kindness

Jackie Chan

| Megan
People. Suh See Ok. 1988. On view at The MET Fifth Avenue. Gallery 233.

Kiai!

Kiai! is a real thing
A Japanese word
A shout– ichi
A battle cry– ni
A spirit focus– san
Not just protracted
Onomatopoeia or a yell in
Comedy-action sequence

Kiai! is designed for real life
Try it on– shi—
Go! A holler that signals
Attack– jou-dan
Assault– tsuki
Let’s make it noble– roku
For purposes of this poem
Make it count– rei

Don’t hurt someone
undeserving– youi
What’s something in your
Life that you wish would
Dematerialize
Infinity in a kick, jab
What would you like to caterwaul
Into counter-offensive– gedan

Just know that when
You chop their solar plexus– chuudan
The center, they may be
More fragile than you imagine
Just a human heart– shinzo
In a suit of skin, sometimes
No breath returns–shichi
Hachi- Yame

Fumi Yanagimoto. Contemporary Artist. Painting.

Sushi

Get in my bell
You gorgeous cut
Of perfectly raw
Snapper and White tail
You delectable rolls
Of seaweed rice
Naked salmon
Perfectly nicked
Lemon save that
horrible cream sauce
For another palate
The best advice
Ever received regarding
Sushi is that if it’s good
No additives are the
Way to go
No unnecessary dressings
If it is perfectly toothy
Scrumptious sushi
Undecorated ditch the
Wasabi and Ginger
Eat it by the mouthful bare

Buddha, Chinese, early 7th century. Probably Amitabha. On view at The MET Fifth Avenue, Gallery 208.

Kali

She cradled my head in her hands
a portal opened to my heart

My body silently convulsed
at the chaos

The truth was I needed love
more than I needed life

I needed touch more than I
needed bread.

I needed tears more than I
needed water.

I needed someone who understood
breath, meditation, muscle, sinew

Connection, bodies, I needed
someone who understood

What being left felt like
I wasn’t yet beginning

To believe I would survive yet, I wasn’t able
to process the complexity

All raw edges and terrifying depths of memory,
I didn’t know I’d return from death

I’d come back into the sunlight, warm and
buttery on my chest, all senses awake

Breath Meditation N. 27. Thoth Adan.

Full Moon, Partial Lunar Eclipse, Pisces, September 2024

the earth comes between
the moon and the sun do you
feel energy shift

Lunar Eclipse. Ryan Moat. January 20, 2019.

Eschatology

Life took us to the edge of the known universe

this brink, this precipice, on a red dirt plateau,
all rust-verged and jagged,
like a tear in heart tissue,
like broken bone projecting through soft skin.

skin, bone, sinew often don’t break cleanly
so there, on that terrifying cliff,
we looked out into the blackness
and saw that it was our own

dotted with infinite, swirling stars,
nebulous arms of our galaxy, folded across
that night, that nothing. we realized
the instant we stepped to the fathomless limit

all the light we carried in our core could somehow
save us, from this end. So into the starry,
inky ebony we leapt, being careful to be
sure that we crossed over the boundary between

everything we’d known, into every
night we’d ever feverishly dreamed.
this jump, this real act of
self-preservation flung us into

the heart of the unknown cosmos
and there we were to greet ourselves
at the gates of our unknowing.
we opened the tiny, golden latch on the

impossibly large, swinging metalwork gate,
stepped slowly, quietly over the threshold of
revelation, everything open and waiting
for us in that pitchy gloam still had

to be sensed– felt, touched, tasted, smelled–
not physically, but by the fingers of
the formerly known soul that now
bore this greater knowing. this

was not the end but the beginning.
a larger excursus on the limitless
infinite than we had previously
known. we’ll never know if there

was only one way to this beginning–
the ledge, the leap, the jump–
our tiny, finite, blink of a guess gives us
the idea that, no, there are

many precipices, many pinnacles, many paths
to the infinite edges of the unknown into
new reaches of galactic consciousness–
seeing and knowing more than we

could possibly have imagined yesterday

Breath Meditation N. 22, Thoth Adan.

In the Eleventh Hour

| Megan

In the eleventh hour,
your girlfriends come
to hang the final doors
in your soul.

They know it is your funeral,
your wake.
The death of so much you have built
and known.

You know that’s
how it will be when you die–literally–
or you pray, or wish it to be so,
women and men surrounding you.

Understanding you need
to build this one last thing before this death,
they come with drill bits,
and toolboxes,

and dirty jokes,
and Beyoncé ballads.
You’re *Drunk in Love*
together in the night.

They come with highly
absorbent towels
and borrowed vacuum cleaners
because they know

you need to laugh and cry
at the same time.
They do the same.
It’s no coincidence when

you look down at your watch,
it’s eleven twenty.
And then you clutch your heart
as if you could offer it beating

out of your chest
to show them
how much this grand act
of love matters.

