Confidences and Morning Walks

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In late October dawn breaks in Crozet, Virginia a little past seven in the morning. It’s cold this week and I need gloves and a winter jacket for my walk. Two trail heads are a few breaths away from my door. This morning I choose the one that leads down for a bit, crosses a wood plank bridge and then climbs – not too far or too hard – and opens with a panoramic view of Beaver Creek and Bucks Elbow, two nearby peaks that are part of the Blue Ridge Mountains, which in turn are part of the Appalachian Mountain range that run from Maine to Georgia. On a crisp morning filled with dawn light coming in low and sparkling, like this perfect morning, Beaver Creek and Bucks Elbow are russet, or maybe a sort of blood orange color with flecks of crimson, gold and deep umber. 

I set a strong pace, walking purposefully, slowing only to say good morning to the three white tailed deer whose breakfast I have disturbed. Two of the deer look up to stare at me, their brown eyes showing no fear of this interloper. The third doe, younger than the other two and perhaps more nervous about me stomping through her forest so early in the morning, looks at me, then at her companions, then back to me before springing away. My eyes track her five swift leaps that defy gravity and carry her from open grass to the thick brush in which she disappears. Her more experienced sisters follow with a slow saunter and more than a little attitude that shows no concern about where I’m going or what I might do next.

I turn my attention back to the trail. My footfalls begin to syncopate with each breath and as they do my body falls into a bright rhythm that gives the sun a run for its money and gives my mind permission to wander. And once my mind shakes off the detritus of the day before, that’s exactly what it does. 

This time of year the tree roots and small rocks obvious during summer walks are hidden by a mosaic of wet, sticky leaves. My pace slows.  The trail takes me past a pond that only last week was a resting spot for the Canada Geese flying south. On that day the mirrored surface, broken by the landing wake of one lone goose that dawdled somewhere over Waynesboro town, reflected the sky and clouds and colors of the hills. The Canada Geese are gone now but maybe their cousins, the Cackling Geese, will visit during winter. On this frozen morning though, all that rests on the water is a cold white mist that the sun will soon burn away. 

I’ll be sixty-four next month. This year my birthday falls on Thanksgiving Day. I know that sixty-four is old to some and young to others. Either way, on these mornings, with the damp and solid ground beneath my feet, I spend less time considering the road ahead, with all its joys and sorrows, and instead reflect on the joys and sorrows I found on the road I traveled. And I take the beauty surrounding me into my confidence. I open the jeweled reliquary that is my heart and tell these mountains all my secrets. 

I confide in the dark winter berries, the crimson ones, too. I confide in the milkweed, bright green in spring but now dried and split to angel wings, their gossamer white threads glistening and weightless in the air. I confess my sins to the red shouldered hawk perched in judgment on the bare branches one hundred feet above me.

I trust the trail and the mountains, the deer and the geese. I trust the loam beneath my feet and the rising mist. I trust it all to hold my secrets. To listen in sacred silence. This earth, it’s ancient and knowing wisdom, will not try to fix a flailing human who isn’t broken.

Three miles later I exit the trail and follow the sidewalk past the blocks of shiny townhomes. Most are decorated for Halloween. The school bus stops so that I can jaywalk across Old Trail Drive. I pass a gaggle of kids with full backpacks and wearing shorts in stark contrast to my bundled body as they head toward the middle school around the corner on Rockfish Gap Turnpike. I am home. I am healed.

Tell Your Joyful Story

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Our experiences shape us. Define who we are. Our experiences influence our perspective on life. And the stories we keep of these experiences are important to share. Sharing stories from our life with others builds deep connections that otherwise may have never been made.

That’s what drew me to Guided Autobiography (GAB) and that’s why I lead 6-week Guided Autobiography workshops four times a year.

But there’s a problem with Guided Autobiography. The themes we are presented with more often than not lead us to explore in 800 words or less moments that are sad or heartbreaking. And while sharing our heartbreak helps us to process the event that caused our heartbreak, for our September session of Guided Autobiography I’ve decided we’re going to take a different approach.

We’re going to process our moments of joy. Because those moments, too, shape our perspective on life. Our next GAB workshop will offer themes that encourage us to recall experiences that made us happy. That brought us joy. Experiences that surprised us with a positive outcome.

There are a few spaces left in our Guided Autobiography: Lean into Joy workshop. The workshop begins on Thursday, September 15th from 2-3:30 PM PT/5-6:30 PM ET. Registration is as simple as an email. Tuition is on a sliding scale between $60-$120. Once I receive payment via check or PayPal you’ll receive GAB’s Zoom link.

Our past is filled with profound experiences that shaped us into the people we are today. Isn’t it time to remember the joyful ones?

A short video we more details about Guided Autobiography plus one of my essays written for GAB.

Touching Life: Notes from the New Homestead

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On Saturday our red CRV was filled with flattened cardboard boxes, bubble wrap, assorted other papers and questionable plastics. After an eighteen mile drive we had arrived at the McIntire Recycling Center, where Ben and I met a man named John.

John knew everything about recycling and was eager to show us what from our bounty of trash we could distribute among his many large green crushing machines and what would be coming home with us, destined for landfill. He taught us, for example, about what plastics are useful to the composite deck making industry: ‘if it stretches and doesn’t stick to itself they can use it..’. So our bubble wrap and bread bags were a ‘go’ but the mountains of cling film the movers wrapped our furniture in were, unfortunately, a ‘no’. 

This was a very hands on, prepare to do the hard work, old school recycling experience that forced Ben and I to consider how much we consume and to reflect on the environmental cost of our move across the country. It was hot and sticky work that was eye opening and, with all that we learned, sorta fun in that ‘I can’t wait to get home to take a shower’ sorta way. 

Home for Ben, Bruce the Cat and me is now a pre-planned suburbia, the end townhome in a short row of townhomes that wiggle uphill like caterpillars enjoying a juicy nasturtium leaf toward our ever blooming ‘town center’. And if you’re old enough to remember ‘little boxes made of ticky tacky’ then you get the idea. But we love where we are. We are surrounded by mountains and wooded trails. The view from our kitchen deck looks toward a thick forest that is bound on one side by bright single family homes and a crisp white cement walkway. The difference between the two conditions – one put in order by man and the other by nature – is a constant reminder of our impact on the earth. And somehow it is teaching Ben and I to be better caretakers.

A few evenings ago, just before dusk, I was looking out from my kitchen toward the shadowed woods and saw a slim, young deer enjoying a meal of wild weeds and flowers as she made her way down the grassy verge between the sidewalk and the forest. I called Ben over and as we watched we saw the deer’s fawn – not more than a few days old, all spots and gangly legs – run to catch up to its mother. We watched as they made their way around the pond to disappear back into the thick brush. Another reminder that Ben and I are temporary stake holders. Interlopers.

When we first arrived at our new home we noticed that we had some tenants already living in a vent on the back patio. Two Eastern bluebirds had built a nest and were nurturing their newly hatched brood. A few days after our furniture arrived the bluebirds lost one of their young when it fell from the nest. The next day they lost another. But the parents continued to fly back and forth, feeding what children remained a constant stream of grubs and grasshoppers.

Until Saturday. 

I found Bruce the Cat staring through the glass door in a state of high excitement and agitation. I was happy that Bruce had something to entertain him until I realized what was happening. On the patio was a disaster of Hitchcockian proportions. Two dozen sparrows perched on our railing, harassing the bluebirds. Their last two fledglings had been pulled from the nest and were now writhing on the patio floor. At this point they had feathers but I don’t think they knew how to fly. Their suffering and distress was horrifying. In a panic, one fledgling ran and fell off the patio and down a full story to the earth below. The parents continue to fight off the attacking sparrows to protect their last remaining baby while the sparrow spectators watched in what I imagined was bloodthirsty glee.

When it became obvious that there was nothing more to see the sparrows disappeared. But the parents were still in distress and the young bird was still suffering. Ben and I did not know what to do. Put it out of its misery? Wait for the inevitable? What we decided to do was to cut a hole in the end of a shoe box to create a shelter for the baby bird. We covered the shoebox with a plastic bag and built a sort of dam in front of the box with a rolled towel in order to keep out the rain.

