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parisreview: I think art is sublimated libido. You can’t be a eunuch priest, and you can’t be a eunuch artist. – Anthony Burgess

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A Baptism

Littlest Sister’s daughter was christened today at St. Margaret’s Episcopal Church near Dupont Circle. The pews were half empty until Pilgrim’s family arrived. I sat up front with Mother and Third Sister with my deaf ear to the aisle so I could talk to Mother. Across the aisle Littlest Sister’s daughter was wearing a white eyelet dress. She was calm. She walks already — late to be christened — having been born to great fanfare a couple of days after the President’s election.

At this point I must tell you I love churches. I love the whole mystery and grace of them. When I walk into a church I feel the way I do stepping through a door into a winter-scape newly enveloped in snow. The air is perfumed with incense and honeyed beeswax; alter boys and girls scurry to their tasks; the nave resounds with the solemn yet light tread of a white-robed procession carrying cross and Bible. It wasn’t always so.

As children, Sisters and I went each Sunday with Mother and Father to an Episcopal church in Georgetown. During the week, Sisters and I attended Beauvoir, the Episcopal primary school of the National Cathedral. In retrospect, it was a confusing religious education. Father was an atheist.

Father believed in family, tradition and the rights of the individual. That was about the limit of his belief system. Father used to say, after a tenant had run off without paying the rent, for example, or a friend hoodwinked him – a frequent complaint – that there was no one who wouldn’t sell him short at some point. He reserved his greatest distrust for institutions, where mediocrity inevitably rose, he said, like shit to the top.

In second grade I reported to Father that my class had prayed to baby Jesus, wasn’t that silly, because Our Family didn’t believe in that, did we? The general rule in Our Family was to tolerate religious tendencies in outsiders. At Easter lunch Father sang a falsetto ditty about the “little innocent lamb,” as the roast was brought to the table. He was less kind to actual believers, for whom he had nothing but pity.

Weekly prayer with my schoolmates at Bethlehem Chapel provoked desperate anxiety in me. I didn’t know when to kneel, and when kneeling, how to pray. I copied the students in front of me, jumping up or sitting down. I guessed we were praying for the priests’ benefit, in the same way we recited times tables for our school teacher. The priests at the alter carried  a confusing array of chalices and plates. The priests’ greatest power, in my mind, was not that they commanded the entire chapel, cavernous and Gothic, but that they understood I didn’t know the prayers. Any moment they would swoop down to expose me, the way my teacher shamed me to my classmates for not knowing my times table.

In my 30s I flirted with raising my own children as Episcopalians but turned away. Then a year ago, two days before Obama’s inauguration, God leapt into my life and all Heaven broke loose.

Bye-Bye, Baby

I was missing my daughter last night, whom I dropped off at college a college a couple of weeks ago, and made this video.

Look at it on me.com

http://gallery.me.com/yogawarrior#100024

or YouTube

Work without Service

Ralli is organizing her life at college. First classes, now work. She is beautiful, lively, organized: a shoe-in for a job in the new cafe or cafeteria, she tells me via txt mssge.

But if she gets a job in the cafeteria, shes not sure she will take it.
Serving food to others would make her feel lower-class

Find humility in service, I txt.

I know, she says.

She doesn’t know — she elaborates the next day, that it would be too difficult to serve someone with whom   she is having an argument, or someone doesn’t like.

Locate your humility and revel in the joy of serving them.

Humility in service? Ive never taught her that. How should she know? Ive taught her that no one else can make her feel small. That above all,  she should feel good about herself.

I listen to myself, bemused:

How much purer to serve.

Exhaustion

I am two and a half weeks into my new job and exhausted. How did I do this before? Surely, I have worked all my life, but never felt such exhaustion. Or perhaps I’ve just grown soft over the past year.

