hara hachi bu

The old generation Okinawans are among the longest lived people in the world.  They have a lot of tricks about how to accomplish this:  a sense of life-purpose, intimate family/friend connections, a simple diet based on plants, regular gentle exercise such as walking and gardening.  The other thing they practice is hara hachi bu - the idea of eating only until they are 80% full.  I don't know if you could find a concept more foreign to American culture.  We're a clean your plate so you can have dessert kind of people, an unbutton the top button of your jeans kind of people, not an I feel satisfied so I'll quit while I'm ahead kind of people.

I've been thinking about this concept for some time.  Not just about eating, but about consumption in general.  The science behind hara hachi bu is that it takes 20 minutes for the nerve endings in our stomachs to register we are full.  If we eat until we feel full, as most of us do, then we have already overeaten and stretched beyond our natural capacity.  Eventually we will need more food to create the satiated feeling we are looking for. (More food = more weight = poor health.)  It's the same with our money and our time, of course.  The level at which we are satiated rises with each new luxury we indulge in.  I used to be satisfied with grocery store coffee. Enough said.  My need to create tasks and fill my hours increases with my perception of my own importance.  How will I know I am valuable if I'm not complaining about too much to do and responding "Busy!" to every "How are you?"

Hara hachi bu says it is best for us if we take less than what we feel we need.   Our bodies can't tell us what we need in the moment we are consuming, so our minds must be wiser than our bodies.  What if I bought 20% less food at the grocery store?  Would that eliminate the last of the food waste we generate and be closer to what we actually need?  What if I only planned enough tasks for 80% of my day and left 20% for serendipity or naps?  What if we lived on 80% of our disposable income?  Bought only 8 of the 10 books I think I want? Committed to keeping 20% of our calendar free?

Maybe a practice like that would get me closer to the balance my mind and soul are continually seeking.

Do you have a hara hachi bu practice?  Id' love to hear your thoughts. 

becoming available to yourself

Recently, I pulled out my journal to see if I could remember when I started working on this new novel.  I found the answer back in the July pages.  The months before I'd been wrestling with the balance between what I felt were two distinct callings.  One required availability, the other - writing - required isolation and focus.  I couldn't see how to make both of these callings work, so all through the month of June I am writing out an explanation to myself about what I think is the correct choice: availability.  The writing must not be important in the long run, I say to myself.  It's always about people, it's always about showing up.  In June, there is a sense of relinquishment.  I can remember the feeling of release, a certain peace.  Writing would wait.  Then in July, a succession of unexpected events.  These were small things:  conversations, decisions by friends, a gift from someone close, a paragraph in a book.  These were sudden and illuminating, like matches being struck in dark corners: Oh, I see.  By the end of that month, I had decided that I *must* write, even if it was just 250 words a day.  I would inch my way along both trajectories.  I told other people about my decision, committed myself, made it hard to back out.  I made it to 10,000 words, 15,000, 20,000.  At that point, the landscape began to shift.  Decisions were made apart from me, obligations, relationships sifted, time opened up in a new way.  There were more small things.  Every book I picked up - some I'd bought years before and left on the shelf only to randomly select them again now - was the story of a woman coming into her truth.  Every time I grabbed a magazine, it was a woman telling how she made the hard choice, how she chose her path and stuck with it even when it meant disappointing others.  Friends who all along had been counseling "availability, availability" began to say "it's time for something new."   I began to admit things in the journal I'd never allowed myself to say.  Things I wanted but hadn't given voice to.  In the space of four months everything heaved and buckled, became new ground.

What's interesting to me about all this is in hindsight, I'm not sure if the changes were  inevitable and I was just awakening to them, or if the changes came in response to my decisions.  When I look back, its almost as if this life had been lying in wait for me to choose it.  Each step I've taken has been met with a surge of reassurance, clarity, and confirmation.  But I sense that if I had not taken the steps...if I had stayed on the path I was already on, there would have been reassurance and confirmation there too.  I'm almost certain of it.  That scares me a little, to think I could have just gone on with what I knew and what felt comfortable, that life itself would have risen up and affirmed that choice too.  What might I have missed had I not taken the small messages, the little match flares that were revealing another way?  May Sarton suggests it:

"The gift turned inward, unable to be given, becomes a heavy burden, even sometimes a kind of poison. It is as though the flow of life were backed up."

