copyright 2012 Hula Cat Press
all rights reserved
cover art and design by Ava Greene
technical assistance by Fann Aquinaldo
back cover photo by Joel Markman 1999
No part of this book may be copied, reproduced, or used in any way without express permission from Hula Cat Press or the author.
The names and characters in “Some Swamis are Fat” are fictitious, used for literary purposes only. Any similarity to actual living persons is coincidental.
Library of Congress no. 2012947131
ISBN 978-1-938691-09-6
ISBN: 9781938691089
At least 15% of the proceeds from this book go to protecting wilderness, wildlife, all creatures, and oceans from human violation, insensitivity, and ignorance.
P.O. Box 510058
Kealia, HI 96751
hulacatpress@gmail.com
To Dad
you are my sunshine
With sincere thanks to Kathleen Frederick for encouragement to publish this book, and for her sound editorial advice.
&
Mahalo Ke Akua
EXPLORING THE DAWN
“Exploring the Dawn,” I thought, “my next book.” Two doves in the courtyard immediately took flight. “What I need to do for the next part of my life is explore the dawn.”
I must do this.. I’ve explored every other part of the day and night—I practically own two a.m. But I’m fried. And so are my owlish excuses. It will take me a while to get to the dawn. There’s something about writers and the middle of the night. It’s called silence.
I have here a photo of Mark Twain that was taken by Alfred Steiglitz in 1879. Just knowing the two of them were in the same room that day is nice. These were cool guys. The photo is striking—who knew Mark Twain was handsome?—and somehow represents why I must explore the dawn….they explored their “dawns. A new dawn is always in us, but we must constantly find it. My strategy is to go to the actual dawn to somehow access that elusive metaphysical one.
And so, as I meditate on my miraculous life, I find in the mailbox today a brown governmental envelope from the California State Tax Board with a check inside for $803., from two tax years ago. I looked up at the ceiling, “What do you want me to use this for?”
“Write,” was the answer. It seems indulgent succumbing to fun. But you wonder where the resistance comes from.
Loving one’s self is the journey. Like loving your pet or your car. Loving your digs, your friends, your life’s work. Loving anything. Yet we ride around in these selves with either exterior or interior neglected most of the time.
We aren’t taught to care for ourselves. In school we should learn less about algebra, less about frog innards and past wars, and take on: Nutrition, Solar Power, Capitalism vs. Ecology, Parenting,.(Dismantling Big Pharma might be useful, and Bicycle Maintenance.) Why do we have to wait till we’re grown-ups to figure out how to live? Past Wars would be an elective, along with Chemistry and Trigonometry.
When you compare the physical condition of our hospitals to that of our schools, there’s the tell-all. The salary of doctors to the salary of teachers. When you compare what’s on television to what’s outside a kid’s apartment door, no wonder everyone chooses the virtual experience.
One of my ultimate Earthly pleasures this past year has been teaching yoga…not unlike swimming in a clear turquoise bay with your eyes open underwater, marveling at the blues below and the sun-streaked powdery yellow above. Teaching yoga is a wonderful glide between the real, the sensual, the finite and the infinite. We often leave our skin and merge into softer, intuitive realms. I love the peculiarities of each class, each little group—that day, that hour—with no agenda, just open souls. We expand within our bodies, alone in the safest way. Quietly, we’re striving and learning, then resting and releasing. And when the hour-and-a-half is over, we’ve been somewhere.
It’s an honor to be presented with open souls. There’s no past or future, just today’s energy and today’s calm. And the money that comes in the mail from the yoga studio seems more like a gift than a paycheck.
THE WRONG SIDE OF DAWN
March 14, 1999 - 3:20 a.m.
The dawn I explore is always through the back door, the three a.m. or four a.m. entrance. Usually under heavy lids, intangible guilt, and a curious thrill of the moment. So far, that’s been my trajectory.
My angels and demons usually square off around one a.m., then they joust wildly until I finally collapse. The angels steer me straight as they prep and prime me for resistance, take care of me, distract me from trouble like an older sibling. But they’re only victorious before we get to the battleground. If temptation makes it past these sweet gatekeepers, and knocks, I fling open the door. And then I want everything NOW. There is no tomorrow, no consequence. I’m Everything Anonymous, The Moment Anonymous, Twelve-Step Everything. My yins and yangs charge each other over certain chocolates and cookies and late night ice cream. And once these wars start, my devils win.
But last night, as I settled like cement into my downy bed, I decided to let nature take its course. If I’m a burn-out, then a burnout I will be. If I never attain the yogic pedestal of perfect lifestyle, I shall be the un-yogi who wrote about polarities.
