Bye bye 2019 and the 2010s...I am ready for the Roaring Twenties.

I wanted to write a year summary and felt daunted, then realized it should be a decade summary and was more daunted. This decade has been a rollercoaster from start to finish.

A thumbnail (the details are all here in this blog, at least from 2011 onward, with reference to 2010).

At the end of 2009, things were looking up. I had finally finished my PhD and was dragging myself out of the worst of the grief over my miscarriage in 2007, a day after my wedding.

But at the very end of the year, my 19 year old cat died while I was in the US (at the time I lived in London) and then on that day I had what turned out to be the last phone conversation with my father on his birthday (same day my beloved cat died). A few days later, at the beginning of 2010, he was rushed to ICU, and I flew out to Sacramento to see him before he died. I have written about that prior, but that floored me...but also clearing out his storage area I found photos of my grandparents when they were young. So while I was in a grief fog clusterfuck, I also found a seed of what would become my life for most of the decade, writing about my grandmothers. But first, months of grief fog for a father I barely knew, who I lost twice, once in life and then again in death.

This decade has been like that. Oh joy, then death, then in the death grief fog a seed...and something grows...then joy, then death, then...rinse repeat.

My second marriage, begun with such hope and joy that was cruelly crushed the first day of our honeymoon (the miscarriage), was disintegrating in slow motion by 2010 and by 2011 had ended. That along with wanting to work on this book about my grandmothers—which desire also had contributed to my closing up my London based theater company, Apocryphal—led me to make a leap with no safety net back to the states. I say no safety net because when made decision no job or place to live, but I was rich in friends, one of which let me stay at her place to make that decision.

In the summer, I spent time with my cousin Darcy, celebrating her remission from cancer, and  researching our shared grandmother, my mother's mother, in Minneapolis. Earlier that summer I met the lost part of my grandfather's family, lost because he had had to change his name during the Red Scare to save his job. I found clues to his real identity in all the stuff in my father's chaotic storage unit in January 2010. Again with the seeds.

Then, poof, back in NYC...where I discovered Inwood at the top tip of Manhattan when trying to find someplace I could afford, and moved here. That was a great find. The parks, the green, and then in October, the beginning of autumn in Inwood Hill Park was a revelation. This was October 2011. I had found a job at Bronx Community College and then later at Hunter.

Ugo the IWW (Inwood Writing Workshop) cat

A month later, I adopt Ugo the cat, who I found online at WaHi Cat Colony. He was an adult cat, so harder to place and still available. When I saw him, I knew he was mine.

I then am shortlisted for a full-time teaching post back in UK in May 2012 and fly back to interview and audition for it. They choose someone else. My ego is bruised, but I am so grateful for the ability to come back to NYC that this is the feeling that takes over.

My stepfather Tom sends me a lovely affirmative note about this.

A week later, Tom is in the ICU. He dies a few days after my birthday, Bloomsday (during which I read him Ulysses) and Father's Day. I am holding his feet when he dies and feel giant waves of love that almost knock me over. I am devastated and moved. I have a dream of a net and a diamond. Indra's Diamond my mother says. She is more bereft than me. Who wouldn't be?

I end up finding my own apartment on the top floor of a five-story walk-up in Inwood. Tom left all his kids including me (his step-daughter) a small amount of money, which was enough to furnish a new place (with Ikea and Housing Works and Freecycle). I got it all ready for me to live in, including my own study. I began to work more in earnest on my book. And decide to take some extra time to sort out my life.

Then comes Hurricane Sandy. Happily, my apartment survived and Inwood had electricity, so was able to host people up here who were stranded downtown. Sadly, we lost some huge trees in Inwood Hill Park. The beginning of understanding how vulnerable NYC is to climate change sinks in.

A couple months later, a friend who I had met at a meditation retreat where we were accidental roommates talks me into online dating, and I meet my future husband almost immediately.

Didn't see that coming. I was just trying to get a date before I turned 50.

John and me in Montreal at Botanical Gardens Valentine's Day 2013

Much happiness ensues of course, because it's super fun to be in love. Then of course all the issues rear their head about money and citizenship, since he is Canadian. Very long story short, we do everything by the book and he ends up down here, but there was a bunch of stuff he had to deal with in Canada and that all was way more complicated than he would have wished. We survived it all, but it was challenging, as in years of being challenging, in an apartment I had chosen for me alone, not two people.