I get up at 6 am, get to work by 8 am, focus on my tasks with great concentration until 5 or 6 pm, and I can hardly think straight by the time I reach home. I am rediscovering the astonishing power of duty and caffeine to keep me going. Duty and a sense of purpose wake me before my alarm in the morning. A second cup of coffee in the afternoon renews the commitment.

I had planned to start classes at the Wesley Theological Seminary this fall.

“Foget about it,” JeF says in a burlesque Italian accent.

I love this new life. It is clean and simple, and there is no time for doubt or self-reflection. Every hour is filled with activity. I listen to Thomas Merton CDs on the way home. I meditate before bed. Twice a week I go to Yoga after work, but otherwise, I have cut other activities from my life. I do not take phone calls after 9:30 at night.

I eke out time to write here, because these posts too are clean and simple. They are done when they are done.

New Job, New Life

I have a scattered mind that wants to take on each thought passing before it. Show me something fun to do — or a new form of knowledge or enlightenment — and it’s hard to look the other way. A new form of Yoga — Budokon in my case — and I sign up for a month or two. A new miracle elixir — Univera “advanced cell renewal” works wonders, for the moment. As a result, I do many things, none of them well.
My tendencies toward the undisciplined way apply to my spiritual life as well. I do practice Yoga diligently, if only because I can’t live without it. I go to Kirtan retreats. I visit different Churches. One could call this spiritual exploration, which I would argue is a good thing. But even exploration requires the discipline of choice; it requires the hard task of closing doors in order to really open the way to full exploration.
I started a new, demanding job yesterday. It is a good thing to be making money, and supporting my family, again. It also gives the question of self-discipline a finer point. One has to live within the externally imposed boundaries. So here is my schedule for a more disciplined life:

The Summer’s Top Priorities

• Spend time with my children before they head for college in the fall
• Weekdays
  • Yoga: 4 mornings a week
  • Meditate and Blog: 3 mornings a week
  • Read bible and Merton: everyday
• Weekends
  • Get my house in order:
  1. New Job CHECK
  2. Refinance house
  3. Pay bills
  4. Cut, cut, cut expenses — live a simpler life.

• Things I will Put Off until Spring
  • Pursuing studies at Wesley

Down Dog and Hot Yoga as the Sun Rises

I took two early morning Yoga classes this week — a world apart from each other in spirit. Monday’s class was at 6:16 AM at Hot Yoga on Wisc. Ave. at Macomb with Amberlyn. This morning’s 6:30 AM class was at the aerie-like Down Dog Yoga in Bethesda.

Down Dog in the Morning

Jeanine teaches the Down Dog classes like a military camp instructor. Her voice hammers away as she instructs: plank, low push up, up dog, down dog, over and over. “Hey, everybody, its Summer! Time to try something new! This summer we’re going to break through our old habits.” She is chipper and upbeat and methodical. By the end of the class, she has taken us through a workout that burns our thighs and strains our abdominal muscles.

Jeanine asks us to line our mats in formation — we should all form a group! with no one sticking out! I set my mat down in front, usually out of kilter with the rest (agh, I can’t help it! don’t force me to form part of a neat row) and she always tells me to move my mat, so I will fit in with the group.

She tells us revealing stories: How she out performed a muscle-bound Yogi at back bends: We too can one day be strong like she is! (but will we learn non-competition and Yogic peace?)

Hot Yoga, Pre-sunrise

Amberlyn’s class at Hot Yoga could not be more different. When we enter the studio, it is dark and quiet. Amberlyn speaks in a low, soothing tone that sounds like the voice of fogiveness and peace. Amberlyn is small, but packed with muscle. Her body tells you of its strength and knowlege, but her voice is always calm and soothing. She focuses on breathing: Updog – Inhale, Downdog – Exhale. By the end of the class, I am dazed  by physical exhaustion, yet sure I have found God in the exhales.

Educated Audi

Six months have passed since my last post; my clumsy fingers return now to the empty screen, with news to tell.

I stopped writing because my infatuation with JeF had taken over my life, and strangled everything I wrote. That’s gone — not the man, but the infatuation, which is replaced by a man.