What happened next was astounding. Within an hour the parents were feeding their last offspring an endless meal of grubs and grasshoppers again. Ben and I feel privileged that we were able to witness this remarkable process of feeding, healing and protection for two days. 

Today the box looked undisturbed but there was no sign of the fledgling’s parents. When an hour went by and there was still no activity I ventured out and looked in the box. 

It was empty.

I need to begin this week believing that we saved that young bluebird’s life and that at dawn, with encouragement from its parents, the fledgling spread its wings and took flight. That might not be true but it’s what I need to believe.

I have one more story to share.

On Sunday afternoon Ben and I thought dinner at the Thai restaurant just a five minute walk away would be nice. Delicious food. Friendly service. A mojito that will knock your socks off. What could go wrong?

An hour earlier it had rained. As we enjoyed our drunken noodles and tum yum soup the sky was still grey but there were slices of sunshine. It was only after we paid our bill that the clouds turned black and ominous. We began our short walk home in faltering sunlight. A block later we stayed just two steps ahead of the thick plops of water that began to follow us down the sidewalk. It was less like rain and more like a slow leak in an old ceiling. We were still confident we would make it home. Besides, we had umbrellas. As if they were going beat back the onslaught about to happen.

Just past the roundabout the skies ripped open. And I mean ripped opened. We ran, we screamed, we laughed, we submitted to the inevitable. Ben’s flat cap blew from his head at the same time that our umbrella turned inside out. We ran back to catch the hat before it was lost to the deluge. By the time we reached our doorstep there was not one square inch that wasn’t soaked. It was magical.

I can’t remember having so much fun in the rain.

Over this past week I’ve touched life in ways I never have never touched life before.

New Guided Autobiography Series

I never know where to begin when it’s time to write about Guided Autobiography. I always want to let you know that it’s not a writing class – even though each week you’ll be writing. And I always want to describe the impact Guided Autobiography has on those who join – but it’s difficult to find the words. 

Guided Autobiography, I guess, is about processing. It’s about looking at the events of our lives. It’s about finding again those lost experiences that may have been the catalyst for profound change in our lives. 

And it’s about sharing those moments. Which is the best thing about Guided Autobiography – the friendships that are deepened and made all the more rich as we learn from one another’s stories.

Our Guided Autobiography meetings follow the same format each week: 

  • We begin with a check-in – a casual chat about the successes and the struggles we endured or celebrated during our writing week. This typically involves howls of laughter.
  • As our check-in winds down I introduce the writing theme for the following week. James Birrin developed his Guided Autobiography program around twelve life themes and the questions that accompany each theme as a means to stimulate our memory. When I was a fledgling GAB facilitator I followed those themes and questions to the letter. But as I gained confidence I did what most GAB facilitators do and developed my own themes and questions. Themes can run the gamut from how we developed trust in ourself or others, moments in our lives that became turning points, or the experiences we’ve had around failure or loss.
  • After the theme is introduced I offer a five minute break but no one ever wants to take a break so we jump right into reading.
  • The essays we write are about 800 words – two pages. And it’s important that we try our best to keep to this limit. Once read, as a group we don’t offer a critique of the writing. What we offer instead is encouragement and support. We might ask questions to know more details in the story. On more than one occasion tears have been shed by all of us.
  • When we have finished our readings we close the class with a final discussion about the following week’s theme.

And that, for the curious, is Guided Autobiography in a nutshell.

Our next 6-week Guided Autobiography session begins Thursday, March 31st at 2:00 PM.

Tuition is on a sliding scale from $60-$120, payable through PayPal.

To register, a simple email will do.

Once I receive payment you’ll receive our Zoom invite.

Class size is small – no fewer than four, no more than eight.

Guided Autobiography: Not a Writing Class

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Our next six-week Guided Autobiography session begins Thursday, January 6th, 2022 from 2:00-3:30 PM/PST. Tuition is on a sliding scale of $60-$120.

Curious? Ready to dive in? Contact me for details.

Guided Autobiography is a powerful catalyst for improved self-esteem, self-confidence and communication within our communities and our families. 