I have felt this stagnation, an underground current pulsing, not allowed to find release.  When I think of so many women I know, I am struck by how their deep thoughtfulness, their tremendous strength and creativity is put to use holding relationships together, managing dysfunctional family members, being the emotional center of their homes or jobs or communities.  I cannot imagine where we'd be without such women, but I am also struck with the inequity of it.  What have we lost in terms of wisdom, art, culture, science, diplomacy, language, and much more by allowing ourselves to be available to everyone but our own selves?

It's something to think about.  Questions to ask ourselves in moments when we can be honest.  Step back, look.  What is pulsing underneath the surface?  What longing hasn't even been allowed the words to describe it?  What would you do if there was no one who needed your daily involvement?  There are seasons, certainly, when these longings and gifts have to take the background, but in my own life, they weren't just in the background, they were in a tight little box labeled "probably never" or "probably too late."  What about yours?  Are they somewhere they can be nurtured and watered even in a dormant season?

"And now we who are writing women and strange monsters

Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers,

Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands

More gently and more subtly on the burning sands." ~ May Sarton

Sending love and courage to all my brave-hearted friends today.

tonia     

overcoming resistance

I went to the gym for the first time in almost thirty years this morning.  I went with my husband, who has been asking me to come with him for almost as long.  It's the kind of thing he thinks will be "fun," and I think will be dreadful.  It wasn't dreadful.  Just as he'd promised, no one paid any attention to me as I learned how to operate the bike and the weight machines, and just as he'd promised, it was kind of fun to be there with him.  It wasn't until I was heading out of the gym and on the way home that I remembered why I'd stopped going to the gym in the first place.  I was 18 years old and terribly self-conscious of my body and my fitness level  - and my semi-regular visits to the facility were drawing attention from an older man.  I can remember him waiting outside, leaning up against the concrete wall with a water bottle in hand, asking me in that slow male drawl how my workout was, telling me with a glance up and down that I was looking pretty good.   It was the late 80's - and it was a man's world.  It never occurred to me to stand up for myself and tell him to go away, or to complain to the gym, or even alter my schedule.  I felt uncomfortable so I quit.  In the Christian subculture I grew up in, that was my role in the world: submit, yield, or get out of the way, and I did.I'm at midlife now and I ditched the ideology of the subculture a long time ago, but the muscle memory is still there.  Someone makes a demand on my time or emotional energy and I instantly assume it's my duty to meet it even when I am mentally certain I should be doing something else.  The limbs twitch with conditioned motion, thoughts race along the grooves of practiced belief, and dopamine arrives to validate the action. In the old days, I called this comfortable, assured feeling "peace."  Conforming provided its own reward - and kept me from growing into anything more.

I'm most vulnerable to this kind of reaction directly after I assert myself and declare my intentions.  I've come to expect that any new burst of personal determination signals not a season of productivity, but a major catastrophe looming in the wings.  As soon as I hit the gym, the creepy old guy shows up in the doorway demanding attention, plucking the strings of my ingrained responses, encouraging me to yield to his demands.

"Resistance," says Steven Pressfield in The War of Art, "obstructs movement only from a lower sphere to a higher. It kicks in when we seek to pursue a calling in the arts, launch an innovative enterprise, or evolve to a higher station morally, ethically, spiritually."

she makes it happen

Learning to recognize Resistance can be complicated - especially when it comes to us wrapped in religion, ideology, and gender-roles.  Some people learn early to recognize and defy it, but for me and many others, it's a lifetime's work.  We get there one revelation, one deliberate, defiant act at a time.

We can claim the truth that we are makers, artists, builders, weavers, nurturers, truth-tellers, poets, and our work matters.

So go to the gym.

Show up for yourself.

Tell the creepy old man at the door to leave you the hell alone and mean it.  (If he sticks around, show up again anyway.  He'll get bored when he realizes he has no power to disturb or distract you. )

You can do this.  We can do this.  We owe it to ourselves - those selves that sat back, that let other people succeed, that fixed all the problems and carried all the burdens, that pushed down feelings and desires, that made dreams smaller so they didn't disturb anyone else.  We owe it to ourselves to grow our dreams and find a way and be faithful to what has always been real and true inside of us.  So let's do it, okay?

