Whenever I’m not counseling students at my part-time office job, I’m diligently trying not to play facebook scrabble, gchat my best friend in LA about every detail of my life, or flirt with friends online. Yes, it has come to this. Avoiding the unavoidable which I should be able to avoid but don’t. A series of habits upon habits.
My friend sent me a link to a new Avett Brother’s song. I and love and you. I stare at it in my inbox, thinking back to that romantic love I’d feel swimming in my heart when any of my past boyfriends sent me something. That openness.
It’s a fall kind of song because we are getting to that time of year when my alarm goes off on my cell phone and I feel like it’s really a lot earlier than it seems to be. Some mornings are different than others, but I know that that consistency and time is part of the process. Just getting up and moving on.
There are some relationships that keep evolving long after they seem finished. During a break up you generally don’t hear about what’s going on with the person who used to know everything about you. And for right now I’m keeping it that way. And, unfortunately, it won’t be able to stay that way forever.
Sometimes love is misplaced or misguided, sometimes it was never really there, and sometimes you leave it in little spaces among the wreckage. Rarely does it make any sense to pick those pieces back up again.
I guess there’s a current to it all. I’ve been wading, watching, moving in my day today with ease and humor. But when I woke up this morning I felt part of that wreckage move with me, refusing to let go. Each day a new layer unfolds and I see how well things have fallen into place here in Asheville. Build, build, build, break…build again.
And then it all falls away and there’s a stillness to it. A sense of peace that I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s always been there it was just muddled...
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Friday, September 4, 2009
New!! YES!! New Post!!
It’s already getting to be fall in Asheville (although people keep swearing to me it’s going to get hot again-so don’t get too excited, Alex) and more and more I feel like change is still an amazing thing.
I find myself driving through downtown Asheville excited at the gap in terrible tourist drivers, cutting through the beer trucks and food delivery vans to get from teaching grammar to yoga to counseling. There’s a beat and a thought to it all.
Finding myself wrapped up in the buildings, in the mountains that surround the buildings, in the idea of Asheville and its constant reinvention. I almost forget about this pulse until I cut through downtown and remember why I live here. Why I’ve stayed here even when the city seems to shrink with acquaintances and the inevitable conversation at GreenLife.
One of my favorite parts about Asheville is there are no real shortcuts. Growing up my family always sought out the most efficient way of doing things. It was celebrated, in fact. The building of the Toll Road to replace the Leesburg Pike was a welcomed change to my dad’s daily commute into D.C. Up there, efficiency was drawn out into perfect turns onto back roads, new shortcuts around the ever-growing town, and an urgency of getting exactly where you needed to be when you needed to be there.
For a long time, even while I was regularly practicing yoga, I would reflect on the past as if it was the meaning of the present. As if it represented how I should be feeling in the moment.
I teach yoga three times a week at a local gym. While training many people warned me that there were NO teaching gigs left in Asheville and that teaching at a gym wasn’t nearly as “yogic” as teaching at a studio. This was of course contradicted by my fellow yoga instructor trainees and the director at the studio. Because if you put anything out into the universe it will, in some form, return back to you. But at some point you’ve even got to let go of that philosophy.
Any philosophy is a trap, really. Just the idea of living a certain way because of past experience is limiting. I often talk about suspending any ideas of what happened on their yoga mat the day or hour or even minute before. Because once we assign all these ideas we are forced to live by them.
There are layers gone just in time for the fall. Just in time for leaves and cool nights and mosquitoes disappearing.
I find myself driving through downtown Asheville excited at the gap in terrible tourist drivers, cutting through the beer trucks and food delivery vans to get from teaching grammar to yoga to counseling. There’s a beat and a thought to it all.
Finding myself wrapped up in the buildings, in the mountains that surround the buildings, in the idea of Asheville and its constant reinvention. I almost forget about this pulse until I cut through downtown and remember why I live here. Why I’ve stayed here even when the city seems to shrink with acquaintances and the inevitable conversation at GreenLife.
One of my favorite parts about Asheville is there are no real shortcuts. Growing up my family always sought out the most efficient way of doing things. It was celebrated, in fact. The building of the Toll Road to replace the Leesburg Pike was a welcomed change to my dad’s daily commute into D.C. Up there, efficiency was drawn out into perfect turns onto back roads, new shortcuts around the ever-growing town, and an urgency of getting exactly where you needed to be when you needed to be there.
For a long time, even while I was regularly practicing yoga, I would reflect on the past as if it was the meaning of the present. As if it represented how I should be feeling in the moment.