On the happy side, I kept working on my book, got support from a crowd-funding campaign (all this is in blog circa 2014) and other votes of encouragement. John helped me with all of this and has been a relentless (in a good way) cheerleader of my work. I was given fellowships to residencies, and that helped, too. I directed a staged reading of ''whatever God is..." and Ian W. Hill directed My First Autograce Homeography (1973-74) at The Brick, all in 2014. My first short story publication as an adult also happened in 2014 with The God Thing, which has since been nominated or been a finalist in some awards, which is gratifying.

There have been many highways and byways with the book, The Amazing True Imaginary Autobiography of Dick and Jani, and with luck it will get published fairly soon. That is a long story that I cannot give details about, because much is in process. But it had been a steep learning curve for a theater chick to figure out publishing, and wow, it's different, but OK.

However, I was beginning to figure stuff out and making some headway when I came back from a lovely yoga retreat at Kripalu in December 2016 to a phone call from my mother that David Berry, my ex-stepfather, the playwright, had died suddenly of a heart attack, boom. I have written about that a lot too. But his sudden death floored me. It was two months after the DTs struck the US, and I was convinced that is what killed him, a gay Vietnam Vet artist. What greater insult than a homophobic insane person who had 'bone spurs' that he used to weasel out of service in Vietnam.

I lurched through another series of months in a grief fog, but also managed to finish another book I had begun in September. However, I was adjunct professoring, and it was killing me. I was exhausted all the time, and the pay, in case you don't know, in terms of hours work, is basically minimum wage.

I realized it was killing me right around the time I read a book that is the most iconic book of the decade for me: The Body Keeps the Score. I mark the time I read that book (early 2017) as the moment when I realized I was not a broken toy. But instead had a normal response to severe traumatic events. I cannot overstate how important this moment was. How healing, and how much my life has changed since.

From then on (Feb-March 2017), I mark as an existential shift in my understanding of myself and the world. I quit being an adjunct and decided to go full-time freelance, which has worked better than I could have dreamed. I decided to go to Westray, one of the Orkney Isles in Scotland in June, where I had not been since 2010. I had written my PhD there, and fallen in love with Orkney in 2003. It has always felt like a spiritual home, and some part of me feels severed from my soul until I get back there. I had postponed this trip a number of times because of my relationship with John and trying to work out schedules and time, etc. But I knew this time I could postpone it no more. My mother and John were going to go with me, but then could not for separate reasons.

Two stones from Ring of Brodgar in Orkney

Dear reader, I went anyway. And that made all the difference.

I stayed on in the olde Manse overlooking where the North Sea and Atlantic meet and revised my second book, Girls Meeting God, to get it in shape for submission, and taught my first ever private writing workshop, on this small Orkney Island, which was a  success and a revelation.

John meanwhile was able to sort out his Canadian albatross, and so when I returned, we were in much better shape on many levels.

Thus began the life I have now: writing, teaching writing workshops, coaching writers, reviewing manuscripts, editing, and sometimes back to theater.

Speaking of which, when the #metoo movement began in 2017 that allowed me to write my stage text On the edge of/a cure. Working with MoveOn and their text team to help elect Doug Jones in December 2017 allowed me to have a reading of this play. I did not realize until seeing this political work effect a positive change how paralyzed I had been...ever since watching DT stalk around behind Hillary Clinton on the debate stage. I could not move during the debate. Literally. But did not realize how totally paralyzed I was in terms of a certain kind of voice until I wasn't.

On the edge of allowed me to speak about things in a way I never have done before. It was also possible because of reading The Body Keeps the Score and Leigh Gilmore's Limits of Autobiography. In 2018, another play I had written in response to another trauma response I was having because of various terrorist incidents, Shit, was produced by IATI as part of their play development program. I got to see another director work with my texts and that was lovely.

Other reading that inspired me along this journey include Elena Ferrante's Neopolitan Quartet, Joan Didion's everything, Jennifer Egan's writing, and the ongoing ever present influence of Doris Lessing. With some key assists from James Baldwin and David Foster Wallace. Yeah, it's weird, I know that. If you know me, you understand the breadth, depth, and gaping holes in my weirdly selective knowledge of Whatever.

