The Dust Settles - Manhattan Spring 2003







Wednesday, 6 July, 2003

It's weird being Pascale today. I feel as if I've said everything that was in me. Of course I haven't. There's all kinds of stuff about my family and past I haven't yet gotten out.

But what it feels like is that to keep writing as I have been would be to just repeat myself. I feel like I've fallen into a rut with the kind of observations I've been making, the kinds of thoughts I have.

And how is it that other people seem to know so easily what they are thinking and feeling? When someone asks me what I'm thinking, I have to stop and think, and even then it sometimes slips away so deep I can't retrieve it. I often don't know until later, and by then it's too late. Why do I have this delayed reaction to life? Why can't I react in the moment.



And now - now, I feel so … disconnected from everyone. Like I don't fit in. Like these people aren't like me and can never really know me or appreciate me. And that I can never really know or appreciate them.

Isn't yoga supposed to help me become more connected to people? To feel more a part of the world, less separate???

Yet I feel so separate now!! I don't like it.



In the Chicago airport:

The last time I remember feeling this level of customer frustration was when I was stranded for three days at the Shanghai airport, and there was no rhyme nor reason to how they were canceling reservations and handing out new ones. Are we becoming the Third World? Where promises and contracts mean nothing? This isn't just an "act of God." This is an act of God poorly handled, by an airline that doesn't have to care. It's not like it's the first time they've had to deal with bad weather.

Of course, the good that came out of my stay at the Shanghai International Airport was that I met Brendan, with whom I then proceeded to spend a couple of months in a fling based mostly on ice cream.



Saturday, 2 July, 2003

I look at these people walking around town, dressed in suits, with full-time jobs - and I have to wonder if they suffer from what I was suffering from my last several months in Hong Kong. I wonder if they are so hungry for something that's missing that it hurts. Hurts deeply. Hurts so deeply that some days you don't want to get out of bed. That some days you actually think it would be easier not to be alive.

A multi-billion dollar a year anti-depressant industry suggests they might be. It also suggests that many of them never actually confront what's ailing them, and aren't even really aware of what's missing.

The danger for me, of course, is in thinking that I need people to be "needy" or lacking in order to benefit from my yoga classes.

I know what it's done for me, and I came to it at a time when I was very needy. Would I have benefited as much had I been happy, whole and strong? Can I still benefit from it now as much as I did then? (Or do I need to be in pain in order to grow, in order to create… and do I therefore create pain in my life so that I keep growing?)

That's the challenge for me as a student of yoga. And it's also a challenge for me as a teacher - to know that I have something to offer to someone who is whole. Even better: To know that I have something to offer to someone who is more whole than me.



Monday, 30 June, 2003

My grandfather, who I never knew, was a photographer. I wonder if he passed something along to his grandchildren. P is a photographer, and M, and me, with moving pictures.

I remember the first time I put a camera to my eyes - to really take pictures, I mean - and it was as if I had stepped into another world. A world where I had complete license to see. Suddenly, I had leapt from my own mind and the world I saw from it, out into the world itself. I felt like… like a voyager and a voyeur… like a ghost, allowed to walk around and look at things a real person couldn't. I felt like a spy. Like I wasn't really supposed to be doing this - looking so closely at everything - stepping into things to look at them - but that somehow, I was getting away with it anyway.

When I look at pictures of my grandfather, I can see that he got away with it too. His eyes have an almost faraway look - like a pilot's, but not distant, very present and very focused. It is the look of someone who has stepped outside of himself, and finds himself in awe of the world that he is allowed to see.

It's just the opposite of a computer programmer's eyes, come to think of it. Those are the eyes of a (usually) man who may never step outside of himself, or even fully believe in the world outside of his own mind. When it comes down to it, his final point of reference is his own internal logic, and at a deep level, that becomes more real to him than this messy, contrary, and sometimes stupid world that won't follow the algorithms he thinks it should.

A photographer doesn't expect the world to match up to his mind, to his internal logic. He doesn't need his own mind to be the final authority, and he doesn't fear a world that doesn't obey his rules. Instead, he is grateful to have been allowed outside of his own little box, grateful to be shown a world that is bigger than his own mind. And he just honors it by seeing it as truly as he can.



Saturday, June 28th, 2003

I'm walking down the street after dropping off my materials at P - and the director says I may be hearing from them soon, as they are looking for teachers (!!)

…and there's a guy - a garbage guy - emptying the city garbage cans on the street corner, and a few bottles fall out as he overturns one into the truck. One bottle is directly in front of me. I feel an urge to pick it up and toss it into the can, but then say to myself "no, I draw the line at picking up garbage for people." But as I walk by, and the moment passes, something sinks just below my heart. Something small, not big, but still… and I have learned something: That when god tells you to do something, do it. No matter how silly it may seem… just do it.



