Last week a huge swell in the Pacific had my husband and teenage son rising at 4:30 a.m. to snake their way through our canyon to the beach in the dark, to surf the biggest waves they’ve surfed in the two years since we moved here. It would last only a few days, and they didn’t want to miss a moment. Through a year of hard lockdown, surfing was their salvation. Several mornings a week, even in the winter, they left for the ocean with the stars still out, to hit the waves before Zoom school. My son took his first class from the car most days. I usually tag along to take a run and do some sunrise yoga on the beach. I would have loved to be there last week, watching them navigate those thrilling waters, but I sat this one out because there was no beach to run on or watch from. The waves, they told me, crashed right up against the cliffs at high tide. In places, the road was washed away. By 7:30 they were racing back over the hill to drop the boy, long wavy hair still dripping with salt water, at the school gate. The kids—now a high school freshman and senior—entered a school building that same week for the first time in 17 months. They’re masked, vaccinated, and tested weekly for Covid, but it feels nonetheless like we're in rough and uncharted water. *** Back in June, just a few days after LA officially lifted lockdown restrictions and mask mandates, before the delta variant sent us into a tailspin of wondering whether this pandemic will ever truly be over, I taught a Summer Solstice yoga workshop. As introduction, I wrote: In yoga and traditions all over the world, people have always felt compelled to pause at the solstices—the major seasonal pivot points of the year. These are moments to honor the rhythms of nature and to find balance in transition. To recognize our relationship with the sun—our power source, the source of physical life of the planet, which also emotionally and spiritually gives us so much joy, energy, and uplift. It's about our ability to tap into our inner power and energy, our personal fire, to be light and to spread light. What I find especially compelling about the Summer Solstice this year is that it coincides almost exactly with the official reopening of the country after a 15-month lockdown—a major transition, if ever there was one. If ever there was a need to open up, uncover, step outside, wander, let the sun’s warmth bathe our faces, taste freedom, live in possibility, imagine wild…it’s now. We’re tiptoeing into the world, shedding layers. With cautious optimism, letting the light in—and out—again. Remembering how to move, connect, reach out, how to shine after so much hiding. But I’m surprised to discover that I have complicated emotions about it. I have excitement, joy, optimism. I have a certain trepidation, uncertainty, guardedness. And I have a kind of grief about the end of the bought-back time I’ve had with our family this year. The kids are venturing out again, different on the other side of this, to be sure. I look at pictures from the beginning of lockdown and they’re hardly recognizable. Did I treasure this time fully enough? Did I use this year the way I should have? Could I have gotten more accomplished? Finished more projects? Could I have written more, practiced more, spent more time in the canyon and ocean? Or-- Could I have tuned in deeper? Should I have let more things go? Found more quiet? Did I take moments to actually breathe in the stillness? *** When I was pregnant with our daughter, I practiced Hypnobirthing. In deep relaxation, we learned how to journey inside and find our way to the hidden control room where you can dial down sensation tune your receptors to choose how you’ll perceive each contraction how you'll handle the throes that deliver your child There, in a worn old armchair in a room full of plants I ran my fingers across the panel and said let each one come to me as an ocean wave let me float just on top of the pain stay loose and limber as each swell lifts and rolls me ride it out in a state of presence and surrender The gradual build of labor they explained makes it possible to give birth at all If you were thrown right into the crisis the searing pain of the final centimeters of opening and letting go just before birth it would be impossible Instead it escalates in increments So you adapt little by little as your body nudges you to that apex called transition the interminable moment just before the moment you release your baby into the world *** At my desk, I keep a clipping from a magazine—I think it's an ad for jeans or something—and it says, "The in-between moments are the ones that count." I refer to it often because it reminds me—in life, yoga, and art—to pay attention when it seems like nothing is happening. Even after a year at home, this summer has felt like a strange and extended in-between moment... no longer in lockdown, but not quite back to normal; masking and unmasking; seeing family and friends again, but growing wary we're going backwards and it could be another long time; excited that the teenagers are finally back in school but mourning