Temperance River State Park (May 29, 2015)

Campsites.  46.  47.  48.  We have pitched our tents at the edge of the world.

You can hear the waves both day and night – crashing, crashing, crashing into shore.  Last night was cool, cold even.  First camp of the season.  I laid unsleeping in our tent, Jake spooned against my back for warmth of many kinds.  I wondered if anyone has ever lived in a place like this and hated the sound of the waves.  Wondered if I will love the sound of them by the time we pull out on Monday, or will I have blocked them out to keep from going crazy.  Will I wake suddenly that first night back, enveloped in a silence made suddenly eerie by the absence of water nearby.

This is not a beach for swimming.  From the main lot wooden staircase leads one step next down to a red and black sand beach; rocks the same colour as kidneys.  Liver.  Standing there you can see the riptide – pulling, dragging, tearing.  Taking everything, everything out into lake.

Lake Superior is so big that you cannot see the opposite shore from where we are camping.  Just the point where sky meets water.  That is our horizon.

It has been misting, raining on and off since we got here, but there is a kind of raw beauty to it.  Did we ever thing the going would be easy right here at the edge of everything?

Maybe I’ve been reading too much fantasy lately, but I can imagine waiting on the edge of an expanse very much like this.  Alone, only a journal, few books to keep me company.  I can imagine myself looking out each morning, waiting for a boat to appear suddenly on the horizon, the unseen becoming seen at that place where water meets sky.  I can see myself standing on the shore, watching the boat grow slowly larger, larger, and knowing somewhere, below the decks, an envelope waits just for me.

An envelope with my name on the outside.  And inside, the answers to all the questions that make it so very hard to sleep at night.

UNTITLED: TEETH POEM draft 001 rough

thank you
mister dentist
but i do do do
want these three
rotten teeth
pulled from my pretty mouth.

yes, even
the right canine
though you
tap it with your tool
and tell me losing it
will
“compromise”
my smile.

i suppose that i am lucky
the left one
had already broken –
top half flared out.
most unbecoming angle.
if both had been intact,
you might have just refused
to pull anything at all.

i ask to keep the teeth.
dental hygienist advises me
to leave them in the sealed bag.
“technically,”
she says
“your blood makes them
a biohazard.”

after a few days,
once the worst of the pain
has subsided,
i open the bag
to look
at my teeth.

both canines abscessed
in 2005
and i
took care of it at home –
cocaine or crack
injected into veins of hands
wrists, slamming
through my blood
to numb the blinding pain
inside my mouth.

what i lacked
in prevention
i made up for
a thousand times
in cure.

the black blisters
on my gums popped,
refilled,
popped again. each time
sticky rotten meat stink
filling up my mouth.

ten years, and
two failed root canals.
dentists do not like
to pull the teeth of women.

i did not want
to touch the canines.
infected
during those
dark years.
those years of smack
and blow and price tags hung
from naked skin. those years
of liquid handcuffs.

the molar does not
make me so uneasy.
just a tooth
in the wrong place
at the wrong time.

it had chipped –
a bottom corner
broken away
to reveal
the rot inside.

black.
sparkling black metallic.

i did not know
that this
was what decay would look like.
i am sure
i owned a dress
this same colour once before.

Karma Yoga Practicum Essay (mid to late july)

My karma yoga hours are done and I am starting this essay on Highway 2, passing through North Dakota.

North Dakota has always seemed like a blank space to me – South Dakota tugs at me – memories of my Grandma Joyce’s house in Vermillion; Grandpa Harold, her third husband, and the only one who did not beat her.  I saw many funerals in vermillion, walked streets paved in red stone to thrift stores and watched my 28 year old aunt, 5 months pregnant, be placed set into the earth.  And that good memory from my mother’s drinking days – camping illegally in the Badlands when I was 14 and angry, and for one night, I had fun.

We are on our way to Glacier National Park in Montana.  We are headed West this summer vacation.  Montana – it’s been what, near 20 years since I last climbed your mountain trails.  I am thirsty for the water of your glaciers.

In those North Dakota fields we pass by, the cows huddle together at what I assume must be marshy areas, seeking some respite from the silent muggy prairie heat.

Center

Although it’s not silent here.  The prairie is torn apart, drilled deep, by the oil wells, the oil rigs, pumping pumping pumping.  Our car shudders with every semi-truck that passes, carrying tankers of oil, and every car on every train looks just the same and they all are going back the way we came.