Later:

There's a guy across from me on the subway, dozing. His beautiful long thick lashes are perfectly balanced on his serene face, and he looks like a deity. A gentle, peaceful deity.

Yet I know when he wakes up he may become as ugly as anyone else here, and do evil to the people around him. I've already made the mistake of believing that because a man has a beautiful soul, he is true to it. Why don't people know how beautiful they are?



Friday, 27 June, 2003

WHOOOAA!!! Flying in pointe class!!! Doing the fish dip, getting lifted… and running and assemble-ing into his arms to have him whirl me around and around…

YAY!!!

Who needs sex?????



Later:

Sitting out on the stoop of a Park Slope brownstone, waiting for "Alex" to show up so I can buy his 13" $15 TV…

And as the last of the melon from the little fruit salad I'd bought at the corner bodega hits my stomach, this warm feeling of perfection oozes out from my belly and into my flesh, all of me. It's a combination of the perfection of the fruit - balancing my electrolytes, I guess - and having been in the sunshine just long enough that I begin to feel "soaked" - and the recent memory of flying in pointe class that makes me feel I've cheated both biology and economics for ONE MORE DAY…

But it's more than that. It's a satisfying, warm glow that doesn't actually mean anything. Just a feeling that, right now, on this stoop in Brooklyn, everything is perfect.



Tuesday, 17 June, 2003

Jenny and Melissa are different from me. They think it's hysterical that I wear makeup, and that I splash around in the bathroom and leave puddles on the counter. I can't understand why they don't want the window down in a land that smells so sweet, and prefer artificial air-conditioner air, or that Melissa won't sit on the grass for a picnic. I envy them the completely open channel of communication that is between them. It's as if everything that comes into their heads gets said - from the mundane tasks of packing or getting to the museum, to little slights and hurts, to the bigger issues, like is Melissa gay or not?

I envy it, but I also know that it's not entirely me. I would love to have that kind of open communication with someone about what I'm feeling in the moment, and what touches me, etc. But I can't seem to bring myself to want to talk about the mundane much. Is that bad? Does that mean I'll never be in a real relationship? Be really close to someone? It brings me back to my conversation with "Antonio" -- what we had in common was that we didn't want that constant stream of chatter.

For me, I'd rather be soaking in the streets of Florence, falling to my knees (if in mind only) to thank the beautiful dead who gave their lives to beauty. Who gave their lives so that centuries later, an American woman who has spent way too much time in Asia can have her faith in humanity restored.

I'm not even sure I want to be in a relationship. I like how I felt on my trip to Italy by myself (except when I wasn't.) I like feeling whole. But I'd like to be able to be whole with another person, and to let someone else into this life of my own that I've created. It's just hard to imagine.

Later

We are very different, Jenny and Melissa and I. Different tastes, different ways of living our lives, different values (except, I guess, the core ones.) But when I'm with them, I know I'm loved, and I hope they know the same.

Melissa thinks I should be "open" to my partner in life being a woman. She wasn't gay - and still isn't - yet she fell in love with Jenny and now they are together. I tried to explain to her why that wasn't possible for me, but I don't think she understands. She doesn't understand what it is to need sex from a man. And it's not just the penis. She says that sex isn't such an important part of the relationship for her. OK, fine. But it is for me.

And even if I found a woman I wanted to be with (or fell in love with one? God what would that be like?? To fall in love with a creature who couldn't give you what you needed?? But isn't that what I've just been through???) I know in my heart that I would still always want a man. And I couldn't start a relationship with someone knowing that I would always still want something else.



Monday, 16 June, 2003

Amboise, a little before 4:00pm.

I touched the grave of Leonardo Da Vinci. My first role model.



Saturday, 14 June, 2003

Carved in marble at the Trocadero, where we got really close to making it up the Eiffel Tower:

"Tout home cree sans le savoir
comme il respire.
Mais l'artiste se sent creer
Son acte engage tout son etre.
Sa peine bien aimee le fortifie."


…and on the other side…

"Il depend de celui qui passe
que je sois tombe ou tresor
que je parle ou me taise
ceci ne tient qu'a toi
ami n'entre pas sans desir."


(Or, the song of the pissy little French boy.)

I walk over to the other side, past the fountains gushing in the hot summer night. I'm wearing the lacey black halter top Heidi gave me, and my new blue stone necklace. Two young men walk by me. "Tres sensuelle," one says to me. I walk back in the light of the Eiffel Tower and see Jenny and Melissa from a distance, sitting on the ledge with our picnic, preparing the cheese, soaking in the lights and sounds, and I know these are my friends.



Friday, 11 June, 2003

Montbriac - OH YEAH!!!

Brie de Meaux too.



Wednesday, 11 June, 2003

On the plane to Paris.

You have to be a little bit drunk to appreciate the French. OK, and it helps if they're a little drunk too.

I'm starting to see something so clearly now - but not yet clearly enough to articulate it well. It's like this:

There's a kind of sexiness that a lot of people seem to think is hot, that is built on ego and power and emptiness. It's the sexiness of the movie "Chicago." The kind of "power" that can only emerge when there is an enemy.

The "sexiness" of desperate women and powerful men. The sexiness that treats sex as a weapon, a tool to get something else or to hurt someone.

The "sexiness" of a woman saying "I'm going to take what isn't mine." Saying "I'm going to prove my worth, prove how powerful I am by getting a man to fuck me."

And it's not sexy at all. Not to me. And it isn't just because I've been hurt by it. I've been on the other side too. I do know what it's like to feel so empty in myself that I need another woman's man to want me before I feel worthwhile.

And I also know that it doesn't satisfy. An itch, yes. And it gave me the same temporary relief, the same sense of "fullness" that watching X-Files re-runs in Hong Kong did. That relief from the loneliness, that illusion that the people on the TV screen are your friends, and everything is OK.

But, thankfully, a part of me knows that TV friends are not the same as real friends.

And that same part of me is trying to put into words something else that it knows: That sex driven by ego, sex that only answers to the ego, only seeks to satisfy the ego, is not... what? What is it that it's not? I'm not sure what the name for it is. It's more than love, it's love and sex, but more than just the two. It's something else on it's own.

What I am clear about is that ego-driven sex is not really sexy to me. It doesn't satisfy below the ego, where the real hunger is. It can be titillating, or at least it could once. But I am way beyond titillating. What I want is something that is deeply exciting. And wild, and has nothing to do with ego or illusion. Now if only I had a name for it…



Tuesday, 10 June, 2003

And now here I am in my next crisis, my next "opportunity for growth"! I completely SUCKED in my yoga class today, and here's why: I was intimidated by the students. I'm used to real beginners, people who know little or nothing about yoga, and this time they were all intermediates. Maybe it would have been different had I not just read an article in Yoga Journal deriding health club yoga instructors who get their certification in a weekend. The self doubt set in and it didn't leave. It still hasn't.

So… because of this intimidation, I shied away from getting in and giving feedback, correcting postures. I only corrected what was egregiously wrong, instead of helping them to improve an already pretty good pose.

I didn't think I had anything to offer. I was - and am - afraid I didn't know what I was doing. Didn't know what corrections to give. And it's true. I don't know as much as I want to. I don't feel confident in my knowledge.

But I do believe that I know enough to have something to offer even at an intermediate level. I believe that most of what was stopping me was just plain fear and self consciousness. Being more worried about how I was coming across than I was about giving a good class.

This is the next hurdle for me to get over. The next barrier to break through.

I want to be a good yoga teacher. This is important.

What I have to give requires looking beyond the correctness of a pose. It requires having a vision of the possible beauty of a pose, the dance in it, the way it moves the spirit. It requires looking beyond the bodies of my students and at their souls. And then adjusting them to better let their souls be expressed through their bodies.

This all sounds airy-fairy - it's not. It's as simple as seeing that someone's chest - and therefore her heart - could be more open. Or that someone could push a little further up in his hips in wheel, and in doing so, push through a little fear.

I know what these poses mean and say to MY soul: I know how they have opened it up, and opened up the channels of feeling. I ALREADY KNOW this. I just need to look - to look into someone - and I will see what is required.

It is scary. Because I don't "know" much. But I am being guided by God, as well as by my teachings. I need to remember that.



Sunday, 1 June, 2003

So I'm taking the class of the girl I'll be taking over for, and she's really good, and gives detailed corrections, and I'm being lame - probably not as lame as I think, but still lame, and I'm thinking "great - she's going to go to Y. and tell her I'm no good, that I have no business teaching a yoga class and she doesn't want to hand hers over to me…"

Blah blah blah blah blah!!

…all this self-doubt and self-deprication… and then I think "it's my punishment for getting stuck in dark thoughts about D. and that's put me on a bad path and I'll lose this job because of it"

Blah blah blah blah blah!!!

And then, kind of gently, it occurs to me: I'm meant to be here. I'm meant to be teaching yoga - giving yoga. It's what I'm here for.

Later:

What's next:

Art without Pain.