the loss of the days, weeks, months we were all cloistered together at home. Raring to reclaim creative space that got squished out in the chaos of pandemic family and work life, but feeling far removed from those projects too... Transitioning away from one thing, but not yet quite sure toward what. *** I’ve heard yoga teachers say that more people get injured coming out of poses than going into them. On the way in, we explore, test the waters; we’re careful, intentional about looking for our edge. We take time to go deep; observe, pay attention. But on the way out, we get in a hurry. Whether we’re holding a pose that’s hard and muscular, or stretching and surrendering into deep release (which can be equally intense), we get close to the moment when it’s time to move on, and suddenly, we can’t do it soon enough. The mind starts saying out, out, out, and we rush to escape. We move without breath or awareness, thinking everything will be better when this damn posture is just over. But if we don’t take our time in the transitions, approach them mindfully—it hurts. Whether you’ve spent the last year muscling through—staying sane by staying strenuous and busy—or whether you adopted an attitude of deep repose, either way it's been a sort of stasis, suspension. Finding the way now toward whatever is the new normal, whatever is next—getting back into flow in a healthy way—requires our attention. Our willingness to actually have the experience. To be here now in the awkward moment, for as long as it lasts. In my classes recently, I’ve been focusing on transitions—the movement to and from what we typically think of as the postures: taking big breaths and staying mindful in the in-betweens, not knowing what’s coming next, feeling off balance; in those times that feel neither here nor there, like we haven't quite landed and maybe don't know exactly where we're going—cultivating awareness that those moments are their own important thing, and they count. *** In a way it's a rather familiar state for artists because the creative life—the creative process—is full of such moments, perhaps even, mostly made of them. It leans heavily on willingness to be in the not-knowing, and the knowing how to not only be ok in the not-knowing, how to keep breathing through it, but also how to mine it for its importance: how to recognize the beauty and value of the liminal spaces and loose ends and wondering places. *** I’ve always believed in the rule: don’t write directly about your dreams. Dreams are wonderful source material, a portal into the imagination. But an uncurated dream is nonsensical and boring to anyone outside one's own head. To write about a dream is to make it too literal. They need translation, transformation. But that was Before— before we spent a year and a half in a kind of dream, a nightmare, a collective fugue state before we realized we can’t agree on what’s real anyway before we knew how many unreliable narrators there are before we lived 15 months inside our houses inside our heads inside our beds, where we tend to do our dreaming. And the lines blurred My dreams have always been waterlogged and wave-y there’s a whole Jungian interpretation of this, of course but also the simple fact that the most foundational, formative place in my creative life was my grandparents’ lake house where I spent languid, liquid, sun-drenched childhood summers chasing glistening minnows jumping waves shivering and burning I remember the day I was maybe 6 I lay spread out in the sand starfish style drying myself in the sunshine and I discovered I could drift just to the edge of sleep and hover awhile aware of how good it felt aware that I was aware and dreaming at once and that if I tuned in just right I could stay there between the worlds in that blissful shimmer of a space as real to me as the wind and waves and people playing and picnicking around me The lake was a place to woolgather, fossil hunt, shell collect to drift, float, imagine to incubate, gestate stories and lives to be lived to be on my own as my odd little self and later to have what passed —to a little Baptist girl-- for a couple of pretty hot dates. It was a place made for daydreams and heavy humid night idylls it was a cloister it was an oyster full of pearls The lake gave-- And sometimes the lake took away-- the old transistor radio my aunt’s pearl ring the bottom to my favorite little yellow rosebud bikini very nearly my life one time when I wandered into unfamiliar waters and very nearly my father’s when his sailboat capsized in a storm every sandcastle eventually and the entire front yard of the cottage in a violent storm tide years before I was born Decades later the lake and long-gone cottage are the dreamscape I return to night after night Recurring dream #1 On the beach in front of the cottage I’m watching my own children play at the edge of the lake When the water begins to rise behind them Roll toward us like a freight train I scream for the kids who are little or sometimes big and grab their hands and drag them and we stumble-run up the hill toward the cottage and fumble