Love you, my friends.

tonia

rabbit and bone

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Night closes gently over the desert sky in a curtain of pink and amber.  The dark, when it comes, spreads slowly down, as if from the center of a dome, pushing at the last of the pale light, driving it into the horizon. Then the stars come out, hundreds of them, a sequined carpet unfurled against the blackness overhead.  In the middle of it all, the Milky Way, shimmering faintly, hinting at color - purple, blue, a thin shaft of gold.  There is almost no sound.  Somewhere out in the miles of open land around us there are creatures stirring, moths that flutter toward any hint of artificial light, coyotes after their rodent prey, cattle sighing and squirming, adjusting themselves to their prickly beds, but we hear none of it.  It is only the two of us, wrapped in blankets, puzzling out constellations in a whisper, watching for stars to fall.

It was my daughter’s idea to come.  A birthday gift, to write, to connect.  Out here we have no internet to call upon, no cell phones to hunch over.  There is each day, there is each other.

We write.  We read each other’s stories and talk through possible plot lines.  We agonize over edits and the stubbornness of characters. When the words begin to blur together, we go for walks. Together. Alone.

The cabin is perched on the high point of a rolling hill, from there, you can see the jackrabbit trails winding through the sagebrush. Down on the ground though, the trails are invisible.  I head out for a walk alone.  There is no destination to aim for, no obvious route to follow.  I keep the cabin in my sights and begin to wander.  After a half hour or so, I find an old dirt road.  It is criss-crossed with the tracks of dogs (or coyotes), the occasional set of elk prints.  No one has driven or walked it for a long time.  I follow it uphill to a barbed wire fence, then turn around and follow it downhill till I find another.  A mile away I can see the roof of the cabin shining in the sun.  I wave to it, wondering if my daughter is sitting on the porch, watching me amble around on roads that lead nowhere.  If I were doing this in the city, the French would have a word for me: flaneur - the stroller, the passionate wanderer.  Out here, I look more like a simpleton, coated in dust and sweat, stumbling into rabbit holes and over rocks, snagging my ankles on the prehistoric flora, walking uphill, then down.  But there is no one here but my daughter to see and she understands.  While I walk my mind unknots.  I can feel the muscles in my legs contracting and expanding, hear my breath pulling in and pushing out.  I am here.  I am alive.

Just off the highway on the way to the cabin, we’d seen a hand-lettered sign on the side of the road.  “Beetle-Cleaned Skulls For Sale,” it read.  We were fresh from the city, sealed into our speeding car, dust-free, oblivious.  We looked at each other and laughed.  Who would want a beetle-cleaned skull?  That was ages ago, when I was young.  The sun is just descending into the western half of the sky, the landscape stretching unvaried before me, sage and grey and yellow-brown.  I search the ground, confident that in this liminal space I will find some bleached white testimony of a former life - a tibia, a jawbone, a knot of vertebrae.  Memento mori.  What is life without the awareness of death?  I find  the brittle grey bones of the sagebrush, and they crumble beneath my feet.

When it is time to leave the cabin and return home, we stand in the doorway, reluctance making us heavy and slow.  We are unshowered, grit in every crevice; we’ve eaten endless bowls of beans and rice; we have no idea of what is going on in the world outside the desert. At home we will be warm and clean and well fed.  There will be stories to tell and hugs to give, but we do not want to go.

“Supposing you only saw the stars once every year. Think what you would think,” said Tasha Tudor.  I do not have to think very hard.  How long since I saw the stars as I did in the desert?  A year?  A decade?   How long since I felt silence deep as water, slipped bodily into the stream of slow time?  Long, so long.  We clean the cabin, load up the car, stand in the dust and look out over the hills one last time, then once more.  "The wonder of it!"  I am here.  I am alive.  I make no resolve save to place myself here again and again.

body, soul, earth

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{A repost from the archives (2015), as I visit these themes again.}

The story goes that Ned Ludd, a young textile worker, grew worried about the safety of his job amid the rise of "labor-saving devices" in the 18th century garment factory in which he worked...so he took his apprehension out on a couple of stocking frames in protest.  Other workers saw what young Ned was getting at and began to try and thwart the industrialization of their own jobs in the same way. Before long the "Luddites" were a group to be feared - known far and wide as people who hated technological advancement to the point of destruction.   I have a lot of sympathy with the farsighted Ned and his companions most days.  I don't fear the loss of my job, but there are plenty of days I fear the loss of my humanity.