2018 saw the expansion of the freelance work, up to and including starting a retreat for other writers in Westray, an experiment that succeeded enough to repeat it in 2019, twice, and yes, going again in 2020. I also tried again in the spring of 2018 to heal from the traumatic miscarriage in 2007. I went to a workshop at Kripalu hosted by outside teachers that was so wrong it was almost hilarious. But  when I went to the Kripalu yoga classes I felt at home. I made a decision: I would become if at all possible a Kripalu yoga teacher so could be part of carrying on this important lineage, which is the opposite of spiritual bypass faux positivity crap that makes my skin crawl.

Back track to the shit storm of 2016, to remember that was the year also that my beloved cousin Darcy's asshole cancer returned. So the drumbeat underneath all my activity was: how long does she have left and how could I help? The answer was: all I could do was make phone calls and send crystals and gifts when possible, and she would die in September of 2018. My biggest fear in leading the retreat in 2018 was that she would die before I got home. Instead I just got a severe case of frozen shoulder. And the news Girls Meeting God was a semi-finalist for a book prize. The gods are fucking weird. In 2018 John was able to travel to Westray with me, and we had a week together as a 5-year-delayed honeymoon, so that was cool, too, but again all was overcast with the reality of Darcy's illness, the shoulder, and starting a writing retreat. Someday, we will have a proper honeymoon.

I was able to get to St. Paul at the end of August to see Darcy before she died. I wrote about that, too, and someday maybe that will get published. It took me well over a year to write about it even as a short essay. She was the closest I ever had to a sister so the word 'cousin' doesn't cut it as a term to describe her meaning to me. Suffice to say her dying plummeted me into a grief fog that was so complete, I have almost no memory of autumn 2018. I do remember trying to revise my book and sending it in, leading a workshop somehow, going to her memorial in November and then my memory does not return until December 2018 when I went to a very good healing workshop run by Aruni, who is a Kripalu veteran teacher, on grief, loss and renewal. Without that series of days and sharing with a few other people who were equally poleaxed by grief, I am not sure I would be functional.

The one thing I was able to do consistently throughout 2018 was text with MoveOn and that helped the Dems flip the House anyway. Did thousands of texts a day, like clockwork. I am proud of the work I did and the many, many others who did so, too.

Then in 2019 I focused on healing. I had intended to do yoga teacher training in October 2018 but my shoulder ixnayed that. (The body Does keep the score.) I began studying Qi Gong with Alicia Fox, which was transformative. I decided not to try to write because I was exhausted. I taught two workshops, though.

Artistic discoveries of this year that were revelatory include Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim in January and April, her paintings gave me life. The fact she knew a hundred years ago her work was not legible until the future was amazing, and now they quiver with meaning. In October, I discovered Betye Saar at the new MoMA. She is in her 90s, and only now being discovered. If you are a female artist, you best live long to see your work recognized in your own lifetime.

Graduating on Summer Solstice at Kripalu

I also directed a staged reading of On the edge of/a cure. That was both incredibly healing and challenging work that took place between February and May 2019. By the time I was done with that, I was ready to finally do the Kripalu yoga teacher training in June, which shifted me irrevocably. It was the capstone I intuited it might be that drew all the parts together, all the fragments somehow settling into one person. I have written a lot about that, too, but mentioning it here again because key to so much. Getting underneath fixed, linear story has been a cornerstone of my artistic project and lo and behold it's the cornerstone of yoga, too. Fancy that. But to embody this rather than just have an intellectual or artistic framework is a whole other level of living it.

At the 2018 retreat I worked on a novella and short story. The short story White shoe lady won the Nomadic Press chapbook contest in May and was published in December, and the novella I am about to begin revising. In the 2019 retreats, I began writing about my nonlinear journey through yoga. I am writing a lot now. If I had not allowed myself the long down time, though, I don't think I would have the reserves I do now.

During 2019 my workshops and retreats doubled and I now have numerous coach clients, and my own work is beginning to find a home. I am now teaching yoga, which may not seem like a big deal, but me it is huge, because to teach the way I do means embodying radical self-acceptance and compassion, so it keeps me honest.

the shelves that John built! So much more space & writing can breathe (me too!)

And equally, I spent the last week before Christmas organizing my office and the last few days doing the same thanks to John building me new shelves. John is doing well, too, in school and full time work, thriving in a city he moved to in his fifties, not a small thing.

In other words, instead of rushing off somewhere Else to heal or whatever, I am here, in my own space, in my own skin, in my own life. I am 56. It has taken this long. Oh, and I finally created a website, which relates to all this, because I brought together all my various moving parts. The Unadapted Ones. Check it out. Most likely my next blog post will be there, the one that greets the New year and new decade. This is the one that sums up the decade this blog covers. Maybe I am more settled now. I fear saying that, however, less it calls upon a real or psychic earthquake... I began this blog in lieu of a website in 2011. I wasn't sure what I wanted to be when I grew up...

For 2020, I am present and accounted for, accepting reality as it is rather than as I would hope or fear it to be (as much as possible, understanding no one human ever totally can do that). If I keep staying sober one day at a time in February, I will be 33 years clean and sober. I should add without that rock solid ground, None of this is possible. And without the companionship and counsel of many other people who also stay clean and sober one day at a time, I would be bereft.

So...Happy New Year. Happy New Decade.

Find what brings you joy and go towards that more. Accept what is weighing you down is in fact weighting you down, and if possible, slough it off. And if you have any trauma in your background, and you have not read it yet, for the love of all that is holy read The Body Keeps the Score.

Let's help carry each other to shore.

path to Maes Sand outside of West Manse in Westray

the water the shore the distance the light the shadow...Westray

le puffins at Castle O'Burrian, Westray

Offering gentle, meditative Kripalu yoga classes for Every body beginning on Sunday, woohoo!

So, it's official, I am teaching yoga now as a KYT & RYT 200 certified teacher! Started out small in August, and the classes are continuing now that I am back in New York after another great writing retreat in Westray, Scotland. I may teach more but for now it's Sundays at 1pm at Inwood Movement, which is a lovely intimate studio.

The flyer I designed (!) is below. And if you want to know more about Kripalu yoga, scroll down a couple posts to where I describe why I think Kripalu yoga is special and you can read more. And of course you can get in touch with any questions if you are interested. I am happy to bring this type of yoga to other spaces and workshops, so if you have a studio or a space or a group of people who might be interested or want a private session, get in touch.

This along with my writing workshops is my joy. The photo was taken by my dear friend and excellent photographer Jill Nierman when we were in Stromness in the Orkney Isles together before the writing retreat in Westray in September. She captured how I feel about yoga and writing and the Orkney Isles all in one...as I have said many times, I am rich in friends. Who also happen to be wildly talented. A plus.

gorgeous day here in Inwood

It was beautiful today so went apartment hunting, had to fill out another teaching application but in between walked to the water.  The tide was going out so bay area turned into mudflats with rivulets.  Birds walking and swimming, including seagulls, ducks, Canadian geese and a beautiful heron.  There was a moment watching the water shimmer across the flats when a breeze made it looked like a translucent blanket of diamonds that was breathtaking.  Then watching the millions of little ovals of light from the setting sun on one area...walking back from a point, each path of a bird in the water was lit, so there were lines darting out behind each white gull.  There were at least 20 or so birds in the bay, so it made a pattern of indescribably beauty and asymmetry.  In these moments, it's hard to believe anything ever bothers me...ever.  Especially bullshit about status and accomplishments.  When the heron spreads out to its full wingspan and it lands again on those impossibly thin legs, what is there to do precisely?  What could possibly top that?

Once again, I recommit to staying up in this neighborhood, because it never fails to blow my mind as I'm waxing poetic about nature that I am standing at the top tip of Manhattan.

Another viewpoint that cannot be topped is standing beneath the Henry Hudson Bridge - seeing the perfect geometry of diamond-shaped squares receding behind one another.

I have taken photos of all of this but somehow enjoy the challenge right now of describing these sights.

The green of the leaves is lush, no tree is yet in full bloom but they are all ripe with green and yellow, dark and light, life bursting out of every corner of the park, the air smelling sweet and then when the tide goes out like a mud flat, but even that smell I like because it's natural, not toxic.  However a rat running out from between the rocks and into the water reminded me once again of the city.

