Thoughts from home.

I'm back in Pennsylvania for a few days, soon to be in Ohio, then back to California. When I arrive back in this state by plane and walk from the airport doors to the car, I do recognize a scent in the air that you just don't get anywhere else. Okay, maybe in other Northeastern US states you'd get it, but it's not one that I live with a lot anymore. It's a combination of evergreens, oaks, lots of water in the air, and this time, the reluctant winter gently loosening its grip on the ground. It smells like there has been snow, it feels like spring is nervous to come but will anyway. I kind of love it. It smells like home.

And so I came all the way to little Meadville, which is growing in a lot of wonderful ways that I hadn't expected. Crazy brands of organic flour, and not just wheat - almond, flaxseed, anything - you can find it at our downtown Market House these days. On market days, people come and sell local produce, baked goods, salsa and other foods, along with home-made jewelery. There's more than one rainbow flag downtown - it's kind of crazy to see. In a good way.

But the really crazy thing happened tonight. The first night I got here, I rooted through my old room to find a book I wanted to read - a copy of a favorite book from childhood that I have in German. I have a big German exam next week in San Francisco (that I need to pass in order to be allowed to study in Mainz next year) and so I thought another way to passively study could be to reread this book. I opened it up as I lay down in bed, and a piece of paper dropped out onto my face. I opened it up and guess what it was -- a to do list, quite detailed, and from at least four years ago. About an hour ago, I decided to go through some old things in my room - in the process, as you might imagine, I found (and I exaggerate not) at least five such to-do lists, each written with such fervor (expressed, of course, by CAPITAL LETTERS AND EXCLAMATION POINTS!!!) and such stress behind them - and of course, all of those things, I have long since gotten "done". And if I didn't, clearly they didn't need doing. The next time I write a to do list (it won't be long), I'll try to keep the worry at a slightly lower register. Clearly, it's not necessary.

I couldn't believe some of the other stuff I found in that room. From journal entries in my 3rd grade class (where I did things like spell "guess" as "gyes") to the complex directions to a board game called Arachnid that I made up with a classmate when we were into spiders ---- multiple flashy postcards with nothing written on them but with gorgeous pictures of various animals on the front (mostly big cats and wolves. I knew what I liked. :D ) - and "promotional posters", if you will, for a game called 'Squid!' that a friend and I made up to be played on the trampoline (these posters were pretty cool - the game involved lots of balls being thrown and bounced around ((while the players are bouncing, of course)), so these posters we drew depicted a rather cynical-and-somehow-cool-looking enormous squid with several balls in its tentacles), -- a map to a made-up country that another friend and I created, and the map was written in a language that we made up--- and of course, old schoolwork. A lot of this was boring - notes from old history classes, old math tests (back when I didn't enjoy it very much), etc -- but there was also a paper I wrote for AP European History called "Peter...the Great?" which was probably the paper I had the most fun writing in high school, and there was a project for English class that involved rewriting the "To Be or Not To Be" speech from Hamlet (if I remember correctly, my friend and I presented it with me doing the dramatic reading and her doing dramatic backup on the cello -- high school was pretty crazy). And of course, there is my Thailand box up there. So many memories in that box.

There's a really big book in my room - a journal, of sorts. One of the kinds of journals that you usually find overpriced at a bookstore, with artsy paper that's thicker than normal pages, an old looking cover and -- well, let's face it, all the things that I thought were really cool then, and to a certain degree, still think are cool now. I didn't write in that journal every day. When I did write, it was a paragraph here, a paragraph there, never dated, never in order. But I wrote about important things in there. I've never really gone back and read it before. It was from my middle school -mid high school years. I actually flipped through it tonight and read - and cried. Yes, there's the painful young adult poetry in there (standard, I suppose), but there was also some thoughts I had forgotten I had ever had, for example, about realizing that I was gay. That experience is chronicled fairly well in there, even though it's only in a few paragraphs. And about dealing with the first death of a relative. It was amazing to go back and read it. I tend to put "young me" in a box of sorts, to think that all my experiences then can be summed up quite simply with "I had a really good childhood, but high school wasn't all that great." But I think I was as alive then as I am now - I just can't remember it as well.

More Thoughts from Yoga

Today in yoga class, somewhere between the beginning of class where I think "ahh, how lovely, I'm so glad I came to class" and "good grief, this is hard, why did I come to class" our teacher was reminding us, as yoga teachers so often do, to breathe. This teacher is particularly good at getting you to breathe, well, better than you normally would - more deeply, more smoothly, more consciously. But today, one phrase he happened to use was "breathe like your life depends on it." And, in Downward Dog, I happened to giggle just a little because I thought that was a bit of a dramatic expression.

And then, of course, I thought, "But my life does actually depend on breathing!" which may, incidentally, have been his point. As a friend told me a while ago, most of us humans breathe the same amount - that is, just enough to stay alive, and no more. Breathing is something we've definitely lost track of, myself very much included. This goes back a bit to the mindfulness article I posted here a while ago, and I won't for a second consider myself qualified to talk about things like breathing, yoga, or mindfulness with any kind of expertise. But I do try my best at those things.

Of course, we can't always, in every instant, breathe consciously or mindfully. If we did, we'd never sleep and we'd look really silly in meetings, just to name a few problems. But I think there's some room for a bit more awareness when it comes to things like moving and breathing. I think that's why yoga helps so many people with pain - whether it's back pain, leg pain, head pain, whatever. Yoga (and the breathing and mindfulness that generally get talked about in those classes) makes people conscious of what their body is doing - you have to be, or you'll fall on your head during class. (Sometimes, as I have proven, you fall on your head anyway, but it happens less often if you're paying attention.) I don't think necessarily that the poses or stretches you do in yoga help specific back/leg/head/neck problems - however, when I leave a yoga class, I am aware of how I am walking, how I am sitting (at least the first time I sit down after class). I'm actually present in the moment, and sometimes, I realize that how I sit out of habit might in fact be why my back hurts. I'm aware of my limbs after class.

I'm one of those strange people -- well, for many reasons - I've been told by several people that I'm very graceful, but I also have a tendency to overreach myself or overthink things (sometimes overthinking the audiobook I'm listening to while running) and the result is that I fall over, or knock things over, or occasionally elbow people in the face (I'm so sorry, C). But when I do yoga, I do that less often. My limbs seem more closely connected to my brain.

So, that's why I recommend yoga to people. It's not that I think Downward Dog or a Sun Salutation will actually help your back in itself (though it could). It's what it does to your body and your awareness afterward.

And as for a last piece of non-wisdom from yoga, I have been going to the 1-2 level class since I came here to Santa Cruz, so beginning to intermediate. And I took the risk of going and asking the teacher to whose classes I most frequently go if I was ready to attend the 2-3 class perhaps - and she said that I was! So, non-yoga-y as it is, I feel so damn cool that I can go to a 2-3 class and try to do the cool arm balances and things now. It's hilarious. Yoga is supposed to be about awareness and being in your body. Yoga is so not about "did-you-see-how-long-I-held-that-handstand" and "the-person-next-to-me-totally-fell-over-first", but that's such a human reaction, and the juxtaposition of those two types of thoughts in my brain (and they are always both there) in class just makes me laugh.

A slight haze this morning.

The last two weeks have been simply fantastic. C visited and we took a rather spectacular roadtrip, given the time and budget constraints we had -- I've written a bit about that. But only a tiny bit, because I didn't want to take time away from that trip for writing while it was still going on. But now, sadly, it's over and so I do have a few moments to think.

So, what did we do? Half of me really wants to tell a detailed version of the story - complete with when our tent from the sixties and our camping stove from the forties nearly drove us out of our minds, when we took a wrong turn from the middle of nowhere into even worse middle of nowhere, and the times when I thought there was nothing more beautiful and terrible than the desert. But I don't think today's the day for that story. But I'll tell you a bit. We left Santa Cruz and headed South at first - wound our way during the first day to Death Valley National Park, as pictured in the last post of mine. There, we camped for two nights and one full day and after that, drove through Las Vegas (which couldn't have been more different than the park we had just left) to Page, AZ -- a town in the middle of nowhere, except that it is actually in the middle (that is to say, about two hours from) half a dozen beautiful national parks and monuments. We spent one day recuperating from Death Valley and exploring a few hikes around Page and then the next day we took a day trip to the Grand Canyon. Then we spent one more night in Page before making the long trek to Santa Fe, NM, which is now a city very dear to my heart. We spent two days there hiking, learning history (Santa Fe has been around since 1610! Take that, Virginia), and exploring more art than I've seen in a long time, and getting to know some friends of my mother.

Then, there was the real drive home - 1100 miles in two days. Then a few days of recovery and fun in Santa Cruz (including a hike where we got lost like nobody's business, which is ridiculous, because the place we were hiking is all but five miles from my grandfather's house in Santa Cruz, and we navigated national parks with no problem!), and then this morning, the 4:30-a.m. drive to the airport.

And I've just made the discovery that going to a personal workout class (the first one, I might add - I made a great impression, I'm sure) on four hours of sleep is akin to going to one while hungover. So, I am consequently back in bed to catch up on some of that sleep that I missed.

What a fantastic trip, though.

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First hint of desert between Santa Cruz and Death Valley.

The Grand Canyon.

What's called the "Tent Rocks", just outside of Santa Fe.