I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope/ For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,/ For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith/ But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
[T.S. Eliot]

Meet Lucy. In spite of the dear German friends who recently visited and pointed out that babies, technically, are extremely small humans incapable of things like walking or talking, Lucy likes to refer to herself as Beh-bee, and because she knows from going to the playground and from her favorite book (Where is Baby’s Belly Button?) that the world is populated with other babies, she clarifies her meaning by extending her thumb and index finger as far as they will go, bending her wrist at a right angle, and stabbing herself near the breastbone with her pointer.

If I ask her, bist du ein Wuselbär? (are you a chaos bear?) she gives one minimalist head shake and says “no!” in a small, flat, authoritative voice, like a mildly irritated two-foot-tall teacher. There is a clear implication that I ought to have known better. This is how she always says no, whether I am asking her about eating sweet potatoes or telling her that it is time to change her diaper. (Unless she is talking to inanimate objects which are not behaving as she wants them to, in which case it is a hollow, tragic nooooooooo, noooooooo. She said this into the sink the other night when the plastic spinach box she was filling with water tipped over.) Though her no to humans does not vary in execution, it varies greatly in meaning: seconds after pronouncing it in response to the question about sweet potatoes, she may reach for the spoon, dig out a huge chunk of orange mash, hold it in the air with wide eyes and say “Waaaaa-ooooooowww!” before trying to fit it all in her mouth.

The only are you a…? question she will not answer with no! is bist du ein Waschbär, to which she says “Va-pff!” A Waschbär is a wash-bear, which is what Germans call raccoons because they wash their food. It is not clear whether she is agreeing to being a wash-bear or whether the word just combines two things she loves so much that she cannot help repeating it. From her point of view, the most noteworthy objects in any room are sinks and stuffed animals. Sinks she adores because they have faucets, and faucets produce water. When I washed my hands, I used to be startled by a wail coming from just above my right knee: Lucy, wanting the water. Recently, I often feel something firm pushing at my calf, and turn to find her dragging the plastic step stool toward the sink. Her favorite sink to play in is the kitchen one, with the faucet on a hose that telescopes out and back. The other night I came downstairs to find her standing on tiptoe on a backwards chair scooted up to the sink, next to Jim, who was rinsing dishes to put in the dishwasher. She had the red dish brush in her hand, and was leaning as far as she could into the sink (which is hard when it comes to chest height), scrubbing one spot on the bottom of our biggest frying pan in total concentration.

Stuffed animals inspire only slightly less devotion. When she was (even by German standards) almost still a baby, and could barely pull herself up the upright wooden bars of her crib, we ordered three stuffed foxes with plush, cream-and-rust-colored heads and arms, ribbon bows at their throats and ‘bodies’ made of a small white velour blanket lined with satin. For reasons I can’t remember that had to do with first-time parenting indecision, we presented one of them to her much too late into her bedtime routine, when she was already in bed in the nook curtained off from our bedroom, in the half-dark, with no time to get used to it. She loved it instantly, stretching her arms out toward it and laughing with delight at the barely-visible embroidered eyes and nose, the fact of its having a face. This has, since, been her response to all stuffed animals. Beh-beh is the gray teddy bear that is as big as she is (he used to be twice her size). The beanie baby bear of Jim’s (“Huntley,” according to the heart-shaped tag still attached to his ear) is Beh-bee Beh. The raccoon (roughly the size of her torso) that was her uncle Nick’s is, of course, Va-pff. And the triplet foxes, Fuchs in German, one of whom stays in her crib, and one of whom stays at the grandparents’, and one of whom lives in our closet as backup, is Fwa. Today, Beh-beh helped her consent to a toothbrushing (by getting his teeth brushed first). Beh-bee Beh helps her stand diaper changes. Fwa is such a strong sleep cue that when one of his incarnations got loose in the living room during the move from Durham to Portland, she wrapped her arms around him and slumped into a toddler tripod, face down, knees under her, bottom in the air. And Va-pff is always a long-lost best friend, embraced with outstretched arms and cries of greeting.

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

   
   

[Richard Wilbur, who died this past Sunday, October 15th, 2017. From New and Collected Poems, 1988.]

We’re parents. Not that anything can really be summarized about having a baby, but when a friend asked me recently what my favorite part of parenting was, I thought about it for a long time and then said, this:

(Wilhelm Wundt is a German psychophysicist, which means someone who’s trying to do experimental psychology with a sense of the connectedness of body and spirit. 19th century Germany.)

Here it is in German:

„Eine Autorität wird aber von uns Modernen leichter geduldet, wenn sie ihren Namen verloren hat und man glücklich dahin gelangt ist, Meinungen von einer verhältnismässig kurzen Vergangenheit für so einleuchtend und notwendig anzusehen, dass man anfängt, sie für angeborene Ideen eines jeden denkenden Menschen zu halten.“ („Die Aufgaben der Experimentellen Psychologie“)

And my translation:

“But we suffer an authority more willingly if it has lost its name, and we are in the happy state of seeing relatively recent opinions as so obvious and necessary that we begin to assume they must be the innate ideas of any thinking person.” (“The Tasks of Experimental Psychology”)

and then he fell in love with time lapse photography. Here is our apartment, downstairs, overnight.

