Monday, August 27, 2012

Writing with Rox Weekly Prompt—Back to School Special!

You heard me. Jude's starting kindergarten. While I'm going mad with emotion, Jude seems fairly indifferent. Tonight at the dinner table my friend asked him if he was excited and/or what he was going to do at KG and he answered, rather flatly, "I don't know."  If only she'd fit the word "wizard" into the question, he'd still be talking.

"Oooh... it will be lots of fun," I cheered, not sure to whom exactly I was directing said cheer. I asked my friend if she remembered her first day of kindergarten. She did not. Did I?

 Of course. How could I not? And before I could stop them, the words soldiered out of my mouth, landing right smack in front of Jude's tofu.

"What was so scary about it?" Jude asked. And here I thought he wasn't listening. How soon I forget. He's always listening. Silly, Mama. Think quick. Very quick.

"Well...it wasn't scary as in blood scary, but... it's just that Grandma forgot what time school started and I was extremely late and had to walk in front of everyone to my place in the circle on the hot concrete."

"Why Grandma was late? That's not scary!"


Of course I left out the part about the huge circle of strange, unfamiliar faces, eyes like boulders, weighting me into place. Don't even think about starting something.  Multiple hands reaching for my long blonde hair. A tall teacher with a whistle. Ma looking smaller and smaller as she walked away from our class, her soft, white, gauzy cotton like the soft white cotton clouds surfing the angel blue sky above. Ma leaving with the clouds. My voice rising above the singing, "Mommy! Mommy!"

Mommy gone.

A friendly stranger. Tight curls. Wire glasses and toothy smile. Not the teacher, but the teacher maybe in eighteen years from now. "It's okay, child. Don't cry for your mama. Why you finna cry for your mama?"

What do you remember from your first day of kindergarten/school?
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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Wild Woman Writing & Yoga Retreat


Wild Woman Writing and Yoga Retreat
Loving Your Wild       a day of nurturing

Saturday, September 15, 2012 

10am-4pm                       $69  
or what you can/scholarship/barter
        
Calling all Wild Woman Writers of new and yore... Even the wild needs to take time to calm, center, and nurture the whirlwind... Integrative writing and gentle gentle very gentle gentle/restorative yoga workshop 
for women writers of all ages, genres of wild, writing, & yogaing!

* Connect/reconnect with your wild woman tribe!

*Reawaken and stretch into your free spirit, your playfulness, your truth  

* Nurture/embrace/love the wild fear behind negative old thought patterns "I am too out of control!" "too loud!" "too much!" "too anything!" "unlovable!"  and lovingly write those old thoughts away and release them through your body so you can...

* Stretch/write into new ones like "I am fully alive!" "I am authentic!" "I love the sound of my own voice and song!"

* Write and witness the combined creative voices, poems, stories, and  memories that rise up in wild sweet community

    
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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Again I have exceeded the character limit...

Howdy Writers! Here is a recent reply to the last prompt from a former Intuitive Writing student of mine at the Loft, a truly amazing warrior of words...Enjoy!



Again I have exceeded the character limit.

I ran into an old classmate who read the beginnings of my memoir on my blog. I was embarrassed initially but then inspired. It has occurred to me, sadly but necessarily, that there will likely never be a magical time in my life when I can "sit down and do all the writing I want to do." Still, I am making an effort to cobble things together and continually thinking and exploring. 

Incidentally, this weekend was monumental. Reunion with Mom after three months was highly emotionally satisfying but not particularly noteworthy in of itself. I am also highly grateful for the compatibility she and Marshall, the man I'm seeing, seem to share.
I had my five year high school reunion on Friday night. I didn't want to go. I was afraid people would ask about my disappearing midway through senior year on account of my mental health, or about what I was doing with my life now and judge me accordingly, forgetting in the process of course that I am not in fact the center of the universe. Ultimately I decided that going would be a great way to face fear in the eye and overcome it. I arrived about twenty minutes late to a party of five, two of whom were talking to each other and the other two were girls from remedial classes that I knew of but really had no working relationship with. We made efforts at small talk, mostly centered on where the fuck is everyone? I started catastrophizing that it was a cruel practical joke, that the reunion was really somewhere else and was preparing to leave. My friend Gigi came, along with some others, and we made more (albeit more pleasant) small talk. I pushed myself to talk to people that I didn't know as well and ultimately ventured outside to reconnect with Steph. Steph ran in more popular crowd than I did and it felt as though little had changed in the five years leading up to this, a cool distance acting as a barrier between myself and my classmates huddled together. Adam, a hockey player I had class with in sixth grade but hadn't talked to since, broke the ice against all odds and we carried on like the friends we used to be. Marshall came to whisk me away and we had fun telling people that he was a long-forgotten classmate, but not before I turned my life and legal rights over to the mechanical bull. I rode three times, each time progressively harder, before at last deciding that I better not push my luck or the operator's hospitality. The rest of the night was spent laughing at drag queens and gyrating against poles and each other to hair metal and 80s pop. 
Saturday night I went to my first ever gay wedding, excitement prevailing among a melange of less intense emotions. Watching Daniel and Brian watch each other and dance together brought tears to my eyes and everything was selected and executed so exquisitely. I ended up making nice with my table neighbor who I mistakenly and narcissistically assumed had a vendetta against me in allegiance to Frank. Dancing was a (literally) hot mess and hard to leave. 
Sunday marked my worst day of work to date and was largely unremarkable. I listened earnestly to a litany of Marshall's concerns and fears, said what I could with hopes of placation, and realized both my own powerlessness and the fragility of the push and pull that defines relationships. When I got home, I logged on to facebook to commemorate my first year of sobriety. While I do get validation in doing this, the primary objective is to encourage others in recovery. The server was automatically logged in to my new roommate's account. One announcement from the newsfeed was particularly salient: Frank M. Harrell is now engaged to Aaron Jaccard. It was almost an afterthought. Almost. Jesus, I mean you go to one wedding and it's like every queer has to marry. Intellectually I was able to convince myself that I don't want that to be me, that I'd be isolated, certainly uncertain, that I don't want to be engaged at this point in my life. I feel as though I'm on that trajectory, but I can't make that step today. (And don't think that I would be ready after six months of being back together). But obviously it is a bigger issue than that. I haven't seen the bastard in four months and haven't seen his new squeeze much more than that. I combed pages for details before my slow-ass server brought me back to some semblance of sanity. I began speculating that they'll wed or elope to Vermont next month. I glowered, seethed that they have the gall to marry without having lifted a goddamned finger in the campaign to secure gay marriage. Neither have Brian and Daniel, to my knowledge, but their integrity, commitment, and longevity absolves them of my wrath. I want to badly to let this go. It's not my battle, it's not my spoils. I want so much as for my peers to see, think, and feel as I do. I want to sleep and not think about this, to focus on the beauty that is my life and not hone on this minutia. I want more. I want absolution. I want closure and vindication.    

—James C.
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Sunday, August 12, 2012

Writing with Rox Weekly Prompt—The Story You Really Want to Tell

A million trillion things have happened to you this weekend. Thinking and feeling back on today and yesterday, which story do you most feel like telling? What story, however big or small, boring or exciting, do you have an urge (or urgency) to tell/share?

What do I mean exactly? Well...say, you run out in a few minutes and there you run into someone you know at Cub or walking in Uptown or meeting someone for dinner or on the bike path or at Book Club or wherever you are... or your best friend calls, mother, whoever... What is the very first thing you are going to talk about? If you'd like, begin like this: "... I've been dying to tell you that..." or "OMG, guess what?" or "You'll never believe this, but..." or "Hey, I need an ear... would you mind listening to a sort of weird story about what happened to me this weekend?"

Go for it. Tell the whole thing. Don't worry about being boring or sounding dumb. This is the story you want to tell, the thing that happened to you, or with you, or... the story of something you saw or said or did.  You cannot do this wrong. It won't be boring. The only thing to keep in mind is that it must be a story/incident you really feel in your body/mind that you want to share. Take your time. Share here, there, anywhere.


Hope to write with you soon!
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Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Roxy Goes Bhakti!


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My experience at Bhaktifest Midwest