In the eleventh hour,
you call your guy-friend
and desperately ask him for
a recommendation for a plumber.

The upstairs faucet won’t stop
leaking, like your eyes,
broken, and you call him again when
the plumber tells you the only fix

is to drill through the wall
behind the tub to replace
the valve. Your friend gives you the okay,
and the world is made right for that moment.

Another friend, a man, gifts
you a ring, a broken piece of turquoise
healed with gold, Kintsugi.
Mixing Urushi Laquier into your internal joinery.

Another tells you to drink the good wine
and offers you a bottle to catch
all the confusion, upset, anger, chaos,
tumult, of these tender days.

Another wraps you up
in Spring in Seattle.
God-parent to your sons
playing super-smash until dawn.

In the eleventh hour,
your friends, who are no longer young
spread the table with salmon
and homemade spice chutney

for a feast to last through the wind.
They don’t know you’ll go home
to silently sob at their magic
on the shower tiles.

Your girlfriend jumps on her bike
to ride with you through the
rainstorm, sunshine yellow cut-leaf balsam
root punctuating each meadow.

The rain, the sun, the rich
smell of the greening earth
make you laugh with joy,
woop with pleasure over the berms

Revel in the living of it as
they’ve each given their day, their night,
precious moments of their one precious life,
to be with you, to cradle you,

to eat *Thunder Cake** and salty tears together.
It will never be final or forgotten,
this Gift.
The fact that they knew

and understood the challenge
and all stepped in
with Windex and mops
with arms outstretced

Ready to hold you
as your once-life died
and you were made anew.
You, free entirely

-MM

“In the Eleventh Hour” has to do with ambiguous grief and the power of others to help heal us in our deepest darkness and pain. You see, our society honors and marks certain types of grief, specifically the death of a loved one. The death of a partner, parent, child, sibling, or close friend presents the mourner with its own unique fire, dragons, daemons, and oceans of grief. 🌊 But some griefs in our culture do not have specific metrics or physical markers. These bereavements may be losing someone to dementia, substance abuse disorders, divorce, familial estrangement, watching someone slip away in mental illness, or leaving our religion or faith origin. When someone dies, we generally mark their grave. But when someone miscarries a baby, we often don’t have ritual to mark that grief event. The same goes for things like childhood abuse. When you grow into an adult after this abuse, who is there to mark the unimaginable path you have trod out of the way you were treated by those who were meant to be your protectors not perpetrator(s) of your worst nightmare?

I’ve found that grief is holy, sacred even. Whether you experienced an ambiguous or more direct loss through death. Human opportunities to walk through the circles ⭕️ of life and death can both teach and strain the body, heart, and soul.

When I got divorced, I sat down with Google to see if a human really could die of a broken heart. 💔 That is how bereft, how torn and sad I was. And it turns out, yes, sure enough, you can die of a broken heart. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy syndrome is the term for this condition. Your heart, in essence, cannot withstand the excess adrenaline caused by a stressful grief-induced event.

All grief has the potential to break our hearts. But, in fact, not a lot of people literally die from this condition which means that a whole lot of people who have experienced deep, great, wide grief live to tell about it. One thing that saved me in my grief was the net of love, care, catching that my family and friends spread out under me and my family. “In the Eleventh Hour” details that love.

*So worth a read. Thunder Cake, by Patricia Polacco.

The Thunder Cake Challenge! – Natascha's Palace

*Also important in this conversation, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong.

Be kind (to yourself)

| Megan

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I’ve wanted to write a New Year, 2019, post all January. I want to talk about what I am pledging to do with my time this year, and I want to find out what you have set as your goals or resolutions for 2019. I am realizing that there are many reasons that folks don’t subscribe to the January goal setting frenzy, but I think that because it’s my birthday month I feel additionally on-board with the resolution setting set.

If you abhor resolutions that center around an arbitrary date of the year you may consider this post alternatively titled “Lessons from Dedicating 30 Days to Yoga.” You see, I began this year with many intentions– like bringing more peace and patience into my life, and renewing my commitment to not buying new things. For reference, that didn’t really work out for me as a year-long endeavor. Mostly because I came to the project grossly underprepared to support myself. More on that later.

But this year, I am still evaluating and cornering my spending habits, I’m still seeking to be a parent that speaks more peace to my children, and I’m still trying to be a human that is more patient with her fellow humans at large– in the classroom, on the road, at the grocery store, on the news, and on and on.

Instead of putting immense pressure on myself to be all that I wanted to be on January 1, I decided that I would first engage in a yoga practice that lasts the entire month of January. This was one of the best moves I’ve made in terms of beginning a New Year, and I hope I’ll remember how cleansing, enlightening, grounding, and opening this journey has been.

