Reminder: Our monthly ZOOM yoga class meets Saturday, March 21 at 10am-11am. Upgrade to a paid subscription to join us.
I write this on a damp Sunday morning: the sky is a rainbow of light grays and late-winter whites. The rainy season reveals the worlds of possibility between the poles of white and black. I moved to the Pacific Northwest twenty-five years ago this August. The climate, the landscape, the colors, the people are all quite different from Iowa and Minnesota— the places of my birth, childhood, and young adulthood. The transition, and specifically, the contrast between here and there, has been a point of refining my awareness. The dissonance prompted me to pause and to begin noticing.
It’s the last week of winter quarter at the community college where I teach. Every ten weeks, my schedule is reborn, and I need to sort out how and when I will do all of the things I do. Because I’ve been on this academic calendar for six years now (first as a graduate student, and now as a college instructor), I have some experience with the pace of relearning the new schedule. But, if I’m being honest, I feel like it takes me about 10 weeks to get the hang of it. While chatting about it a few months ago, I told my friend Meaghan, “Once I get into something, I need to hang out there for awhile.” We were discussing our current practices and projects during the prelude to my monthly ZOOM yoga class. To top it off, I said “I struggle with transitions.”
Friends, is there anyone out there who does not struggle with transitions? Even just a little?
The thing is, though, it’s all transition. If not everything all at once, life is composed of infinite asynchronous transitions. The moon is in constant motion: affecting every body and the body of this planet. Our exposure to the sun’s light is in constant flux. It’s all transition.
So the practice is to be in constant pursuit of rhythm within perpetual motion and to assume moments of arrhythmia.
Last night, I picked up my knitting needles after a hiatus of at least fourteen years. Even when I was knitting more frequently, it was never as natural or easy for me as crocheting is, so I thought it would be an arduous task to relearn even the most rudimentary of steps to knitting. I was wrong, though. While sitting cross-legged on a cozy chair in the basement, The Hobbit playing (loudly, I might add… haha), I watched a silent tutorial on how to cast on (create the first row of stitches), then practiced alongside the tutorial. “Ah, yes, I remember this,” my hands spoke through the yarn. After another short, silent tutorial on the knit stitch, I’m now ten rows into a new project with old yarn. I’ve returned.
In my yoga practice, the interruptions are what remind me that the practice works. If I miss a day of meditation, I notice it as a tendency to rush or as impatience with things that ordinarily charm me. The departure and the return are as integral to practice the consistency that allows for these swerves.
The thing is, though, I’ve never really swerved that far from my yoga practice. I’ve never stepped away from my mat longer than a week for illness, and I’ve never gone more than a day without meditating in almost twenty years (OMG, that is really sinking in right now). But there are plenty of other practices that I have let fall away due to a transition, so that returning to them will likely require more effort, new habits, and a healthy dose of “beginner’s mind.” I’m curious about the tools that help us return.
Returning to knitting prompted me to write a list of the other things I used to do that I actively want to return to…Not just things that are out-of-season, but that I know I’ll do again soon anyway, but the things that fell away during some kind of transition.
RUNNING: okay. This is not really something I want to return to, but (like knitting), running is a practice I returned to after a long absence. I think I’ll write a whole other post about running, since I’m taking a completely different approach to something I’ve done for most of my life (racing from 1990-2003). I just wanted to note it here to say that it’s possible(!!!) to engage with something familiar in a completely new way.
ASTROLOGY: Prior to and during the pandemic, I charted the astrological aspects most days in my bullet journal. Sometimes, this would just be a list of glyphs, but most days, I used a compass and protractor as well as markers (color-coded to the various aspects; red for square, purple for sextile, blue for trine, and so on). Once we emerged from our homes, my life became more full with graduate school and teaching, and this habit fell away although I still do check the aspects every morning and will note the major aspects on my weekly calendar. I don’t think I’ll go back to charting every day as I once did, but I would like to draw out the major aspects while I’m listening to the astrology podcasts that are part of my ongoing practice and study.
CAMPING: Before Brian and I had kids, we hiked just about every weekend of the year and we camped (mostly backpacking; I don’t think we “car camped” except when waking up super early to do a big hike) almost every weekend it was warm enough. When we were parents of just one kid, we still camped, and we even went backpacking! However, for all kinds of reasons we fell out of the camping practice (we now only camp maybe 1 or 2 times a summer), and I’d like to figure out how to get back into it and maybe even get my children out on a backpacking trip.
FILM PHOTOGRAPHY: I have about 5 rolls I need to develop! And to just get back into the habit of practice with my film cameras.
SINGING & PLAYING MUSIC.
ROLLERSKATING.
Okay, that seems like enough for now. How about you? Are there things you’d like to bring back into your life? What’s your process for doing it?
Reading + Recommending
Future Home of the Living God, by Louise Erdrich is dystopia for poets. What I love about this book is that it centers the internal process of living through, rather than the external circumstances of, a cataclysmic change.
Listening to lots of old episodes of Hidden Brain. It’s SO GOOD. I really dig this episode on creativity and innovation.
Reminder: Our monthly ZOOM yoga class meets Saturday, March 21 at 10am-11am. Upgrade to a paid subscription to join us.✨
LOVE TO ALL+++
kelly
I love this, thank you!! I also, often think about how difficult transitions are for me (even transitioning from work to home, silence to noise, etc.). I also have old yarn from knitting days past and thread from cross stitch. I hold onto both hoping I’ll return someday.
I hope you find time to camp more. We definitely do a much better easier version of camping these days, it’s always worth it. Thank you, Kelly, I appreciate you so much.