Can I create great art - art that is deeply fulfilling - that is not based on torment?

Living on the edge. And dancing on the edge - what M. was talking about. That when a dancer is dancing right up on the edge, it's exciting, and people feel that.

It's always taken pain or disaster or deep frustration - something missing - to drive me to the edge.

The challenge I am setting myself now is: To live on the edge without having to be pushed there. To go to the edge in search of beauty and love and great excitement.

And bliss?



Friday, 16 May, 2003

I love the sound my shoes make coming down the sidewalk to my house. The way they echo off the trees that line the street, and make a sound that says "nicely-lit residential street where people sit out on their stoops and kids play loudly in the street."

And I love the sounds from my bathroom on a morning like today's: gulls crying, a lonely train calls out, and there is the smell of the rain and the sea in the air.



Thursday, 8 May, 2003

The challenge for an artist is to find inspiration when you are not in pain.



Monday, 5 May, 2003

Confronting the fear of turning - pirouettes - is really the fear of falling. It's the same fear of leaving someone you love.



Friday, 2 May, 2003

Men don't realize that they need women in order to be complete, and so they stumble without us.

And women don't realize that we don't need men in order to be complete - and so we stumble without them.



Thursday, 1 May, 2003

I'm not after "fun." I'm after ecstasy.



Wednesday, 30 April, 2003

Men are illusions. Sex - phenomenal as it is - is a distraction from what is real. Yes, it is a connection to what is real, to God, through someone else. But the thing is, if you don't have that connection to God on your own, then you cling to sex out of neediness, because you think you need this other person in order to touch God.

And you don't.

Yes, you need them to touch God IN THAT PARTICULAR WAY. But you don't need them to touch God. And until you learn to touch God on your own, the other ways will be blocked. You can have sex, but you'll start sucking off of it, our of need, not love. And ballet, too. I suck too much from it now, and give too little when I forget that it must come from love.



M. said today: There's something about dancing right on the edge - when you're reaching further than you can go, pushing yourself just a little further… that people see that and it is exciting. She is right.

And that's what thrills me about dance. Those times when I push myself to the edge. Or let the music take me there. When I let myself be just one step ahead of the music, as if it is moving through me and I don't have to wait to hear it before I respond to it. I hear it before it is there. Right before. That's being on the edge too.



Tuesday, 29 April, 2003

I'm angry that my Nana is gone. How stupid is that? How can I be angry that people die eventually? After 103 years!!! Peacefully, with no pain??? What right do I have to be angry about it??

Because we're all so helpless against it. Because we had no say in the matter. Someone did it to us. And it's not fair.



Wednesday, 23 April, 2003

I am so sick of the culture that says: "Let's pretend sex is inconsequential;" "Let's fuck, and later just be friends;" "Let's join our bodies and souls and then, after 'it doesn't work out,' let's meet for coffee every once in a while to talk about our 'lives.'" It says: "Let's be above these earthly passions, let's transcend sex into friendship - to something pure and spiritual."

Well, you fucking idiots, you aren't transcending anything. You aren't above anything. You're just in denial about the spiritual power that sex does have. You want to separate the two - to say you can have sex without soul, and to go even farther and say you can only have soul without sex.

Well you're all numb. You've blinded yourselves to the most powerful light there is on this earth. And God help you.



Tuesday, 22 April, 2003

My Nana died this morning. God, what final words. It's a thing that can only happen once. And it's not quite history yet, not yet quite real.

So many people will be rocked by this. So many people are crying today. I can see them all now: stopping the things they were doing, putting down the things that were so important, that absolutely had to be done today, leaving them for another day and just stopping. Stopping and rocking back and forth, letting it hit them so they can begin to grieve.

My first reaction - before it really set in - was relief. We knew it was coming, and soon. I didn't dread her dying, all I dreaded was that maybe she would live in agony for a while first. Or as a vegetable. That would have made it bad. But dying, at 103, when your body is just worn out… that's not bad in itself. Still, even though we all knew better, at some level we expected her to be around forever. She was - and is - such a central part of who we all are. You can't imagine that not there anymore. And of course, she is still with us in our memories and the stories we tell about her, and in us.

As soon as I got off the phone, I looked at the shelves I had put up two days ago. Right after getting off an airplane, groggy and exhausted. But I had to put those shelves up. I had to make this place my home, and put things where they belonged.

And no offense to my parents, but I know I didn't get that from them.

I'm going to spend the rest of today making this place my home. I'm going to go through all my clothes and take out the ones I don't wear anymore for the Salvation Army, and put away the rest - where they belong. I'm going to do my dishes, and put in my silverware holders and clean up my kitchen - even the floor. I won't deal with the outside world today. The DSL service that absolutely had to get resolved today or I was going to rip my hair out can wait another day. Everything can wait another day. Everything except being my Nana's granddaughter.



Saturday, 12 April

When people talk about how men and women are different about sex, I think all they mean is that men are less evolved, less conscious. They can have meaningless sex easily, not because sex means something different to them from what it means to us, but because they are ignorant, or numb, to what it means to them.

Lots of women know what this is like too - I do. I remember when I could have cheap sex and not think it affected me. And it wasn't because it meant less to me then, or affected me less. It was because I was afraid of what it meant. And I threw up walls of steel to protect myself from anyone really getting close to me.



Saturday, 5 April, 12:28am

Coming back from watching videos at Leslie's - I go into the City Hall N/R/W station. The entrance to the uptown side is taped off, so I go up to the booth and ask the guy where I can catch an uptown N/W. Go to Brooklyn Bridge, he says, take the 4/5/6 up.

I thank him and turn and head for the exit. I hear a thunk behind me, and turn to see a wet floor sign that I must have knocked over with my coat. I look at the group of military men behind the bars of the downtown platform, and I leave the sign on the floor where it fell. I walk to the stairs, where three or four more military guys in black are heading up. One of them carries a long thick tube. Another carries two boxes with antennae, which he waves in front of him. I don't have to guess what they are. Radiation detectors. Little gadgets to use to try and detect whether this entire city is going to be vaporized in an instant.

And when I get outside, I look down Broadway, towards his apartment, and I notice how differently I feel now about the prospect of him dying. How numb I feel to it. Or did I ever feel anything else? Did I just make it all up because it was what I thought I was supposed to feel? Was he right that I only loved the IDEA of him?

No. He wasn't. That I still remember. I didn't make up my love for him. I didn't imagine that, or concoct it. It was real. Maybe it still is. Maybe that's why I'm eating so much lately. Maybe that's the feeling I'm trying to squelch. The truth that I still love him, even though I can't have him, even though he disgusts me, even though he hurt me. And my brain can't bear the contradiction. Can't reconcile the opposing truths.

And I really didn't like what I felt earlier tonight - a numbness at the prospect of his death. The possibility that he could come to mean nothing to me. My brain can't reconcile that either. Or is it just pride? Not wanting to believe I'm the kind of person who could stop loving someone so easily, that my love is so small.

But there's something else eating at me. It's not just pride. Maybe what my brain can't handle - what my body is so upset about - is that I do still love him. Even though he is no longer a part of my life, even though I've had to rip him out of my flesh and heart in order that I can go on living, even though he is destructive of himself and those around him. I do still love him, and that's not going to die. Maybe not ever. This love doesn't die. The others did, but I don't think this one is going to.

I don't mean I'm going to carry a torch, or that I still want him, or am still in love with him. That one? I honestly don't know the answer to that. I think the answer is: I will not allow myself to be in love with him anymore.

But the love that I have for him won't be allowed or disallowed. I am not powerful enough to stop it. And I guess I shouldn't try.



Later:

The man standing Christ-like at the ticket booth at the Ditmars station. We all have this need to be heard, to be known, and some of us are still painting on caves.



Saturday, 5 April, 2003

In the W train, trying to get back to Joan's.

"Ladies and gentlemen, because of a police investigation at Astoria Boulevard station, Queens, all W trains are terminating at 57th Street…"

And now we're stopped in the tunnel between 23rd and 28th because the trains are backed up.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, because of a police investigation in Astoria, at Astoria Boulevard… next stop 34th Street! Stand clear of the closing doors please!"

What he didn't understand is that attachment doesn't cancel out love.



Thursday, 3 April, 2003

Yoga

Tapas: "The desire must be hot." And I think: Well, mine's not. My desire for ballet is. To dance on pointe. I'll do anything for that. My desire is hot there. But not here. Warm, yes, but not hot. Why not? Because I'm afraid. Afraid of what I will have to give up if I am totally devoted to union with the higher self ("yoga".) And what do I think I will have to give up? THINGS I DON'T EVEN HAVE. Earthly love. Sex. My desires. I guess what I fear is letting go of wanting the things I don't have.

And I realized: There is a love "out there" that I haven't even experienced yet, and that I cannot even imagine. I don't even know what this love is. Can I be devoted to that? Can my desire be hot for that which I can't even see, or imagine? Is that faith?

Anyway, I'm stoking the fire now, under my yoga practice - my reaching for yoga. It may not be hot now, but it will be.



(For pre-April blogging, see my even earlier archives.)