While my website is undergoing a re-design, I’ve been posting writing on my blog on Open Salon.  Please feel free to check out articles there.

http://open.salon.com/blog/lkwalker#

Been reading some of Hemingway’s letters in this month’s Vanity Fair.  He is one of my favorite writers, and one who deeply influenced me.

continued...]]]>

Been reading some of Hemingway’s letters in this month’s Vanity Fair.  He is one of my favorite writers, and one who deeply influenced me.

I remember reading the Nick Adams stories and longing for a life in the wild.  I remember Nick’s sandwiches, onion and butter wrapped in wax paper in his pocket, waiting to be eaten by the side of a stream.  And nothing seemed as delicious to me as that.

Looking back I see how much of my life I modeled on this writer, who became a favorite of mine because he was my father’s favorite.  Just like I adopted Black Raspberry ice cream, because my father loved it.

In my life I’ve learned to hunt and hike and camp.  To sit quietly by a river.  To love deeply and to think it simple, while knowing truly how complex it is.  I’ve learned to love the short, declarative sentence, and to love the word ‘and.’  To love the repetitive, poetic telling of a story in lines that are bold and clean, and which, together, add up to a nuanced and detailed interior space.

I’ve loved Papa’s courage.  Both Hemingway’s and my father’s.  I’ve loved his boldness and his passion.  And his simple egoic desire for revenge, which he took out in his fiction on those who dismayed him in his life.

I don’t love Papa’s early death.  Not Hemingway’s, nor my father’s.  I don’t like missing what stories might have been.  What memories left unmade.  What aisles gone unwalked.

But since, as Einstein said, time is not a line, but a point, truly, there is no missing unless the missing is a joy to feel, a longing in the heart, a yearning toward, like a flower leaning upward to the sun.  Missing, like sadness, like grief, is just another way to feel alive.  Like loving.  Like playing madly in the woods on wooden skies in deepest snow.  I took that too from Hemingway.  My love of winter, and the winter woods.  My love of Spanish and unrequited love.  My love of life itself – lived brashly, fully, exultantly.

From the privacy of your own living room or the seclusion of your office, you sit with your computer, glowing its eery blue light.  There is no end to the things you can find on [continued...]]]>

From the privacy of your own living room or the seclusion of your office, you sit with your computer, glowing its eery blue light.  There is no end to the things you can find on the internet.  Hundreds of sites where people have the same exact strange and quirky opinion as you.  Thousands of sites where people express opinions abhorrent to you, absolutely antithetical to everything you think and believe in.

These people must be crazy, those ones who think differently, live differently, behave differently.  Surely they are insane.  Certifiable.  Even lock-up-able.  What can you do?  Their opinion, which certainly can’t be true, is exactly opposite of your opinion.  This.  Means.  War.

But you have some ammunition.  You have the power of words too.   You know that whole pen mightier than…blah blah..  And you are burning up mad!  Never mind that Chekov said to come to the page cold as ice.  To hell with Chekov.  You’ve got a beef to grind!

So you let fly with everything you’ve got.  Every mean, angry, nasty thought you can think.  Every rejoinder, cruel, and of course true, idea comes pouring out.  You reread it.  Wow.  Who knew you had such power in you.  You could slay a roomful of dragons with this stuff.  You feel a bit afraid yourself.  Hmmm.  How should you sign it?   You look around the room.  No one’s there but the cat, and he won’t tell.  You make up a fake name, put on a picture of a dragon.  And hit send.  Your talent at criticism unleashed on the world!

……

We have lost to the anonymity of the internet, our basic decency.  No more are we a society which debates ideas with honor, respect and integrity.  We are a culture spitting at each other from behind closed doors.  We have lost our ability to disagree kindly.   And with that, our capacity to expand our understanding beyond the limited scope of our own experiences.  It is easy to hate someone who is so different from yourself.  And easier still to abuse them from the distance and hiding inherent on the internet.  Our public discourse has suffered greatly.  And with that, our own private lives.  The enriched view we get from adopting another perspective.  It is time to become wary of our own dogmatic opinions.

I am reminded of a bumper sticker I saw years ago, in Seattle.

“If you can’t change your mind, are you sure you still have one.”

It starts out small, with a few angry words thrown at some random article posted online.  And it escalates to the complete breakdown of society.  On the edge of which, we are already teetering.

