Another healing journey...

A lot has happened since my last blog post, all the events listed were performed, and had a wonderful retreat to Westray in Orkney Islands. In fact, so good, that I have booked three more - for April, July and September. So, if you want to spend some time in a beautiful place, getting a lot of writing done, surrounded by serious writers who are super supportive, then get in touch.

But what I want to write about now is my near-future plan for October of this year...which involves spending the month at Kripalu - a yoga center in the Berkshires that I love - for intensive yoga teacher training. I will be there for a month.

Aside from the fact that the training itself will be transformational, and I will be certified to teach after over 17 years of practicing Kripalu yoga, this is also happening precisely 17 years after I was meant to spend a month at Kripalu doing a seva program. I had just begun practicing yoga and wanted to immerse myself in it. I was excited and nervous about the prospect of spending a month someplace I had never been, but I had been assured it was a great place. I was ready for an adventure after what had been a challenging year getting over a difficult breakup of a 13 year relationship, which had the effect of making me question Everything. I was ready for this new life, this new world.

Then less than a month before I was meant to go up to Lenox, September 11, 2001 happened, in my city. I have written about this many times, and if you want my best description, you can read it here.

But what happened after is, I could not leave the city. I was afraid it would disappear. Many were fleeing, but I was holding on for dear life. NYC was my home, the only place on earth that I had ever felt at home, and now all I could smell was burning plastic, metal and bodies - even up in Yorkville where I lived at the time. The smell made it up the East River. The smoke was visible, even though I was miles north of the attack. I had many friends who had been closer, some who lost people, and all of us saw the missing signs everywhere. People had tacked up photocopies of smiling pictures of friends and relatives, every fire house had at least eight photos up it seemed. There were candles under some of the photos in little planters, near trees, on steps up to brownstones. None of them were missing. They were all dead, incinerated.

I could not move. Would not move. Was not afraid, as far as I could tell, but of course I was. In yoga class, I felt the terror, but mostly was in a dissociated fugue state, that I arguably lived in for years, and to some degree even exist in to this day.

I cancelled the trip to Kripalu. I ended up doing a lot of other things, including moving to the UK in 2003 for what I thought was temporary stay that ended up lasting 8 years. I left in August 2003, right after the blackout, which ended the morning I flew out, I remember seeing a guy - probably drunk - stagger in front of our Super Shuttle Van at 4 am in Times Square. The driver swerved to avoid him, but it was eerie. My cats had looked at me bereft when I walked out the door. Everything was deeply weird.

I won't go into those eight years, because that's a novel in its own right, but the fact is I missed all the 9/11 anniversaries after the first one in 2002. And because of the way it was being used politically, I refused to participate even then in any event that showed my grief publicly. I was enraged that our grief was being used as an excuse to ramp up a war. So, I shoved it down. Then I was in the UK where no one wanted to know and most were cynical about 9/11. Individually some people wanted to know my actual human scale story but most decided to launch into diatribes about how it was an inside job and/or how Americans now know how it feels, etc. So, I learned to shut the fuck about it.

Then I shut it down into a tiny, hidden part of myself. Hidden even to me.

This part would emerge when I visited NYC and sometimes was near downtown and would see building going on and feel nauseous or start shaking, and I would have to leave.

I shut. it. down.

So, when I was back here in September 2011, realizing I was going to move back to NYC, and the 10th anniversary rolled around, I was kind of shocked by how moving it was to me, how emotional I got. I was wary now of saying this to my New York friends, because they had now been through Years of this grieving or ignoring it, depending on their mood or capability. So, once again, I kept it to myself.

I have begun to realize over the years of being back in NYC that some part of me is still damaged from that day, some part of me I have not allowed out somehow, a wound I have protected.

One of the original ways of shielding that wound was to Not go to Kripalu in October 2001.

So, when I realized I could go up in October 2018 for teacher training if I received a scholarship (which happily I did), I decided it was time to finally do this thing. While this won't heal everything, it's a start. I will finally allow myself the immersion I so craved then, but then somehow feared.

I don't know if the buried emotions will come up or not. There has been a lot of trauma in my life since then, including difficult losses, and there is one right now on the horizon. I have no idea what will happen.

But I am dedicating the training and any yoga teaching I do to people who were like me when I started yoga in my late 30s: scared and kind of suspicious and sure I could not do it. I want to work with people who suffer from PTSD or just plain old bad body image or a sense of being "bad" at physical things. And maybe people like me, too, who just can't shake certain wounds.

I want to embrace vulnerability, my own and others'. I don't know if I can actually do this or am just talking trash. In reality I hate vulnerability. My own that is. Total loss of control. It sucks. But it's also the only place life can become, well, life. So there's that.

We shall see what happens.

But this is a baby step towards healing. I was torn asunder on 9/11/01. More than I knew. I don't think I will necessarily get put back together, because not sure that's possible, but maybe, if I'm lucky, I can at least find the bits and pieces that were lost, even if they are in shards and make into some kind of whack collage.

There are worse fates.

Until the End of the World...

That is the title of a great Wim Wenders film written by Peter Carey.  At the end a few people are stuck staring at videos of their own dreams, they become so addicted to these images that they lose themselves entirely in their own solipsistic world of private imagery that no one else but than the individual cares about.  They just keep playing their own images over and over.

This film was made in the 1991 and was projecting a dystopian future of 1999.  It is now 2012 and I think that end bit where they are looking at hand held video screens that look almost exactly like an iPhone or iPad is kind of eerie in its prescience.

I say this not as some detached observer but as someone who can get sucked into the internet and my minor-league social networking (Linkedin and Twitter - no Facebook for me or I'd never get up off my chair) or the ever-dangerous Googling of oneself or others and suddenly hours have flown by - where have they gone?  Who the fuck knows, but it seems odd that this can happen and does happen on a distressingly regular basis to me.  I hate admitting this.  But there it is.

The movie comes to mind because the only way the woman gets cured is when her batteries run out and after a few days of junkie like withdrawal, the guy who she broke up with but has followed her around the world, writes her a story on an old manual typewriter and gives it to her with some tea (he's British).  Eventually, she reads it and seems somewhat becalmed.  The guy she had fallen in love and his father are found wandering around caves in the Australian outback (where the guy's father was doing the research) and taken away by the CIA to get the dream-catching technology.

I watched this movie over and over for a period of years, before I ever had internet access in my own home.  I knew there was something important about it, and now that I feel like that woman, I know what it is.  This shit can be addictive and I have an addictive personality ergo am susceptible.

Perhaps I am writing this now because I'm focusing more intensively on meditation and expanding to mindfulness meditation - which includes mindfulness during daily activities.  When I was intending to drink a cup of tea mindfully today, I instead found myself at the computer emailing people back, looking at my blog and twitter, then vacuuming, then at the computer...etc.  So my 'mindful' tea drinking lasted 10 minutes and made me late for a meeting in real life.  I hate that I can get so easily distracted.  I also do not fully understand the dastardly space-time continuum of being on the internet.  Something happens, it eats time...it feels like the opposite of mindfulness, a kind of semi-conscious zombie state wherein all things one does kind of meld into one so the hours drift by and you wonder: what have I actually done?  Even if I have 'done' a lot - meaning got some things accomplished that needed doing, contacted people, got information, etc., it feels kind of well like nothing really.  Like a long ..... whatever.

I almost miss a typewriter enough to get one again.  I wish I wrote these blog posts, as I used to do, on Word and then cut and pasted them here so I could be writing without being on the internet, but I got lazy and now write directly to the blog.

On the bright side, I spent a lovely evening with the writer Barbara Garson and her husband Frank at their place in Westbeth (and oh do I envy the Westbeth residents with their subsidized artist housing! But at the same time glad for them, because at least Someone has subsidized housing...).  We chatted about things artistic, political and international - comparing countries has become a bit of a group sport for me with folks who've spent time abroad.  We talked about the monarchy in the UK, our crazed political system, which country's class system was worse (toss up), where racism was worse (toss up) and watched yet another British detective drama on TV and laughed our asses off at the horrendous American accent of one of the actors.  For some reason everyone in British drama schools learns an American accent that sounds like someone from working-class Chicago - and there is no class variation - so upper class Americans are supposed to sound this way, too - which is a cause for much hilarity on this side of the ocean.  This is also why I could not listen to most BBC4 radio dramas with American characters because the accents were inevitably atrocious.  Barbara noted that the British version of American accents tend to always sound somehow smarmy.  We wondered if this signaled contempt.  From my experience in the UK, I don't think it's only contempt (not always - though sometimes, yeah, it is) but sometimes ignorance or perhaps the inflections are just too weird to wrap one's mind around if one has learned British English first.

It was nice tonight to speak with people who could understand why I came back here to NYC and yet miss aspects of the UK at the same time (like oh say health care and a social safety net, funding for the arts, all that whacky stuff).  Barbara especially got it from the political and writerly angles - that the words don't work the same - they resonate differently (see above in re accents - imagine that transposed to all the varieties of word usage, subtleties of meanings and connotations, etc.) and the politics - as in where on earth can I stand politically if I'm an American in London without seeming like a total jerk?  The answer for the most part is: nowhere.  Even if I write plays that focus on US politics, it's like shooting at a barn in Britain and like who cares?

Coming back up to Inwood tonight from the Village by the subway and walking up the steps to the street, I once again remembered why I came back here.  I just love it.  No matter what, it's an effortless and a weirdly unconditional love.  I feel lucky somehow.  Don't even know why specifically, I just do.  I feel if I keep up this attempt at mindfulness and let myself believe from one breath to another that I can indeed begin again, all will be well.  That is if I don't get swallowed whole into the internet vortex.

Speaking of which, time now for bed...