with the latch tumble inside just in time and it takes our collective weight to shove the door closed and hold out the tide Recurring Dream #2 Returning to the lake after years away I find the beach littered with treasure beach glass glinting like jewels shells in brilliant rainbow hues and old lost things (including a tube of toothpaste that’s always there, who knows why?) that churned up in the storm came back in on the waves things loved and forgotten missed and searched for till at last surrendered and yet it seems perfectly natural that they’ve turned up here just now *** In my 40s, I've graduated from lake to ocean. East coast to west. But the beach is still where I go to treasure-hunt, physically and imaginatively. To poke around in tide pools, beachcomb for shells and sea glass, and float off into fertile reveries. At our home beach, I mostly find the humble mussel shell inky indigo ovals with streaks of iridescence showing through in worn places I look for the ones still attached at their back seams like butterfly wings One morning, months deep in lockdown The beach was suddenly covered with them I thought how they looked like open prayer hands which in yoga are called Pushpaputa mudra meaning handful of flowers A gesture that’s both offering and supplication When we signal our willingness to give, we open ourselves to receive To simply unclench is a gift to yourself and the world *** One day, early this summer, I walked Topanga beach at dawn, after a very high tide. Fully vaccinated and unmasked now, I still dodged the occasional stranger by a force of habit that felt almost instinctual, leaning into my inner introvert after months of being in, in, in. It was cool, damp, and gray but very bright as the rising sun lit the mist. The tide was way out and the air smelled like wet rock and fishy seaweed, like my memory of the lake. All along the high water line, way up on the beach, unusual shells stuck up out of the sand and pieces of sea glass glinted. In thrilling ways and raw ones, everything seemed over-exposed. I combed through a tangle of emotions: hope, relief, excitement, and an unwieldy melancholy, a clutching kind of realization that the end of pandemic lockdown, in some ways, would signal the end of family life as we’ve known it. Before lockdown our teens, especially the older one, had already, for a long time, been creeping away from us slowly. They were on their way out, till the pandemic brought them back in. After all the tragedy the pandemic has caused, I’m ashamed to admit that as a mother, I cherished lockdown. I loved having my little birds back in the nest. But I know they’ve lost so much: a year of broken curfews and raising hell, the general teenaged jackassery that drives parents to the limits of their wits but is such an important part of growing up. After a year of rewind, of being artificially infantilized, held awkwardly close, we’re flinging open the hatch and I envision them being pulled suddenly, inexorably into the uncharted waters of a post-lockdown life, beyond my grasp forever. After a long stall in the natural, gradual labor pains, we find ourselves rather abruptly in transition. Making up for lost time, the leaving job they began bit by bit so long ago now feels like it’s happening in one fell swoop-- and the pain of delivery just might be more than I can bear. That’s what I was thinking about, as I strolled and stooped and filled my sweatpant pockets with sea glass. And then, one right after the other, I started to find the most remarkable things. Truth being stranger than fiction, the tide had deposited objects so startlingly specific to our family life—its eras, accoutrements, and inside jokes—that it seemed like I was in a waking dream. My actual recurring dream, come to life. Every few steps another artifact winked at me from the gritty wet sand and knots of strewn seaweed. The tide brought a Nerf dart a pastel plastic rabbit a little boy’s sneaker (a green shoe no less) a little girl’s sandal A rust-colored cowboy missing an arm a pink plastic tea cup with an embossed heart it brought them back different it brought them back changed it brought them back, let's be honest a bit rougher for the wear still-- it brought an empty vessel just waiting to be filled How do we endure these Transitions the moments at the threshold the comings in and the goings out their sweetness and pain the miraculous little cups that runneth over with delight and despair the way they wash over you bit by bit then all in a rush? There is no way to prepare You can only pause as it happens-- turn all internal dials to receive tune the sweet ache of your attention to the instant inside the instant when the wave is neither on the way in nor on the way out but just at its zenith poised to take something away and leave something else behind-- As you stand there at the almost imperceptible margin in between, blinking into the implausible brightness of the diffuse gray morning, you can only inhale and exhale and open your hands like mussel shells. This post is dedicated to the memory of my beloved uncle, