To My "Frends" at Timber Ridge

I sit and talk you through a visualization. You 13. I arrived with 13 brand new composition books and threw in 2 or 3 recycled ones for good measure, but I see now that you are the 13 who were always going to be sitting here, listening to my words and generating your own.

Gratitude rises like a wave dragging its belly across coral reef, so that it pitches skyward and gives the sensation of pleasure--I skitter across the face of the wave. I smile, though there is always the seed of fear, always the knowledge that not every gift is received with love. I give it anyway.

In your varying degrees of interest and investment, you listen. You close your eyes. You meditate. Write. I am awed by your willingness. Your positive orientation toward every new thing. This openness, this trust, is what encourages me to keep tending the soil, keep caring for this group so committed to caring for this thing--this vibrant, growing, pulsing, alive thing that has the potential to heal the planet.

When you share your writings, I am humbled. By your guilelessness and your frankness, by the beauty of your stories and impressions, but mostly by the way you express your love. By the way you trust this group. You send the gift back to me a thousandfold, and I am blessed. Thank you, Frends. Mahalo nui.

See you at the Gathering...

Birth of a "Frendly" Movement

I sit down at a tall table near the back of the Red Fox Inn and Tavern with Jack Mitrani, pro-snowboarder and entrepreneur extraordinaire.  These are Jack’s stomping grounds and just getting to our table takes a fair amount of time, as everyone wants to greet him, talk to him, hear of his latest adventures. As always, Jack takes the time to attend to each of them, equally happy to share in a moment of connection.  I find quickly that this is why we are meeting today. Connection.

It is written in Jack’s earnest expression, in his exuberance as the topic opens up in our conversation, as he opens his laptop and we begin perusing the schedule for his upcoming Frendly Gathering. Jack is all about it: connection. The Frendly Gathering is in its third year. A three-day festival of people connecting with one another…through music, hiking, yoga, food and fun. The thing is evolving before my eyes, and Jack’s grow wider and more alive as we discuss how he can cultivate what is already blooming through this visionary event. It is an event that seems to be spilling out into a Movement of sorts. I find that this was always the intention.

Jack opens a document on his computer screen. It is the Frendly Manifesto, a four-page statement containing the ten core values of the Movement, the biographies of the four individuals who have dreamed this thing into being, and an articulation of their vision. Their vision is simple but ambitious: draw people together in love and “frendship” and promote human connection globally. Jack’s cohorts are equally impressive:  pro snowboarders Danny Davis, Kevin Pearce and his own brother, Luke Mitrani. They are the “Frends” who started the headphone company that has become a wild corporate success but more importantly, together these young men have formed a union that involves a contagious kind of camaraderie. “There’s no ‘I’ in Frends” is their motto propounding selflessness and inclusivity.  Looking at Jack’s computer screen, I notice that these words are an integral part of the articulation of the Frendly value system.

And then there’s Jack. Somehow, this twenty-four year old rock-star athlete and public personality sees a bigger picture…and his place in it. We begin to talk about this connection and its role in the Frendly Movement—people talking with one another; sharing through language, sound, revelry; people truly listening to one another, to their words and their music, and connecting in a meaningful way. We talk about what often hinders this kind of connection: judgment, exclusivity, fear. These obstacles can be diminished, we agree, through uniting people in mindfulness and friendship, and this is what the Movement is all about.

Yes, he nods and laughs, because we are connecting through our shared desire to foster this kind of experience in the world. We talk about technology and social media as the tools that can enable this kind of connection but which are often mistaken for the connections themselves. No, we agree, people connect face to face. In real time. In real places. They laugh together; they touch, whether that’s a handshake or a hug; and if the music is playing, they dance. Enter the band lineup. Wow.  From the electronic menagerie of Paper Diamond and Conspirator to the folksy hometown heroes of Twiddle and Gold Town, to the amazing Kat Wright and her Indomitable Soul Band, the artists who will be performing at this event run the gamut.

Jack and the boys have put together a music lineup that has something for everyone. Using multiple stages and rotating the crowd from hour to hour, the Frends crew have choreographed the revelry of the many “frends” who will gather that weekend to connect over the course of three days and nights. As one band finishes on the main stage, the people cheer and gather their blankets and coolers to move to the woods stage. There is happy chatter and a palpable buzz of fun and camaraderie as they make their way to the next venue. And of course there is the DJ Nest perched high in a tree and sending moving lights along the wooded dance floor into the wee hours. It really is visionary.

I point out that Jack and his Frends are in a unique position to truly have an impact on the world—their generation in particular, but certainly their scope of influence does not end there. Jack is already nodding his assent; he seems to know intuitively the responsibility and yes, the opportunity that is inherent in being in this position. Perhaps the most endearing quality in Jack is his humility, also a Frendly value, and combined with his charisma, there is no limit to what he and his cohorts can do. 

People listen to these guys. They watch their hilarious antics on Frends Vision, they watch them competing or hear them announcing at elite pro-snowboarding events, they follow Frends on every manner of social media, and when Jack and Danny put out a Tweet that “some of us are meeting up for a game of kickball in Burlington,” they show up to play!

The result of our meeting is an agreement, and I know without asking that this is the business Jack is in right now…going around and making agreements with one and all who share in this vision. Making agreements to cultivate this fabulous garden of “Frendship” that is already growing. Agreements to tend that garden lovingly, whether it is by offering time, energy, resources or talent. They are agreements to hold sacred space for the Frendly Movement, which already has a foothold here in Southern Vermont. It was born in the gorgeous green hills of Timber Ridge, and its stewardship is led by four extraordinary individuals.  I’m in, I say, and I, like so many others who share those values with Jack and “Frends” will be there…at the Gathering and for the long haul, because this is where the healing of the planet and its people begins: human connection. 

Almost 42...and Magnificent

“And at once I knew…I was not magnificent.” This is the line of the Bon Iver song that played in my head again and again as I moved through 2012. It was something to do with turning 41 and looking about, forlorn that I had not become, achieved, bloomed in ways I always thought I would by then.

I recognized it as the unique privilege of my kind—upper middle class American—to be discontent with my present circumstances, though there was nothing inherently imperfect about them. I recognized it as a variety of ingratitude, beautiful as my family was and healthy, happy, thriving. But I didn’t have the discipline to resist it. It was a longing for—not youth, but perhaps the orientation I had then: everything ahead of me, every door open, life inviting me to bloom into all the ways one can be. 

After a few months of this melancholy (which waxed and waned, of course, with the little joys I was still privy to), there was a choice to be made. I could either indulge this fairly contrived (albeit palpably felt) sadness, or I could turn my face to the sun, flower that I was. I could drink in its light and keep processing, transforming it into my own perfect energy, letting it grow me into the thing that I must certainly still be in the process of becoming.

41 or not, I was still growing, still learning, still blossoming. Healthy, whole, surrounded by love and family, I knew myself as more than magnificent even now, midway somehow to something I could not fathom. I knew myself as perfect and dazzling in that divine light and separated from the magnificence of the rest of humanity only by the thin membrane of imagined separateness. And so I dissolved it. In my mind’s eye I dissolved that fine veil that was always of my own creation, and I let myself merge into the current of all life. All beings. All earth. All language.

It was the way I saved myself. The way I extended every deadline I had ever imposed on myself. The way I learned to glisten again. It was not magic. Not anything special, really. Just a shift. In my belief about myself and the world I inhabit. In retrospect, it sounds so easy. It was not. And yet, it was possible. It took time, and it took a conscious effort, and I did it.

I still hear the song occasionally, and auditory memory makes my heart ache in the familiar way, but only for a moment, and then it passes. It goes the way of the self-doubt and disappointment I let go of. I’m nearly 42 now, and the sense of possibility is very much alive in me. My own children grow and change before my eyes, my marriage settles in to the stretch of twenty years and the sense of home that was always so elusive to me before, and I—I become quite fearless.

It’s not that I fear nothing. Those haunting fears of loss will always exist, as they must for every one who loves. But I move in a way that defies them. Refusing to let my lesser fears define me, I no longer wonder about my own worth in the face of the passage of time. I am, as I have told so many students they were over the years, perfect. Not in my words or my deeds, try as I might, but in my intention. And that is the magnificent. 

Tonglen of a Jewish Mother...Again and Again, Tonglen.

"But the man who had found could approve of every single teaching, every way, every goal; nothing separated him any longer from all the thousand others who lived in the eternal, who breathed the divine."~Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha

I always return to Michelangelo's Pieta. So exquisite in its falling grace, the near collapse of beauty into grief...but it holds. Just. Sustained by the perfection of intent. By the acknowledgment of ancient surrender manifest in the present moment...where all the things they ever agreed to culminate in this: the death of the body. Gratitude for thirty-three years together in flesh and bone--mother and son walking the earth and whole. Whole.

Her left hand falls open--languishing gesture of receiving even this: what aches, what saves. Her child, her love, draped across her own body like a pale garment. Her head is bowed just slightly, eyelids flagging--half mast in her languor. Oh. It aches. It drains. It is what she said yes to. And she would say yes again and again for the time that she had, the time that he belonged to her and to this earth.

Baby boy grown into this: gentlest of men, compassionate lamb. Her eyes scan his body, pause at the light beard, the girth of the ribcage, line of hair below the navel. When? When did he become this? When did he shift from the infant gumming a crust of bread to man, generous with his whole life and willing, willing to give it away. To leave this fragile shell to fall away from her like a veil unraveling.

Her right hand, the giving hand, still clasps his body beneath his arm, striving toward the heart, but her own heart spills open there beneath her gathering garments. Even now, she knows to breathe her grief and to send away from her not bitterness but love. Exhalation of gratitude and light. Tonglen of a Jewish mother. Again and again, tonglen.

Unwittingly...Tonglen.

Tonglen. I learn that this is the practice in which I have been engaged for some time now. Without even knowing what it was or that it had a protocol and a name, I have been involved in the Buddhist practice of tonglen. Pema Chodron, the American Buddhist nun and writer, defines it simply: "when anything is painful or undesirable, breathe it in." But why? Why would we lean in to suffering, sadness, pain?

Though I didn't let it derail me, I have over the years wondered about the source of my interest in exploring volunteering with Hospice, reaching out to people I know have experienced tremendous loss,  teaching yoga to cancer patients, or even writing a book like Inertia. I knew it was possible to interpret these interests as morbid or even masochistic, but they felt too right to judge in this way, so I have pursued them...allowed myself to lean in to "what aches, what saves."

Funny, that little quote is from a poem I wrote almost ten years ago--before I began this unwitting tonglen practice. In a time when I was fervently resisting pain and sadness, protecting and shielding the soft spot of my boddhichitta, or tender heart, which had in recent years become fearful and incredibly vulnerable through having become the mother of two beautiful boys. Even then, I seemed to have a sense of the parallelism between "what aches" in the heart and "what saves" us in this lifetime. I knew intuitively, without even processing it cognitively, that these two things were one and the same. It was evidenced in my poetry, but I had yet to open myself to what that meant.

"In tonglen," Pema Chodron says, "we become willing to begin to expose this most tender part of ourselves" and doing so "tells us that there are people all over the world who are feeling exactly what [we're] feeling...the story lines vary, but the underlying feeling is the same for us all." In tonglen, one breathes in what is dark, painful and full of sorrow, and one breathes out, literally sends out in an ever-widening circle, that which is light, joyful and full of hope. "If you can know it in yourself, you can know it in everyone" and in this way tonglen is a practice that awakens our sense of kinship with all beings. It widens our circle of compassion while at the same time helping us to cultivate fearlessness.

It's a beautiful practice. We lean in to what hurts us: anger, disappointment, self-loathing, jealousy...we breathe it in, absorb it through our pores, and "use [this] poison as an opportunity to feel our heart, to feel the wound, and to connect with others who suffer in the same way." Yes. And we send into the world, with our breath, everything that is light and divine and full of happiness. These things are infinite by their nature. Radiating them like this in no way depletes our own abundance of light; instead that light is perpetuated and strengthened through this practice of sharing and extending the wish to help.

Tonglen. What beauty in its purpose. To cultivate fearlessness, to connect ourselves profoundly with all other beings. To know our own sorrow, acknowledge it and name it and sit with it, rather than acting out or repressing it. In practicing this, "we gradually begin to realize how profound it is just to let [that sorrow] go, not rejecting [it], not repressing [it]. We discover how to hold our seat and feel completely what's underneath all that hopelessness and despair...We find that there's something extremely soft, what is called boddhichitta. If we can relate directly with that, then all the rest is our wealth."

I sit with this idea of tonglen. I meditate on how it moves in my own heart and know it as the perfect expression of compassion. Empathy. It helps me to understand these 'interests' of mine and inspires me to follow them where they may lead. I am indeed practicing tonglen. It makes me brave. It lights my way.



**Thank you to Pema Chodron whose book Comfortable With Uncertainty my son Taiaroa chose for my Christmas stocking this year and from the pages of which all quotes in this post (with the exception of "what aches, what saves") are drawn. And thank you, Taiaroa, for such a wise choice. Namaste, my love.

Retreat...ruminations and invitations

The retreat blooms out of the braiding of my myriad interests, my love, my experience. My desire to share what I am learning and what makes me whole. A teacher of one kind or another for so many years, it is my way--I gravitate toward sharing, guiding, lifting each beautiful lesson into the light.

I have learned a little about softening into the thing that hurts the most, the thing that makes me most fearful. I begin to open to my own knowing and to my own ability to heal, both emotionally and physically. I learn how to move my body, breathe, create space so that there is harmony inside and there is nothing to detract from my healing.

I learn, too, that "writing is a form of prayer" and that each word I send into the world is perfect in its imperfection, like a little boat carrying my intention across a vast sea. Each one of them lovely and unique, representative of what breathes me, what lives and grows inside. I learn that it is healing to tell my story and also to be still. Attend to body and mind in that stillness. Breathe.

I learn to cultivate my creativity, because what grows will also wither and die if not nurtured. I learn that there is something to learn from every person I encounter, no matter who they are, and if I do not recognize that thing, the failure is my own. I learn that I must "let go" of things sometimes, but also that I must "let come" what wants to arrive to me, must not harden myself against it by clinging to the form I expected it to take.

So many sweet little lessons still blossoming like a million wildflowers on a green hill. What better thing could I do than call other, like-minded individuals together to share in that beauty? To explore and to face fear and to attend, gently, gently, to the body and mind...together. And all of that in such a sacred space as Cold Moon Farm in Jamaica, Vermont.

I invite you to consider how things might align, fall softly into place, for you to get away for four days to participate in the Creative Awakening Retreat at the Cold Moon Farm. We'll be doing yoga, breathing, eating delicious, locally grown and produced foods, writing and sharing. It will be a time for looking within and also of letting the petals of our creativity fall gently open. Lotus Wheel is the name of my new venture. It is fitting. You are invited.

http://www.coldmoonfarm.com/special-events-at-cmf.html

To My Students...Past, Present and Future

This is my hope for you, dear ones. That you live creatively, happily. That each moment constitutes a present worth remembering. That you find what makes your heart beat most wildly and dedicate your life to doing that thing. It is so much easier said than done--so much interferes with the perfect intention to live in a mindful, meaningful way and feed the soul--may you find your way clear of what muddies those beautiful, lucid waters, and may you know those things worth doing, worth pursuing, when you see them. May your choices allow you to grow into the best versions of your luminous selves, and may you experience, above all, profound love.