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I finally get around to returning Ma’s call a few days after the Fourth.
“So? How was it?” she wants to know. “Was it fabulous? Were you totally blissed out? Did your boyfriend come? What’s his last name again? Was the Kirtan Rabbi there?”
“It” was (and is) Bhaktifest, a three-day peace-out rooted in yoga, meditation and Kirtan — devotional call-and-response chanting, mostly in Sanskrit. An annual event in Joshua Tree, California, since 2009, Bhaktifest producers responded to the Midwest’s call for consciousness and took the Bhav (spiritual emotion, bliss) on the road, debuting Bhaktifest Midwest June 29-July 1 in Madison, Wisconsin.
Venue-wise, Madison’s Alliant Energy Center is more fairground than folk, a somewhat surreal host for a festival in favor of “raising the consciousness.” A sign greets us late Thursday evening flashing “BhaktiFest Midwest” theatrically against a dark country road with subsequent flashing that KORN will be screaming into Alliant in late July. All the same, we could be in Kansas or Oz or anywhere, because when we park our bikes at Willow Island the next morning, beside two freshly opened technicolor pink lotus blossoms, I’m certain I’ve left the home country of my head and have entered Kirtan-Land.
“It was good,” I tell Ma, my typical response to her call, less melodic than Shri Ram, Jai Ram and Jai Jai Ram, but enough to satisfy Ma’s need to know if my birthday weekend was well spent. I liken it to a Dead Show or the annual Hare Krisna Parade at Venice Beach, stuff she can relate to. I tell her I have a new yoga guru, Mark Whitwell, who actually lives near Venice Beach, so maybe she could take a class? Sadly, this is how I dumb it down.
But how do I explain to anyone, let alone my Jewish mother, that I spent the afternoon of my 42nd birthday in a tacky conference room singing to the Lord? I’m not even sure who the Lord is or which Lord I’m singing to — I don’t think Jews do “the Lord,” but this is just one of the things that bemuses me about chanting. The irony isn’t lost on me, but a quick peak at my blissed-out Bu-Jew boyfriend beside me in lotus pose confirms this is kosher and I’m back to the bhav in no time.
More concerning is why I am so achingly addicted to something I once wrote off as another empty fad, cloaked in woo. Plus, how does a spiritually challenged Los Angeleno raised tithing to Hollywood have faith in something — anything — without expecting to be disillusioned? I’m digging the bhav, but the bliss scares me to death. How can peace and love be so easy?
“Forget about your analytical mind,” says Pascale LaPoint of Kirtan Path, deemed “jewel of Bhaktifest Midwest” by emcee Shiva Baum, “allow yourself to be there.” The more she talks, the more stereotypical I feel. Our kirtan paths (and likely everyone else’s) are similar: you hear it for the first time and you “just know.” When LaPoint heard Krisna Das for the first time, she felt as though she was “coming home,” which is exactly how I felt hearing her chant “Jai Ganesha” at my inaugural kirtan last summer. Similarly, kirtan helped me out of a fairly serious funk; LaPoint says chanting turned her life around, and before she knew it, she bought a harmonium, taught herself to sing, found a couple musicians on craigslist and called up violinist, Nancy Lemke, with whom she happened to rideshare on a yoga retreat.
Like many of us, LaPoint’s gateway to kirtan was yoga and Krisna Das, “KD” to fans, whose pantheric rasp is pure liquid love, a jungle honey you feel in your spine. Ironically, I feel completely unloved upon meeting Das in person, following his afternoon workshop, the same one where I melodically consent to “find a way to live in the presence of the Lord!”
I even play the Jew card. “Come on Krisna! You had a Jewish mother, too!”
But it’s no use; he insists that it is not my job to change the world no matter how passionate I am or how messed up it is. Later I realize I’m upset because Das has (unintentionally) called me out on my tendency to seek external verses internal validation. He emphasizes what we all know, but rarely get: It’s not his or anyone else’s love I need — I need my own. And until we learn to cultivate deep self-love (through chanting, or whatever works), external love will never be enough.
Duh. I’m a therapist. I’ve known this a long time. I write about this stuff. I teach this stuff. But chanting, like yoga and the handful of other woo I do, is still teaching my body to know this.
Das also affirms that love is what chanting is all about — not religion, not God, not anything constructed by the mind. He says when we chant to all those Shris and lords, we are actually chanting to the deities within.
Recently, my therapist aptly likened my need for kirtan to an infant’s need for a response to her cry, in my infant case, a cry for hunger, love, holding…. Perhaps chanting provides the response to the call I have longed to hear answered for forty-plus years.
When I chant along to KD’s chant/love song “Heart as Wide as the World,” I cry huge weeping willowy tears of something mysteriously bittersweet, especially hearing “All I need is to be with you…all my prayers have been heard….” Perhaps the tears are not so much about the longing to have someone sing these words to me and truly mean them (though boyfriend take note), so much as me recognizing the sweetly ringing nectar of my own voice tenderly humming down my throat, before settling to safely rest against my own widening heart.
Copyright © 2012 Roxanne Sadovsky. All Rights Reserved.
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About The Author | Roxanne Sadovsky

Roxanne Sadovsky, MA, MFA is a Twin Cities freelance writer, teacher and healer. She earned her Master's degree in counseling psychology from Antioch University Seattle (1998) and a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative nonfiction from The University of Minnesota (2004). Roxanne teaches Intuitive Writing and The Healing Memoir at the Loft Literary Center; her private healing practice (Writing with Rox) offers integrative workshops, healing groups, Wild Woman writing retreats/groups, classes in creative expression (memoir/intuitive writing/therapy; drama therapy, adult play therapy), and more in a safe, supportive, and playful community. For current classes, workshops, groups and healing work, visit writingwithrox.blogspot.com.
Contact Info | (612) 703-4321 | Email | Website

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