I wrote about this back at the end of last year.  I was sawing through some deep cords, trying to free us from the entanglement of the ever-present internet.  We lived for two months without internet connection at home - going to coffee shops and libraries when we needed to connect and leaving home for books and games and conversation -  and we loved it.  And then one day,  by unspoken yet mutual consent, we turned the internet connection back on.  We'd learned some important things:  that internet access is a privilege - sit at a library table competing for bandwidth and take a look around you: at the guy with half his teeth and a halo of old tobacco researching veteran's benefits; at the woman wearing a stretched-out tank top and the remains of breakfast, humming along to Prince; at the couple in the corner trying loudly to fill out a job application in the spaces between when the connection drops and surges again, and feel the frustrated desperation of having to get email read and bills paid and appointments made before your one hour is up - and then realize this whole thing is a choice for you, but these people do this every single week because they have no other choice.  We learned that our relative geographical isolation makes digital isolation less desirable and that maybe it would be different if we had neighbors who dropped by or family members in the same town, but we don't.  And we learned that as much as we (okay, me) are drawn to asceticism what truly matters is redeeming the world we live in -  among, and with, and in, like everyone else.

I'm learning that the modern age requires of us a lot more concentrated awareness than some times past.  We have to learn skills the generations before us never imagined.  Things like decluttering and voluntarily simplifying and asking questions about origins and working conditions and saying no thank you to gifts and not getting addicted to "likes" and "followers" and learning when to share and when to be private, and on and on.   And this concentrated awareness is required of us at a time when everything is conspiring to keep us unaware, distracted, numb.  "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" Just keep spinning, churning, consuming, pressing yourself into the one by one dimensions of an instagram photo.

Lately I've been wondering how to keep after that initial push to bring myself into awareness, how to trigger the body into claiming its own space, tell the mind it's had enough flickering and blinking for awhile.  On a recent Saturday morning I listened to poet Marie Howe talk about simplicity, about how that connected to reading the Little House books with her daughter and something clicked.  Whenever I think of the Ingalls' family I think of a log room, a fire, candlelight, Pa's fiddle - an image that feels like all the best parts of home and hope and humanity.  All my good dreams, I realize,  are accompanied by candlelight, by wood fires, by warmth and hearth.  I'm at the age where I've learned to give notice to such recurring symbols, to make tangible space for them in my life.   Frederick Buechner describes it so:

“You never know what may cause them. The sight of the Atlantic Ocean can do it, or a piece of music, or a face you’ve never seen before. A pair of somebody’s old shoes can do it…. You can never be sure. But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go next.”

You must imagine the kind of long-suffering husband I have, that when I say, "I have an idea..." he does not roll his eyes or sigh loudly but looks me straight on and says, "Tell me about it."

"After dinner, we dim the lights," I say.  "Candles, soft lamps in the bathroom and kitchen, oil lamps for going room to room.  No screens.  It will be a signal for us, a hard stop, so we can turn off the outside world and rest."

"Yes," he says.  (He's priceless, I tell you.)  And so every night since he has gone around and flipped switches, put things in order, lit the lamps one by one.  It feels like a holy ritual, an ushering in of magic.  We are still a part of the modern world, but for a couple of hours each night, we are also a part of the old world, more subject to season and time and natural limits.  These nights when I look around the darkened rooms with their golden corners, watch shadows dance on walls, tilt my silent book so the lamplight will fall across the words, I feel my soul inhale and exhale.  We're not separate from the world, and we're not Luddites - our fists are not raised against all the changes that have come.  We're just people.  People who are finding a way, carving a path through, intent on reminding ourselves that we are not just mind, but also body, soul, earth.