I decided that this vision I clutch in my psyche of my optimal self is not who I am. It is who I was. Yet when I was that younger, fresher entity, I was clutching a different perfected vision of myself, the vision of who I could become. In other words, I’ve never actually been who I really am at that moment.
And that is what I’d like to do now.
THE WRONG SIDE AGAIN
March 17, 1999 - 2:25 a.m.
“Diary of an Un-yogi.” I didn’t eat sugar for five years. I’ve been eating it again for three months now. I don’t even like it, but am letting myself do this. It’s the other side of something… like that other side of dawn. And it’s these other sides that tug us psychologically, through which we somehow carve a path called “my life.” It’s a balancing act. And it’s probably more fun to be the clown up on the high wire than the perfect ballerina.
So, if the ducks are out of line—the sugar, the bedtime, the creative voice making up new phraseology—guess I’ll just take the ride and trust the destination.
When I was seven and eight and nine, I wanted to take acrobatic lessons. Instead, I was given piano lessons. Periodically, I’d pitch the A-word again. The response: cello lessons. And choir practice.
“Horseback riding lessons,” I pleaded. The response: clarinet.
By the time I extricated myself from music, at eleven, it was clear that handsprings and horses weren’t coming from Mom and Dad, so I became self-sufficient. I’d get my kicks out there on my own. There was no way I would be understood by anyone who thought sitting in a stuffy room after school with your tiny legs wrapped around a cello was good for a kid. So I found thrills on the other side of honesty, and to keep my secret, created an ornery wall around my heart that Mom and Dad could never dismantle or suss. And boy did I have a yahoo time on that other side. For many years, I did gymnastics around the law. And cello music, to this day, sounds somber to me.
Then my older sister became not just a high school gymnast, but a performer extraordinaire. She claimed the domain of handstands, walkovers, back walkovers, while I cart-wheeled clumsily on the sidelines as a cheerleader. But I had my own clandestine territory—crime—which in those days translated to real nice clothes.
I’m forty-eight now, and over the years thoughts of acrobatics always crept in (What if…), and, more importantly, the thoughts about how crucial it is to really listen to children. (“Listening” could be another course in that updated school.) And also, if you can, really listen to yourself. What I heard when I listened was that forty years and a zillion pursuits later, I still miss those acrobatic lessons.
So last Wednesday I took a class.
There were seven or eight of us in this “adult class, open to all levels” and I was the only one over seventeen. I was also the only one still improving my cartwheel. The rest could’ve easily been in a Cirque du Soleil rehearsal. For warm-ups they did sideways splits.
The moral of the story, though, comes from Julie, a small, lithe gymnast, who at seventeen told me that because she’d stopped practicing for five years somewhere between ages six and seventeen, she’d totally blown it and could now never be professional.
“We all always feel like we’re too old for everything,” I told her. “It’s ridiculous. And you telling me this at seventeen, when I’ve been watching you all evening doing half a dozen back flips in a row, and I’m here at forty-eight learning a backwards somersault, is the icing on the cake.” I think she actually heard me.
All the kids were wonderfully accepting, illustrating no shock at my being there. By the end they even had me teaching them yogic headstands, as, ironically, it became clear to me that conscious, careful yoga is vastly superior to hurl-yourself-around-the-room acrobatics. Painstaking in every physical regard and a hundred times safer. I realized that I’ve satisfied and continue to satisfy my need for physical challenge through yoga. And, with that, my childhood deprivation was exorcised.
I didn’t quite know what to say when the young troupe urged me to come back next week. They wouldn’t understand why one class was all I needed; when I confessed that I was glad to have survived this one, they chuckled at my “humor.” But after studying yoga, the endless repetition approach—eighteen cartwheels in a row—seems forced and unwise. I had a good time, though, and laughed all the way home.
LIBERATED WOMAN—AN OXYMORON
March 27, 1999 - 6:15 a.m.
I have a tale to tell that’s soaked in tears of profound love and regret. Regret that remains as a wet ball of tissue in my fist and a hazy amber glow on the bedroom wall that’s both the quiet dawn and the unconditional spirit of my mother. I’ve tried to make light of it my whole life, but in the end, if there is an end, it’s like a drink of someone’s blood, a carpet woven with someone’s dreams. It’s everything spilled.
And the ghostly glow at the foot of my bed lingers, saying, “I’ll sit with you here every morning while you take the time you need, the hours or the years, to tell me. Tell me, darling. Tell me. Why are you crying, and why were you crying then? What is the ache you wore like a gash but refused to explain? I am your mother.” There’s a box of tissues by my bed that I sense may be as necessary as my pen in getting this down.