So much has happened.  I need this vacation; I feel so utterly spent, depleted.  Pulled thin as cellophane the dark parts of me begin to become visible under the translucent places in flesh.

My partner’s ex-wife and I have started out own yoga business.  We operate under the name Swastha Yoga, teaching classes at Rail River Folk School in Bemidji, MN.  Most of my karma hours were done here, but some at Yoga Bemidji as a sub for the regular Saturday morning teacher, MT, and one free class for the workers the Family Crisis Center in Bagley, MN.  Everything above the price of rent was donated to the Family Crisis Center, but they were donation classes.  After the cost of rent, I raised $30, and gave each of the FCC workers a 5 class pass card for their own personal use, plus 2 free yoga class laminated badges that can be used over and over again by their clients.  We have more cards made up for the women’s shelter and the Sexual Assault Program here in Bemidji.

Periodically I take my son (the son who grew inside of me those long months of teacher training) out of his car seat to nurse him at my breast – something I believed I would never be able to do with my inverted nipples.  But somehow, we’ve made it work, and I feel liberated, unchained from the breast pump and bottles I had to drag everywhere with me.  One more thing to subtract and we learn to live inside our bodies.

I jump between reading Yoga and the Quest for the True Self and Monster Island.  One to wake me up, one to shut me down.

I’m trying to find the words to describe my practicum experience – fulfilling, exhausting, deeply right but a little bruising, too.

I feel like my birth experience had a very profound effect on my prana and on me as a human being.  In the article ‘Mother Nurture: Yoga and Ayurveda for Postpartum Bliss” by Claudia Welch with Scott Blossom (Yoga International, spring 2011, Issue 113), Welch writes:

“In Sanskrit, the term sutaka describes powerful transitional times like birth and death. Sutaka has several meanings, including “charioteer,” one who transports precious cargo between the heavens and the earth, and “mercury,” a metal capable of alchemical transformation from liquid to solid state.  In the birthing process, sutaka applies to the baby, who moves from one fundamental experience of reality (being in the mother’s womb), to another; to family members, midwives, and others present for the passage; and of course to the mother, who transitions from pregnancy to parenthood.

Sutaka begins in earnest with the altered state of awareness you enter during labor and delivery, and remains very strong for two weeks following the birth; but sutaka can extend for the whole first year – to varying degrees – as long as you remain in transition.  In this altered state, you may become acutely aware of your own prana, as well as your child’s.  You may experience this as a deep sense of connection with – and acceptance of – your own needs and your baby’s; less anxiety over small things; profound relaxation; and a feeling that ‘all’s right with the world

This altered state allows you to bond with your baby easier, and you may even find that your judgments, worldview, and emotions have shifted and softened, and you feel more vulnerable.”

I started doing a few somatic exercises 3 days after my son was born on March 6^th, and I taught my first karma yoga practicum class on May 10^th.  I taught 3 more karma classes by mid-June, and then Arianne and I launched Swastha Yoga officially on June 15^th.

Things seemed to snowball – suddenly I was teaching 3 classes a week, working 2 longer shifts a week at the Co-op, and doing bicycle messenger deliveries for a local company.  Something inside of me started to feel broken, I started to feel like I was forcing myself through the motions of my life, and like my energy was being sucked away from each and every direction.  There was nothing left for me, myself.  I had become last on my list.

Obviously I know/knew that having a teaching practice was no substitute for having a personal practice, but this really drove it home for me.

I’ve started my daily practice again, and hope the fruits will spill over into my teaching.  I think of some line by some famous man, who once spoke of “the long dark winter of the soul” that Christian converts experience once the initial euphoria of accepting Christ has worn off.  I think this may be my yogic equivalent of that.

Postscript

I did not find what I was looking for in Glacier.  We packed up from the park and I had a bad taste in my mouth as we pulled away – that sensation that the whole time, I was just waiting for it to be over.

But I come back cleaned out in my very heart.  And I know now what needs to be stripped away.  I am lucky to have a partner who supports me in quitting my “real” job at the co-op so I can write, teach yoga, and stay home with our children.

My son turned 5 months old yesterday.  My children and I sit in a dark room burning palo santo and listening to kirtan music.  I drink bottle after bottle of water and think that surely there is not enough water in this world to make me clean again.

Post Mommy-Baby Yoga Bliss

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