When my fiancé broke up with me last August, he consigned me [continued...]]]> An edited version of this piece appeared on Salon.com on July 28, 2011

When my fiancé broke up with me last August, he consigned me to the tenth circle of Dante’s hell: Dating As A Woman Over Forty.

The dating pool for the 40 year old woman is frighteningly slim.  The men have no hair, or missing teeth or four kids and a nasty ex-wife, or one kid and an ex-wife they’re still in love with.  Or they’re handsome and youthful and chasing 25 year olds.  Or they’re disillusioned with love and all the heartbreak and have decided to leave society and go build a cabin in the wilderness.

And then, of course, is the way potential daters looked at me.  Why is this woman still single at 40?  What’s wrong with her? Is she going to be desperate to have a baby?  This relationship is not going to be fun and relaxed and flowy.  She is going to have an agenda.  A serious agenda.  And plus, she’s aging, over-the-hill already.  Used up.

I was one of only three women I knew who were my age and unmarried.  Several of my friends were already on their second marriages.  Most of them had one, two or three children.  One or two houses.  One or two pets.

I had no children, a drafty farmhouse, a dog, a cat, and six chickens.  And very, very, very little dating experience.

I met a long-haired, doe-eyed man at a street festival in Vermont. He was age appropriate, also had never been married, and had no stray children.  This alone was something of a miracle, and a rarity.  He was also incredibly sweet and handsome and a great kisser.  He picked me up and carried me over a puddle on our first date and we ate oysters and drank ice cold vodka.  But he was also 40 years old and owned two towels, and slept in a sleeping bag on a king sized mattress on the floor, and got blotto drunk at least three times a month.  He checked out every other woman in the vicinity when we were together.  And he was still in love with his ex-girlfriend, whom he talked about constantly, extolling her beauty while railing against her weak and childish heart.

In addition to his two towels, he had a motorcycle, a 33 foot sailboat and a pick-up truck, along with various and sundry hiking, climbing, camping and skiing accoutrements.  He was a playboy.  But he had a skill set I found extremely attractive.  He could build things, and fix things, and grow things and make things.  I’d been brought up with the intellectual crowd.  Those guys who couldn’t wield an axe or even identify a carburetor let alone fix one.  I was a sucker for calloused hands.  I called him my Frat Boy.  But even then I knew I needed, at the very least, a Frat-Man.

There was the New York City J-Date guy who seemed promising enough, with his full head of movie star hair and his sexy name, Leonardo.  But when we finally spoke on the phone, he had the whiney voice and angsty demeanor of Woody Allen and  turns out he wasn’t sexy Leonardo, but impossible, Lenny Gross.  He broke off our first date because he couldn’t pass up a bargain discount he got at a different ski area from the one where we were supposed to meet.

There was the grizzled hippy man with the floppy hat playing the accordion who didn’t own a car, which made it very difficult to meet up in rural Vermont.   And the sexy looking guy with the fedora who wasn’t opposed to kids but just ‘couldn’t have them himself.’  And did not elaborate on that.

My sister set me up with an age appropriate man who lived five hours away but insisted he wanted to meet me after discovering that I was also a welder.  But I made an 18 foot long three-dimensional fence with ocean waves and starfish and whales woven into it.  He made stainless steel kitchens with crisp, clean corners and hidden, smooth edges.

He drove all the way up from New York State to meet me for coffee and we labored over the steaming cups like a bad interview.  Even the polite questions fell like pennies into a hollow well.

My family begged me to move on and forget my fiance and find a man who really wanted to marry and hurry up and have a child before it was too late.  But what could I do?  I couldn’t rush the hands of fate. I didn’t tell them about my dating escapades as I didn’t want to get their hopes up.  It was bad enough to get my own hopes up and I couldn’t handle the double disappointments.

I already had to struggle with a certain sense of pity that came from almost everyone I knew, and also total strangers.  Poor you, not married, who do you have to go to bar mitzvahs and funerals with?  It must be so hard to be all alone.  Or just the more subtle long pitiful sideways glance which I couldn’t help absorbing then feeling ashamed myself.   Why was I a 40 year old single woman?  Why couldn’t I find and keep a man?  What was wrong with me?   I must be defective in some way.  And then of course, pitiable.

The other problem was that I became suspect – a single woman among all these couples, many of whom had rocky relationships.  What were my intentions in fact, at that dinner party when I’m alone in the kitchen with the incredibly handsome man, husband of the lovely angry woman slamming tequila in the living room.  I always tried to be non-threatening, wore loose fitting clothes and my glasses and kept my hair pulled back in a ponytail or tight in a bun.  But I couldn’t always deflect the wandering eye of the unsatisfied man.

