meeting the moment [journal-type musings]

Even though I've deepened my yoga practice in the last year, and now practice multiple times weekly, if not daily (yet), I am no expert. Many things about yoga still strike me as odd, obscure, or downright offputting. For instance, the fact that I can't find a yoga shirt that doesn't ride up my mom belly in forward fold; the Sanskrit names for the poses, even the ones I've done thousands of times; and the reference to one side of my body as "masculine," and the other as "feminine."

One yoga pose in particular has always held the same importance for me as the peppermint that restaurants put on the plastic credit card tray. [Who eats that thing?] It's the "holding your hands at your heart, palms touching" one. [No, I don't know what it's called in Sanskrit.] Well, lo and behold, I finally understand it, and funnily enough, my dead cat explained it to me.

She's been coming around a lot lately. Not in a Sixth Sense for cats "I see dead felines" sort of way, but not entirely unlike that, either. I keep getting this impossibly tangible sensation of her hair on my palm.

The only part of her recovered from the coyotes was a tuft of her magnificent rusty-colored fur. I couldn't be counted on to brush it daily, but I took her like clockwork to the vet for a lion cut. I wanted to keep that fur from multiplying in the corners and under the beds. After she was gone, of course, I forbid sweeping the house. I missed the scraps of kitty litter getting stuck to my feet, even as I used to curse them. Eventually, my non-sentimental partner did sweep, did remove her litter box, and her food bag. I felt betrayed.

For a while, when I felt her ghost fur in my hands, I would go get the morbid little tuft in its plastic bag in my sacred box (next to my mother's wedding ring, an empty bottle of her perfume, a wooden spool that belonged to my grandmother, etc. and etc. and etc.) I thought about how I never let my cat sleep with me (she might have woken me!), and how she eventually stopped trying, even when I changed my mind. I thought about all the ways I hide from the present moment, thinking of the future or fearing it. Clinging to the past.

I thought of the whole "power of now" cliche. And it started to make more sense. If my cat's death was going to teach me anything, it would be something to do with this.

A dear friend and I have decided to get a friend tattoo. Since we rejected our partners' suggestion to get their names, but cut in half, like an ink version of the old friendship necklaces, we are left wanting a suitable alternative. In conversation recently, we focused on some central lessons we were both getting out of our yoga class, trying to visualize them. One lesson I'd begun to think of as "meeting the moment."

As we were talking about how this concept could be worked into our tattoo, I started using my hands to explain it. I gave the example of a friend she and I were both in the process of "dumping." No regularly chatty patty, this man. Logorrhea, thy name is... well, his name. He overdetermines the moment with constant verbal streaming. He was abused so severely as a child that he likely will never be able to trust others enough to allow them equal space. Listening requires a high degree of vulnerability. When you listen, you're taking something into you, perhaps even letting it change you thereby. As I was discussing him, I pushed one hand against the other and steamrollered past it.

Then, I talked about how some people hide from the moment, and I withdrew that hand, and held it away from its mate. Then I said, "but this is meeting the moment." I put my hands together, with just the right amount of pressure.

I realized I was doing that throwaway yoga pose! Except it was no throwaway pose! I always wanted to stand in a way that stretched my wrists, or with my arms up so I could work on my tight shoulders. The pose was so passive. Or something. And--hello yoga retard!--so absolutely profound!

Often, when we do this pose in yoga, we're singing a Sanskrit chant that means, in part, "My body is a temple." You've heard that phrase before. So have I. I always thought it meant "Eat well; make good decisions; you only get one body; blah blah blah." But it means something more like, "The body is a sanctuary. It's the interface between the self and the divine." [It's hard for me to use that word, "divine." That's another part of yoga I'm still working on, its discussion of a higher power.] My body is the vehicle through which I experience everything; it's the meeting place. How fully I am living in my body determines whether I meet the moment (or don't).

It's a constant struggle for me, to embrace life's loose ends. I strive to meet the moment, the ways my hands meet, just at that point of perfect surface tension, just at that point of sensual awareness.

Leaving my car the other day, I had this brilliant flash of total acceptance. I saw Titus's toys and aborted art projects strewn about my car, and I started laughing, not upset at having a messy car, but ecstatic to have a healthy son, to have that "detritus of Titus," the little littered proofs of his existence. Recently, I stopped taking Trazadone to facilitate sleep. I still use earplugs, and often have to sleep alone, but I'm making my way to being a former insomniac, to becoming a person who doesn't need to sequester herself.

My dreams have come back. Last night, the dream was the moon through a window, and a 2-D representation of the goddess of Spring. She morphed into a neon green and electric flowing 3-D depiction, one that Android Jones would be proud to call his own. I woke up briefly, feeling blessed by that subconsciously generated art. I didn't freak out, "Oh god, will I ever get back to sleep?!" I enjoyed the residual image, and I let its visual lullaby lead me to Lethe.

If Bast (my cat) had been there, I might have looked down and remembered she was named for the goddess of fertility, and maybe she would have been laying next to my "feminine side," and maybe I would have thanked her for giving me the dream.