Guided Autobiography is not a writing class and no previous writing experience is necessary. Guided Autobiography is a class that will make you laugh and cry. It will break you open in the most wonderful way. It’s an exhausting, exhilarating and soothing balm for the soul.

Since the mid-1970’s Guided Autobiography (GAB) has been a method for helping people document their life stories. Researched and developed by Dr. James Birrin, GAB leads us through themes and priming questions that evoke memories of events once known but filed away and forgotten. A new theme is introduced each week. We have seven days to ponder, remember and write two pages inspired by that theme. When we meet again we share our story. The sharing process forges a deep connection within the group. We gain a greater appreciation not only for our own lives but for the lives of other. Writing and sharing our life stories with one another in a safe space is an ideal way to find new meaning in life and to put life events into perspective.

Doesn’t that sound like a wonderful way to begin the New Year?

What Makes Today Special?

What makes today so special? What makes any day special? Is it the blinding blue sky or grey torrents of rain? Maybe the four mourning doves who have found their way to my home, who have sat in my potted herb garden – have shat in it, too – and eaten my thyme. Maybe that’s what makes today special.

I’ll go for a walk later, toward end of day when the blue turns pearly and pink through the branches of the redwood trees. It’s the time of day that dogs are walked and children run in circles as if life were to be lived with reckless abandon. Sweaty and red faced they won’t notice the cool breeze blowing in from the Pacific while I tighten the drawstrings for the hood of my favorite sweatshirt.

If, while I’m on this walk, I look toward the Santa Cruz mountains, I’ll see pure white pillows of fog folding over the ridge and slipping down the slope to fill nooks and crannies. It’s my favorite thing. A beauteous thing. 

After I’m home and have had a bowl of soup I’ll step out onto the mirpesset to watch the full moon rise over the buildings of this town, its light reflecting back to me the stories of everyone who has ever looked up and dreamed. I’ll look for the planets, lined up like soldiers across the ecliptic plane. Not long ago Jupiter and Saturn were so close they almost kissed. And before that Mars, all bold and red, was as big as I’d ever seen. Before I go back in I’ll take a moment to marvel at the stars I can see and to wonder if anyone is marveling at me.

Fear or Faith: My Choice

Can you keep a secret? The trainings in which I’ve been entrenched since before the pandemic’s shutdown began are coming to a welcome end and I find myself with a strange amount of time on my hands. But please. Let’s agree to keep this little admission between friends. I don’t want the universe catching wind of my twiddling thumbs because you know as well as I do that empty space loves to be filled. I’d like a chance to see what I do with all this spare time before that happens.

But I’m wondering…now that I have the chance to dive into all those ‘things’ I’ve always wanted to do but never had time for…what’s stopping me?

I’d like to blame the bout of ‘pandemic malaise’ I’m experiencing but to be truthful the malaise I’ve encountered on and off these past twelve months is fleeting. Maybe it has more to do with the weather, which has been unseasonably chilly and wet for mid-March in Northern California. Or maybe what looks like malaise on the outside is really, on the inside, indecision and fear.

Indecision I understand. I’ve always seen both sides of every coin. But why fear? What’s that about?

In a recent coaching conversation I wondered if the fear my client experienced was less about feeling unprepared for the tasks she needed to complete in order to move her project forward and more a fear of wasting time. It was easy for me to share that observation because that is where most of my fear is rooted. I’ve been alive longer than I have years left to live. I don’t want my time wasted. Besides, I need to earn my keep while my jiggly human form still takes up space on this planet. I need to draw a salary. Make money. Pay bills. I don’t have time for flights of fancy.

I wonder, though, if my excuse, “I don’t have time for that”, masks a harder truth. My interests, outside of teaching yoga, require focused attention. Commitment. Awareness of both my strengths and my weaknesses. They require a willingness to learn.

Yeah. Who has time for that? Especially if the final result is an amorphous unknown.

Another friend of mine is an artist. Seven or eight years ago, when we first met, she was learning to paint. Now she wins awards, exhibits regularly and is about to have her work published in two books.

I wonder if she felt her time was wasted while she was learning to turn a flat circle into a sphere? I wonder, when she first picked up a paint brush, if she even considered time?