In the corner, beside my mother’s glow, is an antique lamp. I wonder if Mom would like the lamp. She preferred newer things. The lamp was probably made right around the year she was born, 1923, though the man at the flea market was only guessing. Looking at that soft patch of sunlight beside it on the wall this morning, I’m reminded how Sonny and I came to the conclusion that Mom’s spirit sometimes communicates with us through lights, and in all the symbolism of the word “light”—laughter, buoyancy, enlightenment. Perhaps Mom is the spirit of my lamp, inhabiting that corner.
I knew Mom for almost nineteen years. One of the comforting things about her, when she sits on my bed every now and then, or joins me on a late night walk, is that she’s easy to hear. I know her, I know what she would say. I know her take and her motherliness.
Maybe if she hadn’t been such a good mother… Maybe she took all that too seriously. Maybe if she’d been my pal…
Somehow it seems everything’s gotten watered down in this wash of survival, like there really isn’t time to feel as intensely as one did before. Don’t go there, go to the bank instead, do some laundry. The either/or of daily living now. Either work and survive, or…everything else: write, cook, sew, feel, help, plant flowers, and feed animals.
So, deliberately and with kid gloves, I’m slowing down, taking my life quietly back to subtler places. Smaller sensations, quieter hours, more colors. Five different shades of grey on white paper are suddenly thrilling. Tints of whites and creams, iciness, pale gold, crispy linen. Against black. Or maroon, or weird colors I never cared for, like all depths of brown and its million suggestions from sand to adobe to buffalo fur. All the implications and journeys of each color spill out before me. I’m taking the little trips.
At the expense of certain friendships, long distance calls, romance, and the eternal stock market. None of these will go away; they’ll always take me back. But the moments won’t wait. The hungry alley cat darting across the midnight, that glow by the lamp, this inside out stretching to curve fatigue and memory into some new weave. Something that goes against the grain of Los Angeles, like riding your bike in the fast lane of the freeway. I’m doing it. At the expense of my looks, that I keep hoping will circle back. But it’s another kind of circles I get.
Looking around these papers, colors, and clothes, the floor is like tilled land and I’m spring planting. For others, couches and television. For me, farming. Every patch of land in my one-bedroom place is being mulched, tended, even composted. It’s organic and experimental farming, with bare feet. Lots of bending and hard work well into the night and often before sunrise. There’s just a lot to do. To sort things out, to write, to think, to feel, to place, to share, expand, create, build, grow, to have fun. Taking ownership.
My…self. What if “self” meant “holy place”?
THE RIGHT SIDE OF MIDNIGHT
April 6, 1999 - 11:25 p.m.
Lenora is a movie star. I’d compare her to somebody known, but she’s incomparable and that’s her stardom. Lenora is this exquisite equation with youth torturing her grace. This twenty-nine-year-old slender beauty has it all, but stays committed to her confusion.
Must she leave that baggy shirt hanging off one shoulder? Must she keep three cats locked in an empty flat on the seventh floor of the Marlborough Apartment Building in downtown L.A.? Here’s this playful creature who swims in the ocean and walks in the night, voluptuous female, photographer’s dream, endearingly kind, adorably descriptive, in love with the bigness of life, but can she clean her apartment? Can she stop whining that the guy’s not good enough?
“You know those movies where they’re chasing the bad guys and the cops kick open the apartment door?” I asked her.
“Yeah?”
“And then the camera pans around and there’s just pizza boxes, broken chairs, and carpets with holes, then the cops ransack the place?”
“Yeah?”
“Your place is worse than that.”
Lenora has all the tools. The artist’s idea, the writer’s perspective, the dreamer’s vision, the pragmatist’s durability, the depth of soul, the willingness to feel and even to change. She changes. She listens, learns, and grows. She has ‘thirties style, Eastern European smoldering gorgeousness to make the screen sizzle. Cast her as the lead and there’s your Academy Award.
Does she have any idea?
I’ve at least got her into acting class now. I don’t think Hollywood could destroy her because she’s already been destroyed and is back from there. Her oversight is in playing the child instead of simply relaxing onto the throne. Could she allow herself a crown?
Can any of us? What does one do with one‘s personal magnet? The me-ness or you-ness that’s breathtaking at its peak? Where do our personal ascents lead us? What do we do on our mountaintops? The heights are dizzying. Maybe safer not to venture up there.
But is there really a top? Is there any limit to how far we can climb? The nature of up, of the sky, is infinite.