I brought another friend on the walk through the woods the other day, and the familiar response: I didn't know this was here.  It doesn't even feel like a city.  Look at that light.  Oh my God it is so beautiful.  Is that the Bronx?  Yes.  Is that New Jersey?  Yes.  This is what?  Where the Harlem River and Hudson River meet.  Then the apocryphal tale of the Native Americans 'selling' Manhattan at that stone right there...then the awe: wait these trees were here then?  Yes. Why hasn't it been developed?  I don't know but I am glad.  In the case of this friend: it reminds me of my hometown in Germany, the trees and the smell...an old steel town where the Rhine meets the Ruhr (I think...can't remember the name but that's my best guess)...it's a place, this place, on the edge of meaning as well as place somehow.  And the light...oh my God/dess, the light.  You cannot believe it.

The conversation then turning to the vagaries of being on the edge of careers, artistic ideas, teaching jobs...the ways in which we think that does not fit into boxes and forms...wondering again if it is a generational thing.  Perhaps this is why I am always happy on the edges of places...where land turns to water turns to mud turns to water turns into another river into another state under a bridge where the train whistles to another borough to another town...to another century if you turn around fast enough.

So, wish me luck with finding another apartment up here...was taken around earlier today by a real estate agent, which is always a weird experience, because you know you're being hustled and at a certain point they know you know, but they can't seem to stop themselves.  So weird.  Hope I can find something on my own through a management company or owner because I feel somehow just too old or whatever it is to play along.  Today, the tired song of "if you like this place, you need to act now because someone could snap it up tomorrow" and me saying, with the superintendent present, yeah and then something else will open up, which made the super laugh and nod his head in agreement.  No one can keep a straight face anymore.  I mean, come on.  I'm sitting there looking at a long list of vacant apartments and it's obvious the masses are not moving in on any of them.  These are the benefits of getting older and - dare I say it - a little wiser.  False urgency appears as what it is: false.  Plus the hilarious-sad moment of me telling them - gringo that I am - I'm OK with living East of Broadway - gasp.  All the real estate agents, and I mean ALL of them, assume I have to live West of Broadway.  He even tried to scare me by leaving me out on the street by myself - which like didn't scare me.  He was surprised when I was joking with people on the street.  The racism here is just unfuckingbelievable.  Even when I said: yeah, I know what East of Broadway looks like, I walk to Bronx Community College (through the dreaded East of Broadway), he still didn't believe me.

Oh and speaking of racism, it turns out one of my students, as I suspected at least one of them would, knew the 18 year old boy who was shot dead in the Bronx by a policeman a couple months ago.  Not on the street, in this boy's own bathroom.  He was unarmed and the police chased him into his own house because they suspected he might have pot.  Which he may have had and may have been trying to flush down the toilet.  So now he's dead, feloniously black in the Bronx.  The weirdest thing about it is how little uproar there has been.  There should be riots, instead there is just despair and a few marches here and there.  She is going to speak about police brutality, this student, for her oral presentation.  I look forward to it.  I had to stop myself from crying when she told me the story.  When I saw the news report, I did cry.  I saw the photo of the young man and knew he could have been one of my students.  To put this in perspective: just imagine if this had been a middle-class or rich white college student who had been chased into his dorm room by cops and shot to death.  You can't even imagine that can you?  Right, so there you go.

So, like, of course I would love to live west of Broadway to be next to the water and park with a view, who wouldn't?  But this is not about that.

The teaching application I sent out today was to teach full time at BCC.  If I got that job, I could probably afford to live where I want.  But who knows where I will end up in the autumn?  I certainly don't.

Just hope wherever it is can be as drop dead gorgeous as corners of Inwood and that I will be able to experience another year as close to the changing seasons...and also the edge of reason, which is the poverty and inequality.  Not because I enjoy it, because I do not, but as a reminder always, that the human construction: global capitalism + nationalism + racism kinda sucks.

Scary Newt and the wit and wisdom o' Inwood

So, to start...here's the weird sign I saw on the street leaning against a lamppost on 207th Street walking from the 1 train.  Wisdom?  Google Translate? Inwood Confucianism? You decide:

I am really not sure what to make of this, is a bad lie one that works or does not work?  Is a fast cart something that gets you somewhere or refer to the people who sell things off carts on the street?  In any case, I could not help but stoop down and get a blurry photo with my half-smart phone.