I drove my Audi out to the repair shop this morning. My A6 is five years old, its bumper plastered with aging stickers noting our educational pedigrees. The oldest — and newest — are from Johns Hopkins, the alma mater of both me and my son. They adorn the rear-view window as well as the left and right bumper.

I was racing along River Road, trying to shift to the left lane. I was forced to crane my neck out the window to look for cars behind me. My left-hand rear-view mirror is out. Saturday night on Rock Creek Parkway a black sedan coming from the opposite direction sideswiped me when it swerved across the dividing line, decapitating my mirror. The smashed appendage swings forlornly in the back stream like a limb from its sinews.

A beat-up red car pulled along side me on River Road at Goldsboro, a white-haired wild looking man motioning me to roll down my window. He had been trailing behind me.

I saw your Hopkins stickers,” he explained. “And your mirror  is out, and I thought, this person has to be a genius. It’s trailing from an umbilical cord.”

I immediately looked to the left window for something that might resemble an umbilical cord.

No, no,” the man shouted. “There is nothing there. I am a painter. I look for what’s real: Hopkins graduate with no rear-view mirror.”

He saw an umbilical cord to the past, I saw frayed sinew. I waved cheerily and sped ahead.

Laughter and Forgetting

We woke in the dark at 6:00 to Leslie’s alarm. She said she heard Angela’s chimes, as well. Angela  walked the halls each morning ringing her Govinda bells to bring us out of our fog.

I came downstairs to the  kitchen to make coffee and soon poured the boiling water to overflowing in the he dark pre-dawn and spilt hot wet grinds across the counter. I erupted in laughter at myself, breaking the morning code of silence. And in that eruption I realized my sadness had lifted and I had re-entered the world.

And what of this silence?

It is both an escape from too much contact and it begets a terrible loneliness. It draws you deeper into yourself,  where there is only yourself to turn to, and it is a soft padding, like your own angry face, that protects you from disruption.

How lovely it is to be with others and to laugh and smile and chat. It is what we have built  in our little Yoga community. We don’t know each other too well – we have not tested each other’s mettle - and that’s okay.

Each weekend we work out and have coffee together after. There is a fellow understanding  and love of the shared experience we recognize in the other.

When with each other we discover in ourselves lightness and grace. We seek it out and cultivate it whenever we find ourselves together: at Yoga, on the street, at a drunken party.  We demand nothing of each other or of ourselves but a bubbly love.

And in that laughter is forgetting — an alcoholic’s forgetting at the first sip of communal love.

This communal silence strips me of my lightness. We are doing the dishes together and  I want to smile and hug, but turn away to dry the wet plates.

On a workday, this would be perfect. Ralli and I do not talk much as we get ready for work and school each morning. At the office my work crowds out personal connection, which is as it should be. But here, on retreat, with no to-do list to distract, I am forced to confront my thoughts.

They are terrible, obsessive thoughts. My mind ranges to the hills and bare fields outside the window, and wants to rest there. But along comes J. and the last good night kiss, pestering my mind with doubt and fear. My own Harlquin Romance, playing endlessly in my head.

Winter Sleep

It is 7:30 on a Saturday night, but this week I am at a Yoga retreat in Beallsville, Maryland.

I am sad and tired. I am sad because I am easily upended and sleeping away from home and living with strangers for a weekend is disconcerting and because I am in love. Being in love can be exhausting. It can suck everything else out of you. What is a strange bed compared to a new intimate being?

There is a malaise that comes over you when you go a way. You want to sleep. I had three naps to day, and I am still tired.

I have joined Gopi and Angela on their three-day workshop on the third chakra, called “Radiant Heart.” We have Yoga Nidre each day, as well as 2 to 3 hours of Yoga asana and poetry but truth is I can’t stay awake. I slept soundly through the Nidres –(in addition to my three legitamate naps elsewhere during the day).