And too, at those dinner parties 38 year old women would talk about finally having a baby at 35, when they knew their biological clock was almost run out.  I’d stand idly by, silent, nursing a lemonade.  What could I say?

I, too, wanted a child, a husband, a family.  But desperation smells sickly, like fear, and brings on the wild dogs.  And I didn’t feel desperate.  Just a strange sort of unrest.  A loneliness, and a pale sadness, like a smudge on the lens of camera, or like looking up from underwater to the surface of the world.

One night on my last date with Frat Boy – a three night bender that included motorcycle riding, skinny dipping, excessive alcohol consumption, half-naked yoga and recreational knife throwing – I met an angel.

We had gone out to a dance club and drank too much vodka and beer.  This young woman leaned against the bar.  She was gorgeous, with long, black, curling hair and dark clear eyes behind Wonder Woman glasses.  She had angel wings tattooed on her back and drank Jack on the rocks, as only a modern angel would.

She pulled me aside and up to the open air balcony to which only she had access.

“What are you doing with that guy?” she asked, and then said, “Can I be blunt?”

“It’s just a transition thing,” I said, “My RR – rebound relationship.” Hiding the small lie that I was already falling for this player and wondering if I could fill in his lacks somehow because he had so many likes.  I liked how he kissed me, how he kept his eyes open, how he looked into my eyes so deeply, and so often.   I knew eventually he would get over his ex, just as I would eventually get over mine, and eventually we could possibly fall in love with each other.

“He’s a frat boy and a flirt,” my angel continued, immediately naming what I was trying so hard to ignore.

“I know,” I said, my enthusiasm deflating slightly as she spoke.

She lit a joint and passed it to me.

“He’s cute and all, in a surfer boy way, with his bleached blond hair and his ripped bod.”

“Yeah, he’s ripped,” I smiled, remembering curling up with him, fingers interlaced, limbs entwined.

“Yeah,” she smoked, “he’s cute and all.  But you’re beautiful.  You’re gorgeous.  You could do so much better.

I looked up at her, blushing in the darkness.  I didn’t feel beautiful, I felt old, sagging, tired.

“I mean it,” she said.  And she said it again.  “You’re beautiful.  You could do so much better.”

I felt her anointing me with her open, kind and generous heart.  I felt my own heart fluttering, hopeful.

We lived in a world that valued her far over me, for her youth, her youth, her dazzling youth.  For her impending fecundity.  She was the desired one in our society.  I was past my prime, reject-able, dated not datable.  The world of men wanted her, not me.  I should best take what I could get, whatever I could get, and be happy.

But she intervened, this tattooed angel, to remind me that we weren’t in a zero sum game.  There wasn’t need for settling or denying, or even self-pity.  I felt a dizzy wave come over me, that wasn’t from the alcohol or the pot.  It felt like some of her youth and optimism re-ignited my own youth and optimism.  The spirit that is stronger than the body.

Ultimately no one knows what this world will bring.  Sometimes bounty or famine, sometimes loss.  Sometimes love.  There was nothing to do with it but move on.  The Frat Boy would find his perfect woman, and I knew it wasn’t me.

And I would find my perfect man too.  And all of the sudden, I knew that I had plenty of time.  The perfection of everything is hard to see in a moment of lack or a moment of loss.  But my failure to trust in that moment wasn’t proof that the moment couldn’t be trusted.

The angel took my arm and we walked back down the rickety stairs to the bar.  She gave me a hug and her email address and went back to the bar where the sea of men parted and waited to flirt with her.  She gave me a wink and ordered another drink.

I went back to the dance floor and spun with my Frat Boy one last wild and sexy night.

To live in the moment, and honestly so, is the only way to move forward into the best future for yourself.

One day my prince will come.  But right now, I’ll just dance to the music.

]]> http://lkwalker.com/2011/08/dantes-tenth-circle/feed/ 0 http://lkwalker.com/2011/07/joyful-yoga/ http://lkwalker.com/2011/07/joyful-yoga/#comments Sat, 16 Jul 2011 19:30:39 +0000 LKWalker http://lkwalker.com/?p=571

When I took my yoga teacher training they asked us a trick question.  What is the one thing that everybody wants?  We bantered around [continued...]]]>

When I took my yoga teacher training they asked us a trick question.  What is the one thing that everybody wants?  We bantered around many ideas:  peace, flexibility, security, love.  No one came up with the answer they were looking for: happiness.