It’s funny, isn’t it, how we give fear permission to stop us in our tracks? It can be fear of the unknown, fear of time wasted, fear of hard work or fear of financial insecurity. Or, in my case, all four.

Rather than giving fear carte blanche to run our lives, maybe it’s faith we need? 

So. Will turning my fears of the unknown into faith in myself lift the malaise? Will it help me find the motivation and momentum I need to make the transformation from someone who watches from the sidelines into someone who’s willing to take a chance on herself?

Good question. I can’t wait to find out.

What I Did During the Pandemic: Take a Writing Class

I thought I’d mix things up a bit and decided to take a 6-week writing class. The format of the class is simple: a writing prompt is presented, we take fifteen minutes (give or take) to write, and then we read what we wrote. Comments and questions are welcome. There’s no critique.

I struggle to write on command. I’m a lazy writer who waits for the muse to strike and when she doesn’t moves on to others things on the ‘to do’ list. And so this class is tickling my brain in new ways. In good ways. 

One of yesterday’s prompts – a poem by Langston Hughes – tickled this:

The sun slipped behind the moon. It seems so simple as I write the words: the sun slipped behind the moon. And in that moment – that singular moment – spirit was made visible. The universe became a sanctuary of peace. The banter of strangers and the rhythmic click of camera lenses being attached to tripods and trained toward the Australian dawn stopped. Just like that. Everything stopped. Birds called on one another, confused. Sandy termite mounds turned red in the changing light. The air fell on my skin cool and moist. At least I think it did. And then the sun slipped out from behind the moon and we took our first new breath. I expected my life to be different after witnessing the infinite. That perfect black hole in the sky. But it was an illusion. I forgot. It was only the moon. It was the moon all along.

It’s not faux humility that has me admitting the obvious: this is not award winning writing. But it’s something. Something that made me think and process an event that happened almost a decade ago (which seems unbelievable to me).

Things are shifting. Changing. More of my friends and acquaintances are receiving vaccines. But it’s not over and we will have to balance solitude and hope in our hearts for a wee while longer.

So – twelve months in – what are you doing now to challenge yourself that you weren’t doing a year ago? 

Resolve & Clarity

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There was a time when New Year’s resolutions meant everything to me. This is how it typically played out:

  1. In December I begin to create a list of goals impossibly long and non-specific
  2. By mid-January I’m inching toward failure
  3. February arrives and the goals and aspirations I imagined for myself in December are forgotten
  4. Guilt ensues

I’m not alone. By February most resolution loving humans have become fickle wrecks, rationalizing all the reasons why the promises we made to ourselves were broken. Why no amount of good intention was enough to realize change.

After many decades of repeating this pattern I decided resolutions were a fools errand and stopped torturing myself. Until now. This year, 2021, is different. I’m not certain why. Perhaps  the chaos and commotion of 2020 has left me feeling untethered and the only way to anchor myself in the present is to build a framework for the future.

I’ve read that one of the reasons why our resolve fails after a few short weeks is because the goals we set for ourselves are not specific enough. For instance, it’s not enough for me to tell myself “In 2021 I want to be published.” What does ‘be published’ mean? Do I mean a letter to the editor of my local newspaper or a feature in O Magazine? It’s more helpful for me to set this intention: “In 2021 I want to be published in the Readers Write column of The Sun.” That still may not happen, but the specificity of the intent allows me to create a plan of action that moves me forward toward that goal.

In the past, like many, ‘lose weight’ and it’s sidekick ‘exercise more’ has made an appearance on my list of resolutions. Even when my weight was well in the realm of ‘average’ and I was hitting the magic number of steps. It landed on my list this year but I had to wonder why. And so, it’s been helpful to take time to consider what I actually mean when less weight and more exercise land on the list. It hasn’t taken long for me to realize these goals are really not about weight loss and exercise. They’re about health and wellness. They weren’t about fitting into the embossed leather pencil skirt a friend outgrew and passed on to me. They’re about living life with vibrancy. With clarity. Besides, can you see me teaching yoga in an embossed leather pencil skirt?

So how do I find vibrancy? Where is the clarity I seek?

