What Did T. Read in 2022?

 




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Poetry. Feminism. Dharma.

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This morning I woke up at 4 am, unable to return to sleep on the first day of school. Too many nerves. So instead, I thought about dharma,  or our calling and purpose in life. Most teachers are women, I suppose because we're seen as more nurturing. I think you can be nurturing and still be a feminist. So here are my thoughts, courtesy of insomnia... Ask me what I mean when I tell you I'm a feminist. "Bra-burning excuse-making man-hating harpy!" That's too easy. That's a trope. I mean I broke free from the ideas forced in youth: That a woman's purpose is to love and support a man. Cannot bear his own children (so you must) Cannot be his own "helpmate" (so you must) God created man to rule and to provide. A woman's place is by his side -- Complementing. Complimenting. Only -- Years passed. No one's life was less without me in it. I had failed my Woman's role. But was it me? Or could it be the job itself? I did not ask for consignment to...
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Advaita - Non-duality

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  I am teaching a weekly yoga class this month. The problem with this is that I have ZERO spacial awareness and am full of an impending sense of doom. In addition to the millions of hours I spend on lesson plans, I am now also spending evening hours writing sequences and studying yoga manuals.  Jade thinks this is a wonderful opportunity during which I will grow as a human being. That is why I am doing it. I want to grow as a human being. I've never been comfortable being bad at things.  Therapy Elsa insists I stop saying "bad" and instead say "imperfect." More than any other thing she has repeated over the last 4 years is the sentence, "I don't think it's as black and white as all that." She (and Jade) says that I am a perfectionist and that my idea of "bad" is anything at which I do not excel. The black-and-whiteness in me says that if I am not excellent at it, I am bad at it. No one likes to be imperfect at things, but I feel like ...
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Adhikāra - The Right to Have

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   "Yoga Elsa told me it would be okay if I quit training, that no one would think less of me. "But I thought you said it's normal for it to be this hard and for everyone to get injured and for us all to feel like we're dying right now!" I wailed. "It is. But you have to think it's worth it. There has to be something worth it in this for you. If you are just miserable the whole way through, it's okay to stop." Yoga Elsa is pretty badass. I am not sure why this training seems to be so much harder for me than for the others in my class. I'm sure part of it is the failure to rise above my job situation. I think part of it is also that most of the others have someone supporting them -- a partner, or a spouse, or even a studio. I'm climbing Mount Everest on my own here and hoping my oxygen holds out." I wrote that weeks ago now when I was afraid I would quit. It hadn't even occurred to me to quit until Yoga Elsa said that I could, an...
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Vācā - Word

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    In the preface to Night, Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel explains that after liberation, he did not know how to write his account of surviving Nazi horrors, of turning his back on his own father, of becoming one of the walking wounded, because words had ceased meaning what they used to mean. There were so many words -- chimney, gas, smoke, selection -- whose meanings he'd understood differently before. But how do you function in a post-apocalyptic world where the words that other people know mean something so catastrophically different to you now? And how do you communicate your experiences to people who cannot begin to fathom the atrocities those words might hold for you? I would not have had the strength or courage to survive what Wiesel experienced. But when I read that about the failure of words, I understood it. Words are my life -- reading them, writing them, teaching students to use them more effectively, how to manipulate words to win arguments and persuade audience...
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Sūrya - Sun

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                                                    The Sanskrit word for sun is sūrya. Sūrya Namaskāra A is "Sun Salutation A" and Sūrya Namaskāra B is "Sun Salutation B." If sūrya were a human being, she would be my friend Abbie. She has been many different people in her life: coach, stylist, Lululemon drone. But for me, Abbie is a ball of sunlight challenging me to think differently.      Two weeks ago, after my ankle had mostly healed and before my milkweed hunt ended in poison ivy welts, I went to one of Abbie's yoga classes in the city. Afterward, we went to the TG Farmer's Market and talked life and philosophy.      Abbie is really big on manifesting things... like just  believing  things into being. If you've read  The Secret by Rhonda Byrne,  you know all about manifesting thi...
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Mudra (Sign/Seal)

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I had been hoping that if I failed to contact anyone from my new (middle) school, they would forget that they had hired me to teach there and just go on paying me without expecting me to show up. I think my years in Hazelwood set me up with false expectations about how payroll works.  Alas, I received a phone call (people still make such things!), asking which day I was available to come in. The woman whose room I'm moving into is just moving to the gym to be a PE teacher. She never introduced herself, just asked what I was doing there and why. Then told me I was doing it wrong. Not off to a great start. The man I report to has a beard that's half wavy, half straight, and exceedingly long. He's apparently quite brilliant but it's hard to tell because he constantly starts slow-moving sentences and then leaves them trailing off in the middle so he can start new ones. The entire time I was meeting with him, I kept envisioning myself grabbing the beard and whacking the whol...
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Samskara II

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School starts on Monday. I didn't make any super-tight friends in my 9 months at the high school, but there have been a couple of good people who texted me, checking to see how I'm doing as I head into my 16th year of middle school. One promised she was moving to Florida at the end of this academic year, so I could have her position when she vacates. In response, I sent her this meme: You could not pay me enough money to move to Florida. I mean it. If someone offered me six figures and the chance to teach at an inner-city school, I still wouldn't do it. So, here I sit, ready to start teaching 7th and 8th grade in the Midwest again. At least the other teachers seem nice. I take back everything I said about the department head's beard; he is a lovely human being. As is usual with me, everyone I immediately dislike, I end up adoring, and everyone I have an instant affinity for, I end up loathing. It really doesn't do a lot toward encouraging me to trust my instincts. A...
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