One of these personal revelations is a two-part story with yet another alternative post title: “The difference between being hard on yourself and kind to yourself (even honest with yourself) is not that you need to stop being too easy on yourself.”

Allow me to explain. Four nights ago I was doing Adriene’s (Yoga with Adriene) Dedicate 30 Day Yoga Journey. Nearing the end of her practice we were lying in a final Shavasana. The practice had been about sweetness and Adrienne was saying, “Sometimes it’s not only about WHAT we do but HOW we do it. Consider that.” Now this is an idea that I subscribe to. We should all think about what we are doing. Why we are doing it, how we are doing it are keys to the ‘what’. Adriene went on, “Are you more in the habit of being hard on yourself or can you get more in the habit…”

My video stopped streaming at this exact moment. And I was left trying to figure out what Adriene was going to say next. The truth is that when I finished her statement the only thing that I could come up with was, “Or are you in habit of being too easy on yourself. Do you need to push yourself harder?” In other words, do you cut yourself a break too often, are you lazy, apathetic, flawed? And on and on and on with the self-denigrating comments. I was ready to get on the wagon and stone myself for being a push over. Why didn’t I see that this was the same thing as being TOO HARD ON MYSELF?

My video eventually reloaded and Adriene said, “Are you more in the habit of being hard on yourself, or can you get more in the habit of finding practices that help you, get you, in the habit of being sweet to yourself. EVEN WHEN YOU MESS UP.”

Stunned silence from my mat.

Can you be kind to yourself? Even when you mess up? Can you? Can I?

This brings me to my next story. Hang with me here. There was once a girl who couldn’t spell. That girl was me, I’m still that girl. And I don’t know when I began to believe or it was pointed out to me that I could not spell. (I hope at this point you are already seeing the irony of this reality as I am an English teacher. An English teacher who can’t spell.) Apparently, not even being a school Spelling Bee champion served to solve this self-image notion.

But this not-being-able-to-spell thing has been something that has haunted me for my entire life. Not just academically, but not being able to spell became something of a self-forecast for all of my failings, all the stuff I couldn’t do. It became a sign that I wasn’t cut out for success.

Well from this girl– me– came a sweet little boy– P. As it turns out, he showed some of the same phonetic unawareness that his mom had/has. That mom– me– told this little boy– my son– that he “could not spell.” Just like that, “You can’t spell.” Just like I had been told.

Now I tried to forecast some solutions to this problem by explaining that he could memorize words and thereby overcome his failing. “We can’t spell.” I kept telling him, like we were rowing this boat called “Can’t Spell” together. Fast forward to Parent-Teacher-Student conferences 2019.

As we concluded our meeting, my son’s sweet teacher asked if I had any questions for her and I felt that this would be a great time to bring up the spelling thing. I explained, “I can’t spell. And I’m worried that this might be the case for my son. It appears that he doesn’t have phonetic awareness.”

His teacher stoped me in my tracks and said, “Oh! That sounds just like me! Your son can spell, he just needs to practice with different variations of each phonemic pairing. It wasn’t until I was a teacher that I  realized there were certain vowels and sounds that were patterned through language. But you know what? (She turns to my son.) For every one of these patterns there are times when the rules apply and there are times when the English language breaks those rules! You CAN spell!” She declared with certainty.

Just like that. “YOU CAN SPELL!” With all of the vigor and certainty of a seasoned educator who knows that as she bolsters students to believe in themselves they will fulfill those prophecies and SPELL.

I was stunned into silence again. Here I had been telling myself (for years) that I couldn’t spell. I had been telling my son that he couldn’t spell. I had been practicing this can’t over and over and over. My son’s teacher continued, “The wonderful thing about spelling is that you do need to memorize how to spell words. Once you can recognize different patterns like ‘r’ controlled vowels– er, ur, ir, or– then you can begin to memorize which words use which patterns.”

I nearly fell off my chair. More than that, I was ashamed for telling my boy that he couldn’t, that he didn’t, that he wasn’t able to. Nothing better than strapping yourself to your failings and then just clinging to them! In that moment I remembered my yoga, the moment that I was so certain that my instructor was going to tell me that perhaps if yoga wasn’t working for me or working a change on or in me I was being too easy on myself.

I realized that I am constantly falling into this belief that if I will just push harder, do more, press into my present with more resolve, then– and only then– will I come out conqueror. But in those moments, on that mat and in that classroom, I realized that I need to be a whole lot kinder to myself and to those around me.

You, my beautiful friend, thank you for reading this post. I’m learning, slowly and steadily, to pass on the power of believing in yourself to my kids and to my deeper self. You, me, we all need to be more kind to ourselves. Happy 2019!

XX,
Megan

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