I find it really beautiful — the sinuous way the light moves. And the moment where there’s light but not quite enough yet, and the camera hasn’t found a way to focus, like it has good, tender things to teach me.

Or maybe what I want is a theology of competition. In particular: what kind of competition will there be in heaven?

Here’s what I mean: take stories. As the Lemony Snicket books so cleverly humorize, a book in which nothing bad ever does or could happen to the protagonist(s) is not a book anyone, generally speaking, is ever interested in reading. Stories (as far as I can tell) simply do not work without conflict; and conflict (as far as I can tell) always involves the possibility or reality of misfortune, or pain, or evil, or loss, or something else we wish (in our own lives) did not exist in the world. This doesn’t seem merely a question of verisimilitude, either; it’s not just that we find conflictless stories unrealistic — we find them boring. So what does that do for stories in heaven? My conclusion here has been that we won’t know till we get there, and that our fallen imaginations are part of what keep us from knowing — but there will be stories in heaven, and they will be interesting, and they will not depend for their interest on the presence of evil.

I need to find some kind of similar way to think about conflict in game-playing. Lately even chess has felt overwhelming and brutal (all that thinking ahead has always felt overwhelming, so I guess that part isn’t a change). But especially games like Risk, or other territorial games that have for their basic game-logic a version of the equation “scarcity + need = violence; violence + violence = a winner and a loser” have felt really difficult to enjoy.

And on the one hand, I think my feelings are right; the world is plenty brutal without our also killing each other in board games. But on the other hand, I feel like I am missing something. I don’t actually believe that in order to enjoy Risk (or chess, or Mafia), one must be a secretly homicidal maniac. Of course all these games can be played viciously and with intent to dominate and harm; but that’s not what I have in mind. I think they can also be played without that intent, and then I think they can be played with good aims, but aims that are still tied up in competition. So what are the good aims? What if competition is actually not about the high of winning, but about a process, and about learning that happens during that process? What’s that learning? How can we teach children (or forget children: how can I teach myself) to enjoy that in competing, rather than to enjoy the high of winning and dread the low of losing, and buy into the false belief that winning makes me more valuable and losing makes me less?

[Thank you, Heather!]

[Thank you, Heather Thomas.]

Welcome. My name is Stephanie. Before we start our practice tonight, I’m going to tell you some things about what I hope you’ll get out of this class, and out of yoga in general. One is an improved relationship to your body. That includes an increase in general physical well-being—I hope you go out tonight feeling physically better than you did when you came in. And if something hurts after class that didn’t before, don’t ignore that—pay attention to it, ask for help (I’m happy to talk after class, or during class). But more than just feeling better in your body, I hope that yoga will help you listen better to your body, to accept it exactly as it is and not to feel like you need to force it to be what it is not. Part of what yoga can do is help you practice that listening. It seems like something that should be obvious and natural but it isn’t obvious to most of us most of the time. So begin by accepting that listening is something you’ll need to learn, and practice, and grow into. And then start noticing. What feels good in your body? Where does it feel good? How does it feel good? What hurts? Where? How? And what are the things you can do, in long-term and short-term ways, to be kind and help your body feel good?

In this listening, pain is not an enemy but a friend. Pain is your body talking to you, telling you something that is true about it. One of the key skills in yoga is to learn to distinguish between two different kinds of pain. The first is your body saying “this is breaking me somehow.” Joint pain is in this category, most kinds of spinal pain, neck pain, lower back pain, wrist and knee and ankle pain. These need physical responses and adjustments—if you’re feeling them, reposition yourself in the pose or go out of the pose into child’s pose or downward-facing dog, or any other pose that feels good. Nothing I say should ever keep you in a pose when you are feeling this kind of pain.

The second kind of pain is part physical, but partly emotional. It’s the internal freakout, the “my thighs and shoulders are burning, I can’t possibly hold this, is she out of her mind, when will this end, this is completely unreasonable, why did I come to this stupid class, how is it not over yet.” The next gift yoga has to give to you, beyond increased physical well-being and a better listening relationship to your body, is an increased ability to deal with this kind of pain. Yoga can help you realize that things that feel impossible are not impossible. Yoga can help train the internal muscle that lets you stay in the places where what you want most is to get out, but all the attempts to get out are, in the end, only increased sources of pain. You know these places—places where you numb yourself with food or drugs or chattering or exercise or entertainment. Or places where you try to control your way out of the pain. Or fight your way out. Or run your way out. These are the places in your life that feel like quicksand, and the more you thrash the faster you sink. So the poses in yoga where it feels impossible, where your body is not giving you “I’m breaking” signals but it still feels impossible, unreasonable, unfair—those are places where there is an invitation for you. You may stay, and you may stay fully present, and learn to hold still in the quicksand, and feel how you stop sinking, and feel that your feet can ground you into the floor and your breath can keep you alive, and feel I can do this, I can be here, I can feel this and not die, because I felt like I was dying thirty seconds ago but I didn’t die, I’m still here.

German Scrabble

[jellyfishdumplingcookingpot; thank you, Antonia.]