After the relative calm of seeing this and spending time with friends today, one at a local cafe, from where you can see the below body of tidal water...(I can't help myself taking photos of it, especially as the seasons change...something so gorgeous about this area in January - stark but lovely...again, sorry for the phone photo but gives you an idea...one of the many things on my to do list is to get a better camera for these photos and video work I'm starting to do...)

But so...after this calm, I managed to shatter it by watching the Republicans debate in South Carolina.  I haven't managed to sit my sorry ass down and watch one of these things all the way through until now.  Whatever hope I've had about Occupy Wall Street was severely threatened by the whoopin' and hollerin' for Newt Gingrich speaking in blatantly racist terms about the economy to the African American reporter asking him a question...then watching the African American female anchor on FoxNews Live Stream pretend she had not written the word 'condescending' to refer to Gingrich by half giggling saying "I don't why I wrote that" followed by Ed - I'm such a racist and wish I was Dick Cheney - Rollins snorting "Oh you meant the reporters!"  She laughed a little too loudly - all the years she must have taken of god knows what abuse to have her anchor position at Fox news live stream flashing before her eyes - uh yes, that must be it, she said.  Bull shit.

I swear to God I was waiting for the pan out to that audience to suddenly include white pointy hats.  But no, they've got 'em stored away in the basement or attic somewhere...you could just see the Aura of it - all that pent up resentment at having to have an African-American president bursting out the sides, a barely contained riot of approval for the fake-academic Gingrich tut tutting all those people on food stamps.  I thought I was gonna hurl.  So instead I started tweeting madly - the modern version of pathetic protest.  I did have a good tweetversation (is that a word yet?) with a fellow in Memphis about all this - someone else who had moved back from Europe and is still reeling with the raw horror of these very scary men - and their even scarier supporters (mobs).

If you think I am exaggerating, by the way, just go to the Fox News channel website and I'm sure you can watch the whole thing again - if you can bear it, and I warn you: it's ugly.

The only tiny consolation I have is that Romney will most likely be their nominee and attacking his idiotic record will be like shooting fish in a barrel, and he does not have the horrifying populist demagogic power of Gingrich or the weird Cameron-like smoothness of Santorum or the righteous Texan religious thing of Perry or the racist anti-semitic dressed up as radical thing of Ron Paul.  Who are all these people?

I say that and yet I know....I grew up among them, I was an Evangelical Baptist at one point when a teen.  The world is so black and white.  White is Jesus and the Church, black is both racial and the Godless Government, etc., etc.  The belief system is incredibly insular and totalizing, which in these days of anxiety and economic meltdown ironically is more comforting to these folks than oh say an actual social safety net.  Nietzsche was right about this: Christianity does valorize suffering as the entry fee, which can cause a weird idea of what the social should be.  We reap what we sow.  He also said, and I agree with him on this one: Christ was the only Christian.  Amen that brother Friedrich.  Yeah, yeah I know he hated women - hold the comments.  Still he got some stuff right.  And it was his sister that was the anti-Semite, not him...he hated everyone.  Kind of like Lenny Bruce except he was a 19th century philosopher.

In summary, for today: friends: good.  Republican presidential candidates: bad.  So, there you go, I am now oversimplifying with the rest of 'em.  Reminds me it's Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and I should be better than that.  He is right that you can only get rid of darkness with light and hate with love, but tonight I cannot find any love for Newt Gingrich.  No, actually, weirdly that's not true.  On some deeper level I can, even for him, which is kind of fucked up, but I can...but on the level of presidential politics and the real world, no, never.  He is my enemy in that world.  Yes, I would like to have a dialogue and yes I'm aware we are all too polarized, but a dialogue can only be had in good faith and  stirring up white resentment and fear under the guise of rational policy is horrendous.  It needs to be called out for what it is not lauded like the idiot commentators on Fox News were doing oohing and aahing over his 'passion' and how excited people in the audience were.

Dear God/Higher Power/Whomever, please help us all...It looks like we aren't doing a bang up job ourselves right now.