Breathing fast and slow

For months now, all my youngest has talked about is the perks of being a wallflower , a book by Stephen Chbosky. Last summer, she saw the movie, then, she read the book. When it was time to get a copy of the book, my daughter wanted her father to buy her the copy with the faces of the cast members from the movie on the cover. Naturally, that way she could revisit them over and over while reliving the scenes from the movie as she read the book. However, the only copy the bookstore had when my husband arrived to buy the book was the other version, the original version, the version of the book with the cover before the movie was made. This version was without those familiar face; those faces that made my daughter fall in love with the story even more. You know, because she had already fallen in love with them when she saw them in the film. She survived this disappointment in the way all 12-year-old girls survive this kind of thing, by insisting that she was not going to like this copy o

"I keep losing and gaining my equilibrium, which is the basic plot of all popular fiction. And I myself am a work of fiction."  Kurt Vonnegut Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons (1974)  Is nonfiction permitted a basic plot, and if so, what the hell is it? I'm wondering tonight whether Plato ever fell out of favor with Socrates, and if so, how Plato might have felt about it. We expect a lot of our teachers, and I suppose at some level that's just how it goes. And perhaps that is the right and proper way of things. I can say this with some authority from both sides of the aisle--or, rather, chalkboard--because, while I have considerable experience being a student, I am also a teacher. Not of yoga, mind you, but a teacher nonetheless, with a skill set and considerable expertise, all set upon a foundation of being endlessly, fallibly human. So I get it, falling out of favor. I also understand the feeling of not measuring up or of constantly trying to. As a

Like you, I have a story that I have used to create my life. Sometimes the story gets in the way, and I have to talk to it like a patient mother talks to an insistent child. Sometimes that works. Other times, I am the awkward mother or the frightened mother, or the very busy mother with important things to do, and I do not know how to approach this child. I might say that I don't have time, but I will also wonder how this story became so big and me so small standing next to it. Granted, there are those times when I understand the place of this story in my life, and together we hum along with great compassion for one another. Of course during these compassion-fests I think to myself, ah, now I am aware, now I have arrived, now I will be free from this story, and before long I find that I have grown small again, not unlike Alice growing and shrinking inside that house. Grasping and rejecting. Their allures seem endless: This experience, but not that one. That pose, but not this one