But happiness always felt fleeting to me and even all of  my yoga practices didn’t seem to seal it into my heart.  I felt happy sometimes, but just as often, incredibly sad.  I felt the grief of the world heavy on my heart, and at times I even felt guilty if I was happy in the face of so much suffering.

I began to read the wonderful Jungian analyst and writer, Robert A. Johnson, and I came upon a passage that clarified my confusion.

“…‘happiness’ was defined as ‘a happening of chance, luck, fortune.’  The word ‘joy,’ on the other hand, was defined as ‘an exultation of the spirit, gladness, delight, the beatitude of heaven or paradise.’  That’s quite a difference!  Happiness is always short-lived.  We are constantly chasing after this experience; we think that we should be happy – after all, isn’t the pursuit of happiness guaranteed to us in the Bill of Rights?  But happiness comes at the whim of fortune.  No happiness can be kept permanently.”   - -Robert A. Johnson, Ecstasy

This felt to me like a revelation.  I didn’t want to be running after an elusive experience.  I knew it was only luck that I had been born into such relatively easeful circumstances: a middle-class white woman in North America.  I could just as easily have been born into poverty in a hundred different countries, or in a country where women are sometimes condemned to death just for being a woman.  How could luck or chance be something to cultivate, or indeed, even desire?  I wanted something longer lasting, something that I could apply to my life no matter what was going on.  Even in the face of hardship, grief, or loss, I wanted my spirit to see the truth of the universe, the beauty that truly infuses everything.

Everyone is so serious these days, running after this transient idea of happiness.  It seems to me that people come to yoga classes yearning for the very thing my trainers told us we wanted: happiness.   Students are trying to find it by struggling to do the perfect downward dog, or the perfect intricate scorpion pose.   We are devoted to our practice.  We show up on the mat, day after day, year after year.  Practicing through injury, fatigue, overly busy lives.  We sweat, contort, fiercely pray.  But where is the joy?

I have never been to a yoga class and learned a joyful asana.  Sometimes a teacher will say, “Smile in that pose.  Why does everyone look so miserable?’

At this, everyone will laugh, and then immediately go back to the practice, faces fixed with focused concentration.

Just as you will never do Hanuman asana (splits pose) without a serious dedication to the form, in order to have joy, you must practice joy.

Here are my tips on how to bring joy to your yoga practice.  Do try this at home, and pay attention: it just might make you feel great! On the mat and off.

Doodle-asana:  Take some water based art crayons (Caren D’ache water color pencils are great) or basic costume make-up.  Put on your yoga clothes, preferably a short sleeve shirt.  Draw on your arms: hearts, Om’s, snakes and butterflies.  Write little notes to yourself on the back of your hands: ‘you’re so cute,’ ‘I love me.’  Notice how many times you smile while doing downward facing dog.

Kid-asana:  See if you can borrow your neighbor’s five year old daughter, or your co-worker’s eight year old little boy.  Put on some music and dance around the living room with them.  Show them a couple of easy asanas (kids love downward dog and tree pose).  Then ask them to invent a pose and give it a name.  Next, you invent a pose and give it a name.  Tell them that this is how the original asanas were discovered, from yogis in deep meditation watching their internal world, and watching their external world, the perfect world of animals, trees and bugs.  Be as outlandish as possible.  Think octopus pose, and wiggle all your fingers.  Or hippopotamus pose, and squirt water out your mouth (this one is best practiced outside).  See if there isn’t some deep and abiding wisdom, as well as some useful poses, amongst this fun gamble.  Remember these to include in your next solo practice.

Fun-versions:  You’ve been practicing handstand for years now.  You can do it against the wall pretty well.  You’ve even managed to do it in the middle of the room, when you have that awesome two person spot where they balance your legs between their outstretched and linked arms.  Now:  forget all that.  Go back to the time when you used to do inversions all the time and never think twice about it.  That’s right, take that kid energy you learned in the last asana and remember when you were young.  Now start doing cartwheels again.  All over the living room.  Or all over the back yard.  See if you can do them with both your dominant hand forward, and then your non-dominant hand forward.  Remember how easy it is?  And all this time you were pretending that inversions were hard.  You’ve been doing them your whole life!  Take time in between for giggling fits.

