yoga teacher training 6 months ago.

So, you know. That's not nothing.

Sneha - Mother Love

One of my favorite stories from the OT is what happens after Elijah defeats the prophets of Baal at Mt. Carmel.

Following his massive and unqualified victory, Elijah is so full of endorphins that he runs 15 miles back to Jezreel, where all his endorphins promptly leave him and he asks God to kill him. (And God is like, "No. Here, eat a sandwich, your blood sugar is low.")

I mean, what? If this is not a clear case of what we would today define as bi-polar mania and depression, I don't know what is. At the very least, it's mood dysregulation.

I feel like that prophet right now. After 15 years of trying to find a high school English position, I quit my job in a massive blaze of glory and took a leap of faith on a one-year-only position that -- I suspect -- I was probably the only person to apply for. This fall I will teach people older than 14 for the first time since the student-teaching days of my 20's.

And now I want to die.

Yesterday, I taught the first yoga class I myself sequenced (an unmitigated disaster, if you ask me, but we're our own worst critics). In a few weeks I will finish 6 brutal months of teacher training and become a certified yoga instructor.

And now I want to die.

I finally realized that I want to pursue an advanced degree in English, and I found a program that would allow me to attend extension classes mostly remotely with only a few weeks a year in Boston.

And now I want to die. 

I met someone who was not what I was looking for -- literally everything about this person was the exact opposite of everything I wanted... and it turned out I didn't even care! Only -- I'm too old now to have a bunch of kids, so it didn’t work out. It's no one's fault. It's just the hand Life dealt. 

In Sanskrit, a mother's love is sneha. I'm never going to be a traditional kind of mother, and I'm okay with that. There are so many kids in the world who need love and affection and someone rooting for them... I was that kid for a really long time. I'm at peace with being a non-traditional mother. My old friends Jared and Justin used to say, "You have such a tough exterior, but inside, you have this big, gooey marshmallow heart" and I think that's probably true.

My whole life growing up, I always thought, If I can just escape this hell-hole, I'll be free. I'll make my own choices, I'll find love and I'll create my own family, and I'll get back all the things I should have had from the start. I'll get to be like everyone else and have a family and a home.

But that's just not the way Life happened. I had a series of relationships, but none of the guys ultimately committed (probably for the best, as I would have made a terrible pastor's wife). I assumed, like my mom used to tell me, that I was essentially unlikeable and that there was something wrong with me. Now I'm 41 and life is still closing doors on me, and that hurts. 

It hurts when things don't go the way you think they ought to go. And it hurts when the very fact that your life has gone differently is a further reason to withhold more life opportunities. It sucks to hear, "You're an amazing woman, but..." (fill in the blank; honestly, doesn't matter what it is).

In yoga, we eat dark chocolate at the end of class. Chocolate has been proven to promote good mood vibes and well-being, as well as to lower stress hormones.

But dark chocolate is also both bitter and sweet, much like Life itself.

The yogic path asks us, "Can I walk the road I am on in this moment, being fully present for both the bitter and the sweet? Can I stay with this?"

A lot of times lately, it feels like the sweet moments are really fleeting and only last for a breath. The bitter ones, on the other hand, seem to come from all directions. For example, my dad came over to check out my new lawnmower, which the 6th hour boys helped me pick out. I was really proud of all my research and the fact that it actually cut my grass, as well as the fact that I found something I could  afford.

"Well, look at that!" Dad said as he gave me a side-hug. "Some of your decisions are actually good! As they say, even a blind man is bound to get a hit if he shoots into a barrel of fish long enough!"

I don't know. Rejection stings. Being constantly told you're almost enough except for -- that stings. It doesn't matter how logical the reason, what remains is the hurt. I don't have any regrets, other than my bitterness at the end. But oh, how I hope at some point, the sweetness and bitterness begin to balance in my life.