Dear Vincent, All your sadness is in your lungs. Also the World is a Heartbreaker

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Subject: All Your Sadness is in Your Lungs

Dear Vincent,

What’s deeply embarrassing is that when I can’t sleep I listen to Oprah, and sometimes I imagine that if only I could think the right thoughts and get myself on the right vibes and wavelength, that I’ll manifest some magnificent and magical life and end up on the plushy emerald green chairs in the middle of Oprah’s emerald green Oprah Forest and I’ll get to tell Oprah all about what I know for sure, and what makes my heart sing, and finally I’ll be rich and happy and well fucked.

Circa 2009, Back when I used to believe in Digestive Enzymes,
Also tequila.

(dot. dot dot. Every time I write about toenail fungus, the fungus takes over and then there is heaps of confusion. Like in university, I tried to write a play called, Clap Loud If You Believe In Digestive Enzymes, and the protagonist's name was Amy, and Amy believed in Digestive Enzymes, and she had terrible toenail fungus, and unrelated to the toenail fungus, she quite literally puked in her mouth for a very large portion of the day. Amy's next door neighbour had a five-year-old son, and also vagina cancer. And the five-year-old son liked to jump on the trampoline, and he wanted his mother to live forever.

Now I remember that the kid's name was Gordon, and one day, Gordon was jumping on the trampoline, and Amy's organs - her esophagus and colon and liver and kidneys emerged, human-sized in Amy's back yard. And then somehow everyone became tiny and ended up in Gordon's mother's uterus, or maybe her vagina or maybe a little bit of both? They were trying to fight the cancer and the fungus all at once. There could have been human-sized fungus as well. Either way, it was all kinds of confusing.)

Oprah does not feel embarrassed to feature her own self on the cover of every single Oprah magazine. And she was not too embarrassed to feature herself on her Master Class Podcast. Why I am like Oprah. I feature myself all the time.

Everyone's life is a class you can learn from, that's what Oprah says. And Oprah told her own story of when she really wanted to get the role of Shug Avery in the Color Purple and Shug Avery’s husband’s name was Harpo which is Oprah’s name backwards and so when she got an audition it all seemed like a magical manifested meant-to-be miracle. Then Oprah called a casting director to follow up on her audition, and the casting director scoffed at her and said that real actors were in the running for the part, and the real actors were skinnier and much more experienced. Oprah felt deflated so she went to the Fat Farm to jog.

I have never been to a Fat Farm, or heard of one until now, but it is somewhere I might have liked to go as a teenager. At the Fat Farm, Oprah jogged around and around the track, and she talked to God and asked God to please help her let go of all the grief and resentment around her heart, and she didn’t need to let go enough to be able to go see the movie, but could God please make her a little bit happy for the actress who got the part she so wanted. 

And Oprah jogged and jogged and jogged and gradually the plaque resentment around her heart lifted and she thought, well, maybe I can go see the movie, and after a while, she even became so happy for the skinny actress who got the part, and eventually her whole heart was light and healed, and Oprah surrendered to whatever big or not big plan that God had in store for her and then Stephen Spielberg called the Fat Farm and he said, you got the part. Oprah couldn't believe it.

"I hear you’re at a Fat Farm," said Stephen Spielberg. "Lose a pound, and you might lose the part." So Oprah stopped at Dairy Queen on the way home. She said that getting this role in the Colour Purple was proof that if you surrender fully to God’s plan, he will give you back a life far greater than anything you ever dreamed. Stephen Spielberg will call. People will skip work and lock their doors and unplug their phones to watch your face every afternoon on television. Or something like that. It was approximately 3 o'clock in the morning on some Thursday morning in February when I heard the Master Class that is Oprah's life. 

Ever since the story of Oprah and the Fat Farm and the Colour Purple, I’ve once or twice imagined that someday soon, I'll go to Parc Laurier, and I'll trudge round and round in a rectangle until all the plaque around my heart will dissolve, along with all the cravings for the exquisite prizes in the plushy emerald green Oprah chairs, and the exquisite fucks in the kitchen and this all-consuming feeling that I love you, and I'll be so happy for everyone else's black-out orgasms, and my toenails will grow back all happy and healthy and pink, and then God will reveal his real plan which will hopefully be more beautiful and lucrative and well-fucked than anything I ever could have dreamed of.

More Love from Eighteen-year-old Erica:

“One of my friends said today:  in 200 years Mother Theresa will get about one sentence in a history textbook.   Being young can really bring out questionable contemplations and aspects of our personalities.   I do hope that we can survive it all, without becoming old and bitter or prematurely dead. I am not going to become an academic, because it requires that you be much too logical and sane.  I feel that I have neither of these characteristics and oh well, I'm going to be an artist. …  

Do you think inner peace is possible or do you think I should just accept that I will be forever bouncing off the walls? 

I was thinking that maybe next year I would start hard core yoga and meditation and become composed and un-unstable but I'm afraid that unfortunately I'm addicted to this unpredictability and strangely believe that I'll be bored and uncreative and uninteresting without it."

At Grown-ups Read Things They Wrote As Kids, I was effervescent and I told all my friends how I was doing so great for February, and I gave them the speech about last February, when I wept from deep behind the bottom of my lungs  in the snow in Parc Outremont, and who was that person, and where did she go?

So many views from so many meltdowns.
Where did she go?

In fact she returned yesterday morning on Tuesday, February 12, at 9:32 a.m. in front of the bathroom sink of the Champion Meltdown House where I have melted down at least seven times in the past seven months, while shining the bathroom sink chrome, or while negotiating refrigerator drawers, or while wiping down the wooden kitchen island that seems perpetually covered with tomatoe sauce chunks, and expensive breadcrumbs.

In fact, I wept from deep behind the bottom of my lungs for a bunch of the day and would have appreciated round-the-clock care (dot dot dot by the way the cute base of my tongue dude bought me a beet latte, and I am not sure he is old enough to stand in as a potential father figure; however, he may be a solid candidate for a Wounded Bird Complex.)

At 5:34 P.M. I called my friend Sherwin with a meltdown, and Sherwin was drinking tequila and drawing a pile of garbage for the sixth last page of his tenth book.

“Every time I make a new book, I think, oh, maybe this will be the one that lets me not struggle. After all these books, it’s less and less likely. But I keep doing it, because I enjoy it.”

One of Sherwin’s first books is called,

The World
Is a
Heartbreaker  

and it is a collection of 1600 3-line pseudo-haikus, and me and blank (not Wounded Bird Complex Dude. Also not Sherwin.) and I read them to each other the first time we ever cuddled and made out, and I got to hump his leg and have an ugly-cry orgasm.

The World

Is a

Heartbreaker, by Sherwin Tija

(For sale)

A really great poem by Sherwin is

the

people who

eat pain.

(TWIAHB, by Sherwin, p.68)

and another one is

my inner life

became this

massive thing. 

(TWIAHB, by Sherwin, p. 91)

and another one is

babies screaming

like the end of

everything.
(TWIAHB, by Sherwin, p. 141)

My poem is

This morning 

2:30 a.m.

sleep fucked.

Last night, after I hung up the phone with Sherwin, I'd imagined I'd go to Parc Laurier and under the snowstorm, I’d trudge round and round in a rectangle, until all the plaque around my heart would dissolve, along with all the cravings for the exquisite prizes in the Oprah chairs, and the exquisite fucks in the kitchen and this all-consuming feeling that I love you, and I’d be so happy for  everyone who gets to have Black-Out Orgasms,  and my toenails would grow back all happy and healthy and pink, and then God would  reveal his real plan which would hopefully be more beautiful and lucrative and well-fucked than anything I ever could have dreamed of.

Instead I walked 1.75 blocks to Jean Coutu, and asked how much the toenail fungus drug would cost, and in fact, the cost was better than I thought, 37 bucks for six weeks, and despite anguished vacillation and the risk of diarrhea plus liver and kidney failure, I swiped my Visa card and bought the drugs, and everyone stared as I trudged around the perimeter of Jean Coutu, sobbing intermittently from deep behind  the bottom of my lungs.

After seven minutes, I switched to sobbing and pacing up and down the aisles of PA Nature, and then I calmed down and bought yogurt on sale, and a poppy seed baguette.

Maybe in addition to diarrhea and liver and kidney damage, the toenail fungus drug will bring fame, money, weightloss, prizes, sex, while also curing me of the tragic belief that some generic to extraordinary dude and his cock is the only thing that will ever be able to set me free.

Dear Nandi, love Erica, 2004:

“This morning I am deeply questioning the human condition, mocking and rolling my eyes at today's society, feeling intensely lofty as I come to the existential conclusion that nothing really matters, all is futile and what the hell let's eat drink and be merry. 

But no, something does matter or nobody would have lasted this long.

Oh, who am I kidding, what is the point of thinking anymore, why write, so much has already been thought and written, and it's all doomed to become a blip.”

The World
Is a
Heartbreaker.

Love, Erica. 

Spoiler Alert: This is the second last letter to Vincent. Send your worlds of heartbreaks to the secret email address ericaschmidt85(at)gmail(dot)com.

View from the hole in my crotch,
Also the view from Irreversible Climate Change.

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Deep Cleans by Erica J. Schmidt (@deepcleanswitherica)
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Dear Vincent, I still wish I / Was Miranda July

Dear Vincent, I forgave myself for not being Lena Dunham

Dear Vincent, It used to be that the last time I felt home was in a tiny blue penthouse apartment in Mysore, India on the 10th avenue of the 3rd stage of a neighbourhood called Gokulam in November of 2014.

Deep Unyielding Depression, Part Two

The Five Days of Creativity Series is taking longer than five days. To critics and complainers, I say, “Time is silly. Why does everything have to be so fucking linear?”

Now it is May 1st. I am switching apartments today. Again. My ever expanding stock of possessions has grown to include three and a half suitcases. And yet somehow I only own one and a half t. shirts.

It’s a toss-up over whether to move on foot or via Uber. Both smugness-inducing options, though my rectangular friend the i-Phone is predicting rain, which might dampen the smugness and the suitcases, should I decide upon walking.  

These days as I meditate, I balance a hardcover book called “A Thousand Splendid Suns” upon my head. I gave the inside of the covers a go as well. Seems like a decent story. What a relief to read something that’s not the internet. Oh, Internet.

Oh, Joni Mitchell.

This morning as I balanced A Thousand Splendid Suns upon my head, a song of Joni’s entered my brain:

“I am on a lonely road and I am travelling, travelling, travelling.
Looking for something, what can it be?”

Joni, All I Want

What can it be? No fucking idea. But just in case, better not stay anywhere too long. Poor Joni. I hear she’s not feeling so good. A couple Mondays ago, I wasn’t feeling so good either, though my condition was far less extreme than Joni’s. I had meant to blog about Dan Savage’s hump porn fest, but instead I hit up some tedious public health care. Here’s part of the story, which I shared on the One Year of Metta Community Facebook page. The page was organized by one of my first yoga teachers ever. For one year, a bunch of metta practitioners takes turns sharing how they are experiencing lovingkindness and meditation in their daily lives. It is quite lovely.
Here’s what I shared on my turn:

Deep Unyielding Depression, Part Two  

Monday Morning. 35 minutes of meditation, 75 minutes of yoga, one unsuccessful computer task and the whole world seems like it’s already crumbled. Yet again the day seems doomed to the familiar fog of unyielding sadness, paralyzing futility and self-sabotaging thoughts.

Everything is awful and I’m not OK.

The day before, a friend had told me about her boyfriend’s high-fat low carbohydrate diet, and something called the bullet-proof coffee. Perhaps the new ticket was in the 10 000th eating regime. I whipped up the coffee with the coconut oil and raw egg. It tasted alright, but a little cold. When I reheated it, the egg cooked at the bottom of the pan. I kind of hate eggs. So much for that.

I am feeling a mess. Yoga, flaxseed, fresh air, and it’s still me and my head, banging against the wall.

I call my friend Franck, who took me up the mountains on a motorcycle in India. Franck is really into God. God and Franck talk all the time. Franck’s surrendered his whole life to him, or her. I hope that he will not tell me that God is the answer. God can’t be the answer today.

“What is it my darling?”

“I can’t do this anymore. Please don’t tell me to talk to God.”

“No, no God today.” It sounds like he’s been waiting for this call. “You go to doctor, you tell them you’ve been depressed a long time, you cry every day.”

Five years ago, I decided psychiatry and psychiatrists were mostly dumb. I canned the Prozac and quit the vomit elements of my eating disorder, fueled almost entirely by willpower, self-discipline and maybe backbends. I thought that was that. A trophy recovery success. No vomit, no Prozac.

And well. Here we are again. No vomit this time, but a low-grade level of the “Divorce” Diet, and a high-grade level of despair.

“It’s okay. You’re just depressed. You’ve been depressed a long time. You go to doctor.” God bless Franck. No more Shiny Happy Lululemon Formulas. No more trying to think yourself out of it. You feel unwell. You are worthy of help.

There is no Shiny Happy Conclusion.

I love myself enough to try the Bullet-Proof Coffee. To wander all over the city seeking help in the rain. To spend four hours in emergency, only to learn the psychiatrist has gone home. And to go back the next day, waiting amongst the people with injured feet and the need to vomit into boxes that look like they were meant for French Fries.

When it’s all over, there is brief elation, though no Happy Recovery Trophy. Multi-vitamins. The possibility of Prozac. Lentils, bedtime, tomorrow.

The End.

Update: Just about two weeks later, and I’m feeling pretty good. Prozac is a fabulous drug, though I’m having a hell of a time sleeping.

Oh, and I gave the Bullet-Proof Coffee some more chances. We are having an okay go at it.

See you in the Mile End!

 I was thinking of starting up a Mile End Butt Club. Guaranteed Happy Butts. Let me know if you’re up for this.



Butt Club, Anyone?!?
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I Let Go, By Erica J. Schmidt

Deep Unyielding Depression, Part One

Five Days of Creativity (Intro)
Day One: Kleenex (Working Title)
Day Two: Performative Grilled Cheese (Recommended)

 

The Erica Museum

It appears I have left the sub-continent.
Now I am in Canada. Montreal, as fate would have it.

I thought that India would involve more sex, and more blogging. But that’s okay. Now I have a whole bunch of extra condoms I can put in the Erica Museum I’m about to blog about.

The girl I am subletting from for April kindly emptied her plentiful shelves. I am curating the shelves with my suitcase and two backpacks full of stuff. Since returning from India, I have added an extra suitcase to my life. At first, this generated mixed feelings; however, I think that ultimately it expanded my curating options. Isn’t curating a delightful word?  One might also say, Curation, though I am not entirely sure about that.



 

Me and My Life with the Extra Suitcase

My room is large and sunny. It came with two beds, two sets of shelves, and a weird pale peach coloured dresser. Included on the biggest bed was a Canadian Version of the Ugly Polar Fleece Bedsheet. It reminded me of India, and this instilled unrivalled comfort. I have nicknamed the Canadian Version of the Ugly Polar Fleece Bedsheet (CV/UPFB), the Deer Duvet. As a source of sexual gratification, it is working reasonably well, as such polar fleece items generally do. These days I tend to leave the Deer Duvet rolled up.  

Deer Duvet

Palm Tree Wallpaper. The photo does not do it justice.

On the walls, there is absolutely nothing apart from three long strips of palm-tree covered wallpaper, framed together. I’ve never seen framed wallpaper before, not even in India. What good fortune. If I had tape, I would add to the walls a birthday/going away card from my sister. It is a picture of a photographer taking a photo of a whole bunch of people’s bums. Full Moon Portrait, it is called. My sister generously labelled some of the bums with names and initials of some folks whose bums I saw and/or came close to seeing this year. How nice that at the birthday dinner table, my father and his girlfriend got a sense of what I’ve been up to.

Full Moon portrait. Labels on bums removed to protect the innocent.

As it happens, I do not have any tape.

However, I am the very proud owner of scissors. And they made it into Exhibit One of 19. While I was in Delhi, I purchased a large pair of blue scissors for 90 rupees. Since then, I have been cutting my own hair and it is one of the greatest joys of my life. Travelling with scissors means that on airplanes, you no longer qualify for the prestigious Strictly Carry-On luggage status. But let me tell you, it is totally worth it.

Exhibit One of 19 + Scenes from a Haircutting Party, Bangalore

Exhibit One of 19 also features the Juno nominated children’s CD, “(name concealed due to the Dignity of my Somewhat Famous Relatives),” in addition to the intermittent presence of my I-pad mini, whose redness brings together a rewarding motif of primary colours.

Now we are going to skip the purse, shoes and broccoli t. shirt exhibits to get right to Shelf Nine of 19. Purple Combination Lock and Chain. Purple Combination Lock is from back in the days when cardiovascular fitness was still a concern and I used to go to Public Lap Swims. I took the combination lock all the way to India and used it to keep various beach house shacks secure. Somehow I remembered the combination which I wrote down in a cloth covered fushia journal in approximately 2009. The journal now exists in an unknown location. I really really really like purple. Same thing for fuschia, despite its elusive spelling.

 

Chain from Shelf Nine

The Chain from Shelf Nine was given to me by my Friend Franck. Franck is a rather spiritual and unusual fellow. In the winters, he hangs out in Rishikesh, writing, helping with a digeridoo factory and talking to God. In the summer, he builds boats in Montreal. Like a real Boatman, not just an arbitrary name I made up for blogging fairy tale purposes. Oh well. Anyways, when I went to Rishikesh, Franck took me up the mountains on his motorcycle. Everyone is dying to know what happened and so we are both going to write a story called, “No Garlic, No Onions, No Toilet Paper.” Franck’s version and Erica’s version. Franck gave me the chain after the motorcycle trip, for my eighteen-hour train ride to Varanasi. God is a big deal for Franck. He talks about God all the time. Even so, he thinks you should lock up your bags on the train. I wanted to leave my chain in Goa, but my Israeli friend convinced me to keep it, in case I ever want to be tied up.

Me and Franck on our way up the mountains.

Plus Me, In the Mountains
No Garlic, No Onions, No Toilet Paper

Exhibit 16: Books.

The Book of Stuff and Whatnot: I helped a bunch of teenagers put together this anthology of short stories, drawings and poems. Perhaps this in itself counts as a sort of curating. In any case, narrowing down my book collection to contain 50% teenage poetry and creative writing was not a terrible choice.  A few excerpts:

The Struggle:

My heart feels ever so heavy.
I’m about to stumble. I’m feeling unsteady.
I feel like I could forever fall. I just can’t stop hitting this hard, brick wall.
My head spins.
And I feel like I’m not going to win.

The Hardest Part:

Even though my mind knows it, my heart refuses to accept the truth.
That you are gone from me.
Forever...

Curiosity Killed the Cat (A Sonnnet)

They say curiosity killed the cat.
Now and then, notice where your head is at. 

The Book of Stuff and Whatnot + a book about Ashtanga Yoga and Having Babies

Yoga Sadhana for Mothers: Shared experiences of Ashtanga Yoga, pregnancy, birth & motherhood: For someone who has no desire to bear her own child or be a mother and/or practice Ashtanga Yoga, I read this book incredibly quickly. I think I am going to pass it on to my Pregnant Friend, who is no longer pregnant, but who has remained my Pregnant Friend in my psyche. Maybe you have friends like that.

 Hazy Indian Currency/Condom/Bandaid/Broken Rock Mini Museum

Indian Currency/Condom/Bandaid/Broken Rock Mini Museum: Here we have the leftover Indian currency, the leftover Canadian condoms I took to India – there were more than two, but I gave some to friends, and selected these specially for my exhibit – and the broken brown rock that my friend Naomi gave me to heal my painful gushing periods. And bandaids. I smashed the menstrual rock in my seven-dollar hotel room in Rishikesh. From that point on, menstruation ceased for over four months.  The blood came back two and a half days after I curated this exhibit, and the morning before I went to visit Franck. Franck takes full responsibility.

Teenage Poetic Interlude:

The Serenity of a Journal Entry:
As you can see, I adore poetry.
Reading and writing are skills I carry.

(End of Interlude.)

May we all carry these skills all the time.

Some of my clothing made it onto the shelf, including a somewhat fuschia and multi-coloured dress I bought in Goa for 500 rupees, the Threesome Tights, and a fancy frilly shirt my mother game me.

Threesome Tights on Legs, with Birkenstocks

Other exciting exhibits feature Tarot Cards, the Fanny Pack Museum, Generic Spiritual Objects A, B and Others, Burgundy Doc Martens and A Letter from Cambodia. The Erica Museum will be on display for the month of April. That is to say, it is a limited edition. Also, I will need a new apartment come May. And/or another country to live in.

To learn the Secret and Exciting Location of the Erica Museum, please get in touch. Curating/Curation Workshops are also available. The fees are not exorbitant.  But if you’re super short on cash, in lieu of money, I could sort of use a decent sized book for balancing on my head during meditation. I gave, Not That Kind of Girl to some rickshaw drivers in Agra.

Not That Kind of Girl, passed on to young rickshaw drivers in Agra

 

Not That Kind of Girl, on my head

And it seems the teen poets are winning the day.

At the end of The Book of Stuff and Whatnot, they generously wrote me a bio. Whoever taught them how to write bios was an okay teacher. I am pretty happy with this:

Erica Schmidt (Coordinator)

A woman of character and just a touch of both serious and childish nature. An altogether fearless mentor to the writing club, she is fearless in her writing, as well as in real life.

Book: The Book of Stuff and Whatnot

Genre: Murder, Mystery and Imagination

The End.

See you at the museum!

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2-3 Dollar Self-Help Book: I Let Go


Not That Kind of Girl, The Blogpost
Business Ideas, On a Tuesday
Mother's Bunion

God Box

Happy

“2-9 it is today. Somebody’s birthday. I don’t know them.”

Jadwiga used to announce this every morning at breakfast as she stirred milk into her coffee in the mug with the cat on it.

“B-b-b bir-day, shanana nana. Cococococa.” Cococococa was Marc's name for me. Whether or not it was my birthday, Marc liked to chant B-b-b bir-day, shanana nana. Cococococa this all day long. On the toilet, while he was shaving, and while he was slicing his breakfast banana. Birthdays were a big deal at my L’Arche house where I lived with five adults with intellectual disabilities. Weeks ahead of time, Nathalie, our head of house, would make sure the L’Arche workshop was preparing a beautiful homemade card for you, along with a Happy Birthday banner. You got to invite your favourite people, request your favourite meal and pick the kind of cake you wanted. My favourite food is Indian, and from her years living with Muslim families in Madagascar, Nathalie knew how to make it from scratch. Homemade samosas, papads, chana masala. Eight, nine years later, I can still remember how delicious it was.

Before cake, it was L’Arche tradition to have a birthday prayer. If you weren’t into Christianity, then they wouldn’t read anything from the Bible. But at the time, I was trying to get a thing going on with Jesus and I didn’t mind. For my twentieth birthday, Nathalie picked a verse from the Beatitudes, in the Gospel of Matthew. The line went, “Blessed be the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”  Since my twentieth birthday, I have definitely drowned myself in cynicism, negativity and self-deprecation for days, weeks or months on end. During such periods, it is nice to remember that somebody once looked at me and decided I had a pure heart, and that I would see God.

After the bible verse which was short and sweet, Madeleine read a poem that Judith, one of our assistants had helped her write. Madeleine came to L’Arche when she was in her early fifties. Coming to L’Arche, she had all these big dreams. She wanted to learn to read and write, and maybe get a boyfriend and learn to take the bus by herself. Whenever we went to church, she would hold the hymn book open and concentrate so intently on the words, dying to be able to understand. It took her a long time to accept that not all her dreams would come true. Still, she wrote really wonderful poems.

Madeleine’s poem began with, “A twentieth birthday is a special day, and you are a very special person.” I will keep it forever. Another L’Arche tradition during birthday prayers was to pass a candle around the table. When it was your turn with the candle, you gave thanks for the things you loved about the person. Some people gave thanks to God, and some people just gave thanks. It all sounds so cheesy and yet, it ended up being pretty perfect.

Madeleine always gave a big speech that was similar to her poems. And thank you, Erica for taking us to the library. And thank you, Erica for that time we walked all the way from… Usually we had to tap her on the shoulder to get her to wrap it up.

Jimmy, a new L’Arche member liked to make speeches too. He was obsessed with Power Rangers, and with me as well. At every birthday, he made fun of me about the time I was having dinner at another L’Arche home and I stuck my hair in my mouth. “Remember, I asked you if you wanted ketchup? I have to tell your mother about that.”

“B-b-birday, cocococoCA, shanana-na-na,” Marc would say a few times. Then he would take my hand and whisper, “Cococococa,” one more time.

Isabelle loved Jesus and prayers. She was the same age as me. Born with cerebral palsy, Isabelle doesn’t move or talk that much, though she laughs and smiles a great deal and says yes and no with her eyes. At my birthday, Nathalie held the candle in front of her face and she broke into hysterics. Over and over again, her eyes looked up.

No matter whose birthday it was, Jadwiga said just about  the same thing. "Awe, what should I say? Same as Madeleine. Happy birthday. Keep up the good health. Keep up the good work in L'Arche."

 

These days, it seems like some of the cool people don’t like birthdays. People are too cool for such frivolous celebration. Oh well. Too bad for them. I’m still alive and I’m happy.

 

When it was a child’s birthday at Montessori school, we put a brass sun in the middle of the Circle time floor. Polishing brass is one of the Montessori activities. The children polished the sun with diluted all natural licorice -flavoured toothpaste.  Sometimes this made the sun shiny and other times the sun became encaked with greenish chunks. In any case, the child with the birthday took the painted globe and carried it around the sun.

“Isaac is one year old,” we’d say when he completed the circle.

“Isaac is two years old.” The child would walk around the circle as many times as the earth had rotated around the sun with him on it.

“Isaac is five years old." Then we would sing happy birthday in as many languages as we knew. English French, and Spanish.

More than once, I teared up as I watched a child walk around the sun. What a surprise.

In Halifax, I picked up on a tradition of doing the same number of sun salutations as the age you are turning. Some people also do this many backbends. I tried this tradition for a couple of years and it was fun. Here in Mysore, you can hardly expect the crowds to wait for you as you whip off your age in sun salutations and backbends. But although there is no official birthday tradition, Mysore is just one big birthday party anyways.  In most cases, I would advise you that not everyone is as happy as they appear on the Internet. And yet, here I am, and my face and the insides match.



Fake Rebellious Yoga Selfie I

The joy is real.



Fake Rebellious Yoga Selfie II
Some of the joy must be attributed to the Fanny Pack.
Also to the Spiritual Pants.
 

And to my dear friends
Got this from the Boatman this morning. It's our friend the moon.
The Boatman is going to be the moon for Halloween.





Wish you were here, Babe.
Otherwise I am the luckiest girl on Earth.

Follow the Boatman on TUMBLR: verysatisfied.tumblr.com

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I Let Go, self-help book by Erica J. Schmidt 

 

Holy Thursday.

Some yogis write about the way stars align.
Maybe I can do that tomorrow.
But today I am writing about what Jesus might have done over 2000 years ago.
And now all the Catholics are doing it.
Washing each other's feet.

I am not Catholic, I am vegetarian.

However, once upon a time I went to Catholic mass twice a week.
It was part of my job, but maybe deep down I wanted to be Catholic too.
This desire didn't work out. 
I didn't make a collage about it, and so the dream didn't come true.

The first time I was at a foot washing service,

I was astounded
and thought there was some mistake. 
Apparently, the disciples were also astounded.
They say that's what Jesus was going for.  The big shock.  Shock and awe. He was adamant.
And he had good bandhas.

There are many impressive stories about Jesus.

Water to wine,
Eyes for the blind,
Curing the leper.  (Pattabhi Jois did that too!)
But maybe the most important thing Jesus ever showed us was to stay low to the ground.
And not for you, for someone else.
Stay low to the ground,
And you can be a little like God.

The End.

Notes from 2016:

I don’t remember being so vocal about God back then.

 I don’t remember a moment when I suddenly felt less convinced about God.
And ended up talking about God less.
How do I feel about God now? I’m not sure.
Probably I still agree with staying low to the ground for someone else.

Exuberant Bodhisattva on Facebook

Twitter: @mypelvicfloor 
I Let Go 

 

The Earth Will Shake Us Off Like Fleas

Exalted 

My Life's Purpose

Not Separate From All That Is