Last year began with the death of my mother. She was an alcoholic. As was my grandfather.  Two months after the local post office lost and then recovered my mother’s ashes (it could only happen to my mom) we shut down and the life we knew became The Before Times. Overnight we were strategizing new coping mechanisms. 

My coping mechanism was wine. What became a glass or two on weekends morphed into a couple of glasses on weekend nights and a glass or two over the course of the work week which eventually morphed into a glass or two every night of the week. Every now and again I took a break for a few days – just to prove I could – but the next COVID graph would send me back to the Pinot. The amount I was drinking was more than I should but I was convinced my nightly habit relieved the pressure of coping in the weird time in which we live. And besides, I only poured the Pinot as a nightcap before climbing into bed. When I started climbing into bed at 7:00 PM I had to ask myself, ‘how much drinking is too much drinking?’

And the cheap Pinot was not supporting the vibrancy and clarity I want for my life. And so, here I go, walking into this new, amazing year as a non-drinker. I’d like to say this is permanent but I don’t know if that’s true. I want it to be true but I’m just a humble and flawed yoga teacher. So we’ll see.

A Bitter Pill

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What will I tell them? Ten years from now, maybe twenty – what will I tell them – the grandchildren Ben and I might have – about all of this? Will I tell them at first I didn’t know? That in the thirty minutes it took for me to walk from my home to the pain clinic where I worked the world shut down? How is that possible I didn’t know? When the clinic sent me home as soon as I arrived they offered no reason – only that our clients had left for the day. I didn’t mind that they hadn’t called to tell me. It was a beautiful day and I was happy to have a relaxing afternoon to myself. 

So I began my walk home at two in the afternoon, past the crowds at Trader Joe’s with shopping carts overflowing, down the bike path to Channing Street where the cars queued for the light at Alma to turn green with what felt like more than a little impatience. I walked past an empty Peers Park. I walked all the way home and still didn’t know.

Is that what I’ll tell them? Will I tell them that even though the air was filled with the same strange energy a person might feel after an earthquake – the same strange energy that makes everyone your friend – that I didn’t know?

I don’t remember how I found out – whether I turned on the news when I returned home or if I bumped into someone on the street. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that when I found out everything changed. I crossed the street to Mollie Stone’s and wandered through the crowds among the rapidly emptying shelves until I found something Ben and I might need. Toilet paper.

What will I tell them? Ten years from now, maybe twenty. Will I tell them how our dear cat Bruce, a ginger memory by the time this year is decades in the past, woke me at 3 AM on a Sunday morning. How was it that the wind didn’t wake me first? And then the lightening came and it was both beautiful and tragic. One night a few days later I kept the window by my desk open and when I woke the next morning it was covered with the ash of other people’s lives. Will I tell them we were far away from the flames and still couldn’t breathe? Will I tell them the sky turned orange and the sun disappeared? And on that day everything was illuminated in a way that was both foreign and frightening? 

I wonder if I will tell them a man named George died with a knee on his neck? Or that a woman named Breonna was shot dead in her home. And that their deaths changed everything. Except I don’t know if that is true just yet. I hope it is. 

I wonder if I will tell them about a notorious grandmother named Ruth, and that when she died we lit candles on the steps of the Supreme Court and little girls wore lacy white collars. 

I might mention that it felt like a game at first. That we laughed at people hoarding even the things they did not need. But then we began to miss one another.  

We were angry when there were no more masks for the people trying to save our lives. And we cried when there were no more respirators for the people dying. I wonder if I’ll tell them that?

I don’t think I’ll tell them how scared I was sometimes. And worried. And so anxious that I drank too much wine and even when I told myself that I knew all the tools I could use to not be anxious none of them worked and that finally a doctor gave me some bitter pills.  

I don’t think I’ll tell them that.

Our current Guided Autobiography cohort went rogue and created their own theme and their own sensitizing questions. We wanted to capture this year – what 2020 has done to our lives, our health, our relationships. Wanna go rogue with me? A new 6-week GAB workshop begins on Thursday, October 14th from 4-5:30 PM.

Class size is limited to six. If you’re interested but want to know more you can leave a message at the bottom of this post. You can register for the class here.