I teach yoga three times a week at a local gym. While training many people warned me that there were NO teaching gigs left in Asheville and that teaching at a gym wasn’t nearly as “yogic” as teaching at a studio. This was of course contradicted by my fellow yoga instructor trainees and the director at the studio. Because if you put anything out into the universe it will, in some form, return back to you. But at some point you’ve even got to let go of that philosophy.
Any philosophy is a trap, really. Just the idea of living a certain way because of past experience is limiting. I often talk about suspending any ideas of what happened on their yoga mat the day or hour or even minute before. Because once we assign all these ideas we are forced to live by them.
There are layers gone just in time for the fall. Just in time for leaves and cool nights and mosquitoes disappearing.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Slacker!
Yeah, Yeah.
Nothing new here...
2 years of a blog and each day I slack more and more...
I'm working on my artist flare. Everyone can be an artist as long as they have a blog, right? I mean, as long as I randomly update it, right?
Nothing new here...
2 years of a blog and each day I slack more and more...
I'm working on my artist flare. Everyone can be an artist as long as they have a blog, right? I mean, as long as I randomly update it, right?
Friday, March 6, 2009
Elk River Falls
There’s a falls right outside of Banner Elk and it was one summer, sunny afternoon up in Boone and a couple of us decided to head out to the falls to jump off into the water below. I had no real idea what it was going to look like, or that my friends would freely jump into the water over and over again while I stood at the top, feeling I needed to prove that girls can do it too, my shorts shaking over my bare legs. I’d heard that people have died or been paralyzed by the fall. Something about rocks and cars being at the bottom.
There’s something in the idea of jumping out into nothing for no real good reason. Even when there are talks of how bad things are or how much money there isn’t or what needs to be cut where. And frankly, I’m sick of hearing about it. Now’s the time to be creative. To innovate. To jump.
At least, that’s what I try to tell myself. I keep picturing this sunny, lazy summer here in Asheville, working at some coffee shop or teaching yoga here and there. And it all seems to make sense. Because sometimes you just push and push and push until there isn’t anything to push up against. Until it all dissolves.
And as much as I love Obama and the idea of things getting better, there’s always something to learn from a “severe” recession. Because really, it’s a recess from money. Because really, security is an illusion. So says the girl who is searching for something to bridge the gap between jobs. Who is a constant in ideas of what could happen…because right now is the perfect time to be thinking of the next great idea.
My coworkers got me a book on writing and yoga and I’m teaching a workshop for yoga and intention during one of our career exploration programs. It’s all about setting an intention for your life and goals and acceptance of what is. Because I feel like I’m really struggling with accepting things the way they are right now. I think we all are.
It got to the point where the crowd (yes, there was a crowd of people hanging out and watching us) was counting down for me to jump into the falls below. And I stood, one foot back ready to launch myself into the falls below, the cheers and claps of the crowd muffled by the water. And then I would have done something that cool summer afternoon.
After I didn’t jump, after hours of waiting for a real reason to jump, one of the women from below came up the rocks to tell me: you’ll do it by the end of summer. I just know it. It’ll happen. It didn’t.
There’s something in the idea of jumping out into nothing for no real good reason. Even when there are talks of how bad things are or how much money there isn’t or what needs to be cut where. And frankly, I’m sick of hearing about it. Now’s the time to be creative. To innovate. To jump.
At least, that’s what I try to tell myself. I keep picturing this sunny, lazy summer here in Asheville, working at some coffee shop or teaching yoga here and there. And it all seems to make sense. Because sometimes you just push and push and push until there isn’t anything to push up against. Until it all dissolves.
And as much as I love Obama and the idea of things getting better, there’s always something to learn from a “severe” recession. Because really, it’s a recess from money. Because really, security is an illusion. So says the girl who is searching for something to bridge the gap between jobs. Who is a constant in ideas of what could happen…because right now is the perfect time to be thinking of the next great idea.
My coworkers got me a book on writing and yoga and I’m teaching a workshop for yoga and intention during one of our career exploration programs. It’s all about setting an intention for your life and goals and acceptance of what is. Because I feel like I’m really struggling with accepting things the way they are right now. I think we all are.
It got to the point where the crowd (yes, there was a crowd of people hanging out and watching us) was counting down for me to jump into the falls below. And I stood, one foot back ready to launch myself into the falls below, the cheers and claps of the crowd muffled by the water. And then I would have done something that cool summer afternoon.
After I didn’t jump, after hours of waiting for a real reason to jump, one of the women from below came up the rocks to tell me: you’ll do it by the end of summer. I just know it. It’ll happen. It didn’t.
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