Joyful Naps:  This is a variation on Shivasana.  After a practice where you’ve incorporated at least one of the above, lie down on your mat.  Close your eyes.  Get comfortable.  Take a few deep breaths and allow your body to completely relax.  Now imagine the earth spinning beneath you.  Imagine yourself lying on the curve of the globe.   Now take your hand and very lightly, with a feather touch, run your hand over your opposite arm.  Then switch hands and arms.  Next, with this same feather touch, run your hand over your face and neck.  It should feel almost ticklish.  This very light touch is the best lymph massage there is.  This feather light touch helps to open the lymphatic valves and allow the lymphatic fluid to flow effortlessly, helping detoxification in a very gentle way.  This touch also enlivens the nerve endings at the same time as calming down the  nervous system.  After this, lay here and let the smiles and tingling of your skin sink deep into your being.  Stay here as long as you like.   Before you get up from this pose, take your middle finger and tap it several times in the middle of your brow, at your third eye center.  This is a technique to lock in a particular feeling into your body memory.  Remember this technique whenever you have a wonderful, uplifting, glorious experience.  Tap it in.  Remember this wonderful feeling.  The feeling of joy.

A yummy and energizing spring cleansing drink – Switchel – is an old folk remedy.  Heavily promoted in the 1950’s by Vermont country physician Dr. DeForest Jarvis, it was a drink first discovered in the [continued...]]]>

A yummy and energizing spring cleansing drink – Switchel – is an old folk remedy.  Heavily promoted in the 1950’s by Vermont country physician Dr. DeForest Jarvis, it was a drink first discovered in the West Indies and used as a health tonic in the new colonies.  Made with apple cider vinegar and raw honey, Switchel is known for its thirst quenching and energizing properties as well as for healing and cleansing.  It is often used as a weight loss beverage with the vinegar helping to increase metabolic rate.  The drink alkalinizes the system, a condition which inhibits the growth of disease.  Vinegar also has antiseptic and antibiotic properties and has been shown to fight the free radical cells which cause cancer.

Apple Cider vinegar has been used as a thirst quencher since Phoenician times, as its many minerals and trace elements help to regulate water content in the cells.  The father of modern medicine, Hippocrates, used it as a healing elixir.  And the Roman soldiers were given a ration of the vinegar to lessen their need for water while still staying hydrated on long marches.  It was this drink that was given to Christ on the cross as a quencher for his thirst, not to antagonize him as many people think.

This recipe for Switchel uses raw honey which also has many healing properties.  It is, like vinegar, antiseptic, antibacterial and also antibiotic.  Raw honey can be used externally to heal wounds, and internally as an aid to digestion.  In its unheated form, honey does not affect blood sugar in the same way as processed sugars, and is therefore suitable for many diabetics.

Because of the live enzymes, it is not recommended to feed raw honey to children less than one year of age.

Some recipes call for adding ginger, another digestive aid with many healing properties of its own including slowing the growth of cancer cells.

Mix up a batch and let the tangy sweetness reawaken you to spring!

Recipe:

1/2 gallon good, fresh water.

½ – 1 cup raw unheated honey

½ cup raw unfiltered apple cider vinegar

1 teaspoon grated ginger

There are many variations on this recipe.  Some of the old Vermonters would add oatmeal to the drink!  And of course, many used the ubiquitous maple syrup, which adds flavor, but changes the blood sugar suitability for diabetics.  Sweetness depends on taste buds, so you may need to drastically change the amount of honey used.  You can also substitute your favorite sparkling water to add some fizz!

It was recently discovered that chemicals known as obesogens, found in things like household cleaners and plastic containers, can impersonate natural hormones that regulate weight and trick our bodies into storing fat; now researchers in Taiwan have come up with a test to identify the culprits.  These imposter [continued...]]]> Throw away the Tide, Palmolive and Fabreze NOW!

It was recently discovered that chemicals known as obesogens, found in things like household cleaners and plastic containers, can impersonate natural hormones that regulate weight and trick our bodies into storing fat; now researchers in Taiwan have come up with a test to identify the culprits.  These imposter hormones are ubiquitous enough that the White House Childhood Obesity Task Force mentioned them as a possible reason for increased obesity.  The new tests will hopefully reduce the number of harmful products that make it to market, but for now, reduce exposure by avoiding canned foods and beverages and don’t heat food in plastic – Heather Hurlock  From Men’s Journal Magazine: