Mother Ship, Mother Earth, Mother Road

February – a month that starts with what I believe to be one of the most under-rated holidays, February 2nd or Groundhog Day, a day where we actually fiend to listen to nature’s guidance, and ends with my birthday (except for this year, of course, where we recognize that the calendar needs to level out and we patiently wait one extra day for Spring, made easier this year by our favorite rodent’s promise that it is coming early). For me, February is always a very strange month. Usually by now, it’s clear to see that any changes I was hoping to initiate or focus on in the new year by setting an intention or by listing out my goals on a fresh piece of paper and multiple calendars (digital and hard copy) after (of course) thoroughly reflecting on my previous year, I can clearly see that the middle of Winter is not a natural time to see the fruits of any life-shifting change I might be hoping to implement. Last year, I started at the end of yoga’s niyamas and set the intention to Surrender (Isvarapranidhana) – to let go of trying to control everything. To enjoy life as it happened. This year, I was thinking about Tapas, or discipline. Discipline in the way of responsibility, deep knowing, and self-care, not so much discipline as punishment. But, by February, all that has really happened over the course of January is that the distraction of the holidays is gone, and we are left to the stillness that is the quintessential nature of the Winter season. This can, in fact, feel like an actual crisis.

By the time my season rolls around at the end of February, the full realization of what’s left when we find ourselves in a time of stillness has fully set in. A vacation is desperately needed to distract ourselves from turning within. If we see another day of clouds, wake up in the dark, drive to work in the dark, come home in the dark ONE MORE TIME, we will die. Or at the very least, cry. Despair, desolation, anger, frustration, irritation. The official mood pallet of February, especially in the North Country. This piece is titled, “Mother Ship, Mother Earth, Mother Road,” but February is a real Mother Fucker. They say March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb- well February is when we feed the lion. If you follow the zodiac, you may have heard Pisces referred to as a culmination and combination of all of the signs, as it is the last sign in the astrological year. A time for feeling, for wisdom (for the intuition of Punxsutawney Phil). 

I always thought that I had such a hard time this time of year because I was assaulted on my 18th birthday. I’m sure that didn’t help, but I am really starting to notice that I am not the only one caught up in their feelings this time of year. As a yoga teacher, the most interesting part of a class to me is Savasana. It’s the final asana (posture/pose) of class, and is the sanskrit word for “corpse.” It is the time we intentionally take rest, to feel and allow the integration of our physical practice with our breath, our minds, and our bodies. As a teacher, I do not participate by laying down on my mat for the five to seven minutes at the end of class but stay quietly seated, holding space for the class to hopefully feel safe and comfortable to take rest. I watch guard, and mostly make sure that they are gently woken up to go on with their day at the appropriate time, which hopefully also helps people relax if they have somewhere they need to be at the end of class. Even with a consistent yoga and meditation practice, I can confirm that there are plenty of times when I am also in Savasana, one-hundred percent not relaxed. I may lay perfectly still (because: Pride and a tiny bit not wanting to disturb anyone else), but I have traveled (mentally) to the grocery store, am planning my meal, thinking about this annoying thing from earlier, wanting to take my bra off, etc. 

When I sit through Savasana as an instructor (or sit in a meditation), I notice that some of us can’t help but move (including me). Some students check their apple watches, scratch their noses, or fully give up and sit up on their mat in a way that does entirely appear impatient if I’m being honest. Sitting with ourselves, with our thoughts, can feel like actual torture. I want you to know that even the most experienced yogi will have times where they watch their mind go absolutely off the rails. To have thoughts is to be conscious and to ultimately be human. When we meditate we aren’t trying to stop the thoughts or control the thoughts. We are observing the thoughts. We are not judging the thoughts. We do not need to become attached to the thoughts. We are not our thoughts, we are our actions (maybe), and we practice and learn that we do not have to take action on every thought that crosses our mind. That is the purpose of practicing yoga and of practicing meditation. If Americans sat with their thoughts and processed their emotions as much as they processed their food, this would be a very different country. But alas, this concept somehow seems new-ish and unheard of or undesirable for many folks. 

Honestly, I get it. It deeply, deeply sucks. It’s not a good time. Looking at ourselves instead of being distracted by the outside world is much harder (Hey, remember the lockdown when we all got to watch politics/the news 24/7 from the confines of our homes and bitch about the administration and felt absolutely trash but probably didn’t ever do a gut check to say to ourselves, hey, maybe what I’m actually pretty upset about is also the person I’m spending 100% of my time with? Yeah.). I have grown up with the absolute NEED to be perfect. Not, like, perfect perfect, because only an imperfect person would desire or expect that true perfection was possible and therefore that would also make me arrogant which would be decidedly not perfect, but the kind of perfect that is just absolutely very very close to doing everything right all the time and the little bits of un-perfectness are kind of more of charming quirks or little vices, not anything that really needs to change because of course I know what I should be doing and what is expected of me, but because I am human I will naturally make mistakes. Even Jesus lost his temper and flipped a table once, am I right? You guys, when I was in elementary school, I actually, genuinely worried that I could experience an immaculate conception. If it happened once, it could happen again, and Mary wasn’t perfect perfect, either.

We’ve been joking a lot in my 300 hour yoga teacher training that we are “Club Zero” and “complete idiots” because we are learning more on yoga philosophy and the seven stages of awareness. How do you know when you are enlightened? Stage seven is complete awareness, you have nothing more to learn and zero is “moorak” - complete idiot, you know absolutely nothing. Stage 0.1 is knowing the difference between what is real and what is not. What is real is unchanging. Though matter is permanent, its form is always changing. Because of this, nothing in our physical world is real. See? Complete idiot. 

At first I found this a little discouraging. Okay, a lot discouraging. Learning about the naked monks and giving up all my attachments, all my possessions, doing zero acts of violence. It’s never going to happen. I am never going to be enlightened (read: Perfect). Devastating. The thing is, Club Zero really is a club, and absolutely all of us are in it. We are all complete idiots, we are all sometimes inwardly (or outwardly) going stir-crazy with our own form of cabin fever at times. The cabin is us, though. The cabin is this existence. It is wanting things so badly and living with the fear of not getting it in the end. It is working your whole life toward this thing that is supposed to make you happy, and getting it and feeling nothing different. It is doing what you didn’t actually want in the first place, and failing at it anyway. 

One of my favorite lectures by Alan Watts is about death. A perfect topic for Winter. We are completely surrounded by death (the Dead of Winter, the Dead of Night). It starts out with a story about an astronaut that went out to space and when he returns someone asks if he saw God out in the cosmos. He says, “Yes. She is black.” Watts goes on to make this comparison to the blackness, the perceived emptiness of space as God the Mother, opposite of the luminous, light bringer, God the Father of Christianity. He likens God the Mother to Kali, the Hindu goddess. She is everything terrifying. She is all the bad, scary things we compare our situations to in order for us to gauge that we are, in fact, doing pretty alright. In this way, the dark, bleak, terrifying emptiness of space, of Kali, of God the Mother, is actually quite helpful because it lets us have this perspective to know how good we have it based on how bad it could be.

He goes on to discuss this further, the feminine being the “negative principle.” The “instanding” to the outstanding, the sub-stance (what stands underneath), the underlying. The blank page on which anything drawn or written is required for you to be able to observe or read the thing that has been written on it. That because it is negative, or underlying, or supportive, there is some connotation that this means less-than. But, he argues, without the black of empty space, of night, there would be no possibility of seeing the stars. Space is not nothingness, it is fundamental to everything that is present. The feminine as the vessel – the womb, and outer space is the void that all life and everything in existence comes out of.

So not only is God black, and a woman, she is death (Kali is often represented holding a weapon in one hand and a severed head in the other). We really don’t want to or like to think about death and we avoid it and dismiss it most of the time. Winter is a time to contemplate and face death. Corpse pose (Savasana) is literally practicing for death. Heaven and hell don’t sound all that appealing and it’s pretty freaky to imagine that when we die, nothing happens. What’s the point of all this if nothing happens in the end? What if there’s no score at the end? What if we know we got away with absolute MURDER in this life and we are sure we are going to the Bad Place. What if we go back to exactly where we came from? Do you remember what it was like before you were born? That is what death will be like. It will be like nothing. It will be like the no-thing of space. He explains that this is the symbolism of “She is black.” That this womb principle is “coming into the presence of God who has no image.” It can seem like atheism but is not really like how we think of the term but actually a profoundly religious attitude because it is giving up these images of God that we grasp and become attached to. That to not grasp is what it actually means to have an attitude of faith.

I am truly not a religious person, but I do highly recommend giving this lecture by Watts a full listen because it is excellent. He also makes a lovely comparison to how just as apples come out of an apple tree (the tree “apples”), so do people come out of Earth (the Earth “peoples”) in another lecture. I find this delightful.

“We do not "come into" this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean "waves," the universe "peoples." Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” 

― Alan Wilson Watts

Just like everything that grows comes from the decay and destruction of previous seasons, our surrender, our contemplation of death, our turning inward and finding stillness is our fertilizers. This time of year I am usually dreaming of seeds I want to buy, gardens I want to plant, projects I want to do as soon as the weather turns. This Winter, I am really thinking a lot about how I need both surrender and discipline. This Winter, I am deep in contemplation about what it means to be a mother because I am in the process of becoming a mother to another human soul. I call it my Stardust, my Alien. Pregnancy is SUPER WEIRD. It’s not the immaculate conception but I find myself thinking “what the…” in about the same way I did when I was a kid trying to wrap my mind around that concept and the whole “miracle of life” cliche is a cliche for a reason (even if someone referring to it as that while you feel like a porpoise is top ten most annoying things in the world). I am finding something oddly comforting about returning to “She is black” and “the Earth ‘peoples’' as I think about being responsible for shepherding a new soul into existence. Like the culmination of the zodiac in my season, transitioning into this new season of life feels like cacophony, like chaos. Maybe that’s why the stillness of Winter is appealing to me, maybe that’s why thinking of everything coming out of this Earth Mother and not so much about the self-importance of life coming out of me feels more palatable. Like I am the Mother Ship to this Alien, I am not the vastness of God and Space that living things actually come out of. 

I had my tarot cards read for the new year, as one does, and the advice that I took home with me was this. She said, “you know how sometimes you think you’re not sure about something, like you should ask for other people’s opinions? Ya, you’re done with that. That’s not happening anymore. You aren't doing ‘maybe’s’ anymore.”  Ironically, having someone give me that permission, permission to not doubt myself anymore, was what I needed to hear. I’m not doing ‘maybe’ anymore and I’m not doing perfection anymore, either. I have thought so much about how grateful I am for the all of the various ways I find employment and spend my time right now, how I am happy to be back in academia a little bit, how I am happy to be cultivating this farm, how I am happy to be teaching yoga, to be doing creative things that I enjoy, like writing. I sometimes think that maybe it is irresponsible to be “under-employed” when we are going to have a child and then I remind myself of what I actually think is important to provide for them. A very wise friend shared this passage with me:

“Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore you must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if you feel you should not follow it, you must not stay with it under any conditions. To have such clarity you must lead a disciplined life. Only then will you know that any path is only a path and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you to do. But your decision to keep on the path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. I warn you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary.

This question is one that only a very old man asks. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere. They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long long paths, but I am not anywhere. Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good; if it doesn't, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere; but one has a heart, the other doesn't. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you.

Before you embark on any path ask the question: Does this path have a heart? If the answer is no, you will know it, and then you must choose another path. The trouble is nobody asks the question; and when a man finally realizes that he has taken a path without a heart, the path is ready to kill him. At that point very few men can stop to deliberate, and leave the path. A path without a heart is never enjoyable. You have to work hard even to take it. On the other hand, a path with heart is easy; it does not make you work at liking it.” 

― Carlos Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge

All paths lead nowhere. All paths lead nowhere. All paths lead nowhere. I am a pretty big Grace Potter fan and her newest album, “Mother Road” has been resonating with me so much. It seems like every album she has put out has somehow miraculously felt like it was written as a commentary to whatever I had going on in my personal life at that time. I love all the oldie-but-goodie classic rock artists (I grew up with Queen, The Doors, The Who, The Band, Blondie, David Bowie, Joan Jett, Janis Joplin… I even dressed up as Tina Turner for Halloween because I loved her so much). I cannot imagine what it was like to grow up alongside those artists and having those albums come out as you were all experiencing your lives together. I like almost every genre of music because there feels like a time and place for all of it, but Rock and Roll really feels like a celebration of belonging to Club Zero. Maybe the groupies and drug references aren’t relatable, but the attitude certainly is. The acceptance that we are all a “quivering mess”, Club Zero, that self improvement is essentially impossible (at least on a deeper level) and that the whole point is that we live in the moment and keep trying, anyway. When you hear the music, you dance. When you are angry, you scream. “Mother Road” is about the path being the whole point of the thing. Not what the path is or where the path is going but that the path, with heart and whatever it is, is the point.

I’m teaching two fun, Friday night, “Rock and Roll” vinyasa classes this month. I think a lot, and I think a lot about honoring the practice of yoga (as an American, it’s not inherently “ours”), and I think some people would have a strong opinion about practicing yoga to some very loud Rock and Roll music, complete with drug references and cuss words. I think it’s also important to a lot of sincere practitioners of yoga that yoga is for everyone. The balance between honoring an ancient and sacred practice and being authentically myself as a yoga teacher is a delicate balance that requires thoughtfulness and intention. To me, the chaotic feelings of February, the surrender and the discipline, Tapas and Isvarapranidhana, are Rock and Roll. I’m honoring me (and probably other people) where we are: which is maybe overwhelmed with feelings, a little tired of the cold and dark, and a little worn down by processing our emotions and sitting with our thoughts in our stillness. It's finding that breath, that space, the pause, the hold in the song, the room in even the smallest moments of silence. Finding that silence and the source of all sound - the sound of source, the sound of outer space. 

Yoga is a practice. We need to ask ourselves, what am I practicing for? I think it’s wonderful to have a space where we can come with community and feel safe and nurtured in the quiet to relax, feel at peace, listen to gentle music (maybe with some nice mantras)  and connect with our breath. I have had so many conversations before and after class about how someone couldn’t focus because a fire truck was going by or someone was talking loudly in the lobby. How they couldn’t rest in Savasana because of the light coming in through the door. The thing is, life has disrespectful people talking in the lobby (sometimes, we are the loud person in the lobby). Life has construction work in the apartment above you. Life is getting cut off in traffic. Life does not slow down so you can realign with your breath and your values. We practice so that we can focus, balance, and breath through all of the mess. We can choose to complain and want the outside world to change to make us more comfortable, or we can choose to see it as a little bit Rock and Roll and maybe do a few mental (or physical) head-bangs, flash someone a “rock-on” gesture at an intersection instead of flipping them the bird, and take a deep breath. We can remember that it's human to be angry, annoyed, disappointed, etc. and that we aren’t any better than whatever is bringing up those feelings in us. Club Zero. Weird and wonderful. We can smile at ourselves and watch the thought pass by as someone asks us during our pregnancy for the one millionth time, “How are you feeeeeeling?” Notice that it makes you feel like a broodmare and that anything interesting about you has now been reduced to your status as a breeding stock. Remind yourself that the Earth peoples and it’s much easier to ask a pregnant person if their boobs hurt than to get into the whole bit about “She is Black.”

Back when I took my first micropaleontology class (almost a whole ramble without a single fossil but, Alas! I can always relate to a fossil), I remember when we finally graduated from picking grains of regular-old beach sand and writing out our names with the individual grains (photo proof attached), to picking samples with loads of fossils. The slide we used to collect them on under the microscope was made of cardboard and had a black background with a grid printed on it, each box in the rows with its own number so you could reference it. I remember finding tiny protoconchs (the babies and first whorls of a snail's life), echinoid spine tips, and all kinds of things I didn’t recognize. My professor told me, “collect everything” (read: appreciate everything). Even if it’s not a foraminifera or whatever microfossil group we were studying for that particular exercise, keep it. Reserve the bottom row of the slide for the “weird and wonderful.”

I still have all of my micropaleo slides and when I look at them, the bottom row is by far my favorite. I don’t know what they are, I don’t know their systematics, their latin names, and they weren’t the point of the exercise. I hope that as you’re living and planning out your life, you keep that empty row at the bottom to admire the weird and wonderful. I hope you are always sincere and that you don’t take life too seriously. That you feel a little Rock and Roll as a member of Club Zero. If you’re around, I hope you join me for some rounds of Dancing Warrior to “Ziggy Stardust” and “Masterpiece.” I hope you come exactly as you are: cosmic, weird and wonderful and on a path with heart: a Mother Road.