in the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary magazine. It always makes me laugh and then, reminds me of the inherent goodness of people. The man in the photo rescued what he thought was going to be a miniature pet-pig. And then it grew. And grew. Now, the pig has gotten so much love and attention that it (I can’t remember its name) gets letters and visitors. Lucky pig. Lucky man to love like that.
someone at a (very loud) gathering leaned into my ear and said hello. Well actually, she screeched, but I know it was a well-meaning screech, and my ear hasn’t been the same. It hurts every day and night. I went to the Ear Nose and Throat doctor to check whether the eardrum was punctured, but was told that it wasn’t as dramatic as that. “Your ear was shocked,” the doctor said. (Oy, I thought. I know about shock from physical and emotional trauma, from car accidents, but now there was ear-shock to add to the list.)
I’m writing about this because just the other day, I realized that I haven’t been happy with my ear. I’ve treated the pain like a a mosquito to swat away. Still, I’d think? Come on, time to shape up, get over it.
This impatient attitude towards something I’d rather not have (or be) is so pervasive, so subtle and yet so apparent.
Get over it.
Stop.
Enough already.
Change.
I get the message: don’t let screechy people close to your ears. Wear noise-canceling earphones everywhere (note to self: find them in a burnt-amber color with rhinestones). Now go away.
Then I remembered the act of turning towards rather than away from. And I realized my poor ear has been putting up with a lot of meanness from me. No wonder it’s still shocked after three and a half months.
These bodies. They are so soft-skinned, so vulnerable. So time-limited. So steadfast in their willingness to support us. Sometimes I think it’s amazing that given what we feed them (and not just the particulars of food), they’re still willing to carry us. Still willing to circulate our blood. Still willing to do anything for us, despite the ways we treat and talk to them daily, but most particularly when they get sick or hurt.
Everything alive needs to be fed, says a teacher of mine. Not necessarily with food but with attention and appreciation. When I remind myself of this, I think, “Of course. Even the roses, even the rocks, even the grass. They all seem to perk up when I notice them.” And sometimes it’s easier to do this with a rose or a child or a dog than an ear. Or an aching back. Or a sprained ankle.
So, in the past week, I am showering sweetness on my ear, which isn’t used to such attention, since for sixty-five years, despite its inherent capacity to, um, listen, I’ve never talked to it. I thank it for its service to me. For hearing birds and water and people talking. For listening with such attentiveness to music and wind. I don’t do it so that it will heal. I don’t know that it will. I do it because something opens in my crusty heart when I do. Appreciation, it seems, is holy.
Kevin Durant (of the Golden State Warriors) isn’t the only one who can play basketball. There was, for instance, my college boyfriend Lee whose nickname was Spider because as an offensive player on the All-Star Louisiana team, he was all legs and arms and no one could get past him. Although, and don’t tell anyone this, Lee did coach my friends and me for one game when he suggested we start a girls’ basketball team. He ran up and down the court a lot that night, but we didn’t score a basket. Not even a jump shot. It seems that when your team is made up of people like me who are 5’2” tall, the distance between you and the basket is a bit daunting.
Still. Lee — I call him my first husband because we were together for nine years — taught me to love the game for the quicksilver speed and grace of it. There was also the Broadway show called Promises, Promises during which Jerry Orbach sang, “She Likes Basketball”, which I’d already been humming for a few years before I met Lee. Now, however, Spider, Kevin Durant and Jerry Orbach have coalesced into a general fondness for the sport, and every time Matt asks me to watch a game — thirty years and counting - I belt out that song and dance around the kitchen using a dishtowel as my basketball.
But I digress. Last night, the Warriors won the NBA championship and after the second quarter, I stopped walking out of the room, checking my phone for the score to allay the suspense. Kevin Durant was grace in motion. And Steph Curry, with his huge gorgeous eyes, was also quite good. And LeBron James, who played on the opposing team, the Cleveland Cavaliers, was stunning.
Today, my mother texted me at 5.30. She wrote, “That was a great game. Congratulations to you and California.” She also added many heart and hands emoticons. I had a good laugh. I wrote back: “Thanks, Mom, if only I had something to do with it.”
Everyone here is atwitter with the win, and although I too reveled in the pleasure of watching people at their level of mastery, I’m not into the us-and-them part. The our-team-is-better-than-their-team part, not to mention the sports-industrial complex financial side of things, but this post isn’t about that (despite my commitment to pointing out the unspoken side of things).
But in case you are wondering what this post is about or what we have in common with Steph and Kevin and LeBron, here’s what I want to say: I heard one of the announcers ask KD about a basket he made from “way downtown.” It looked like an impossible shot. It looked like no human could have made that shot. And he did. And then he kept making them. His response to the announcer was, “I’ve been practicing that shot my whole life.”
Yep, I thought, it looks easy. It looks like he leans forward, jumps in the air on those legs that seem to go on forever, raises his arms and the ball goes twirling and rolling into the basket. Done.
But the truth is that it takes great effort for anything to be effortless. After I heard KD’s answer, I asked myself what I practice. What I’ve been practicing my whole life. I remembered my friend Natalie’s words: we are always practicing something and most of us practice suffering. And that was true for me for a long time. But not anymore. Now I practice bringing my mind back to this moment when it wanders off into blame or shame. I practice noticing what isn’t wrong. I practice showing up. I practice paying attention. And appreciation. Taking in the beauty of floor, chandelier, sky, feet. I practice remembering that when I am utterly in this moment, nothing is better than this. And this.
For the Warriors, practice might be about winning, I don’t know, but for me, I practice because the process is the goal. In the practice itself, I return to what I love. I’m not practicing to get anywhere, I’m practicing because what could be better than floor, beauty, tree.
Someone asked Pablo Casals, one of the greatest cellists of all time, why, at ninety years old, he still practiced his instrument. His answer was, “I am beginning to notice some improvement.” Me too. I’m beginning to notice some improvement.
because everything –flowers, bones, people, dogs, rocks—likes to be loved. I’ve worn these boots to walk fifty blocks in New York, hike a mountain, talk to Oprah and Katie Couric and pretty much every day for five years. They’ve been resoled four times and been adorned by friends (notice the boot belt. A friend’s birthday present to me).
My mother would say that they don’t owe me anything at this point. It’s true. But. I’ haven’t said thank you enough to them (or, for that matter, to my legs that carry me and heart that beats me and eyes that see and arms and toes and kidneys and liver and, and, and) So anyway, thank you boots.
called Tell Me I’m Fat and although I usually like Ira Glass’ work (particularly the one about his dog), this episode left me feeling as if the emperor (actually, the empress) had no clothes. I was frustrated at what didn’t get said, but only, as Anne Lamott would say, “in the kindest possible way."
Three women were featured. One had accepted her fat (she said to call it fat. She said that calling it overweight implied that there was a weight you were supposed to be and therefore, that the weight you were was wrong) and realized, after seeing Leonard Nimoy’s photographs called The Full Body Project—gorgeous, sumptuous photographs--- that the rolls of fat on her body might indeed be beautiful. The second woman had lost a huge amount of weight by taking amphetamines. A decade or so later, she is now married, still taking amphetamines to dampen her appetite, and feels as if she left her old fat self behind—and that the leaving was a kind of betrayal or abandonment (my words, not hers). She recorded a heated argument with her new husband of ten days about the fact that he might not have loved or been attracted to her had she not lost weight. And she found this painful because, of course, at her core, she is still the same self she was before she lost weight. The third woman talked about being much fatter than the first aforementioned woman and that she didn’t want to accept her fat. She was suffering daily because of it. She said the fact that she was black only added to the amount of discrimination she received from other people.
As I listened, I kept wondering about the particulars of food itself and how each of the women used it. If it provided emotional comfort, if it was being used as a drug to change the channel in their minds, and what it might be like to turn towards the heart of discomfort—which is the point at which most of us use food. And, having just returned from our retreat, and having just heard from so many women—fat and thin and every weight between—I am once again reminded that it’s possible to lose a great deal of weight or to accept being fat, and still not address the core of the relationship with food. And until this part is addressed, she-who-is-living-your-life goes untended.
It feels to me that there are two issues here: one is the way the culture has hijacked women’s definitions of themselves vis-à-vis body weight and beauty. The podcast addressed this beautifully. We are bombarded by images of thin, thinner, thinnest women and in the sheer volume of the photographs and ongoing articles about losing weight, we are hypnotized into believing that the only acceptable body-weight is thin. That beauty is defined by the size of our thighs or a number on a scale. That we can only have big lives if we have small bodies. In this regard, fat really is a feminist issue. (The same is true with ageing and the fact that only young, smooth, jowl-less women are considered beautiful). Because the culture is us--an externalized projection of all of our minds—one way to change the culture is by changing our willingness to accept what is unacceptable. To stop buying those magazines. To do whatever it takes to stop shaming ourselves. It’s slow work, it’s one-by-one work, but it is effective and powerful, and as I sometimes say to my students, what better thing is there to do?
The second, unaddressed part of the podcast was the essential issue, the one that addresses what cannot be seen or felt or touched. It is expressed through this body but has nothing to do with it. It is what it feels like to be you in the middle of the night, when you open your eyes in the morning, when you pad to the bathroom. If you know yourself as something beyond the shape of your body, regardless of its size. This part is not about doing but about being-- and noticing what stands in the way. This part is about questioning your most painful thoughts, your entrenched positions, your cherished opinions about anything, everything. It’s about noticing that you are at war with yourself on a daily basis. At war with traffic, with waiting in lines at the bank and at the grocery store. It’s about realizing how much of the time you find yourself blaming and judging and shaming. About asking yourself if you believe that feelings can be felt (or not), that any situation, no matter how painful, can be a portal to what poet Jennifer Welwood calls ‘’the clear strand of light running through you.” Loving the rolls on our bellies is certainly better than shaming ourselves because of them, but it’s only a beginning.
In my own life, having spent years being fat and years being thin and still, throughout it all, being deeply unhappy, low-level depressed, and anxious in ways that were almost impossible to put into words, I no longer believe that being a particular body size (even without shame) is the answer to anything except being able to move with ease when you play with your kids or sit or stand up or walk to your bedroom.
I’m interested in what, where, and why you eat not because it’s better to eat protein or fat than carbohydrates, or because I think it’s better to be thin than fat, but because if you believe that you are secretly unworthy or unlovable, your relationship with food is a concrete, obvious, daily way--an outpicturing—to question that core unworthiness. What’s on your plate is a snapshot of your beliefs about deprivation, pleasure, control, sufficiency, joy, nourishment, living and dying.
I’m not interested in food because food is so compelling (although it is that as well), but because by going deeply into one thing—that relationship—we get to everything. We get to see what you believe and whether you are showing up for the ten minutes you are here on earth. Are you actually there when you take a sip of tea, eat a bite of chocolate, walk to your car (or are you thinking about the next thing and the next and how different it’s going to be when you finally have that job or house or relationship or pair of earrings?) Are you living in your body or are you looking at it from the outside in? Are you paying attention to the diamond-trill of birds, the black-purple smell of night, the passing glance of a stranger on the street? When you leave this earth, will you will feel as if you were actually here?
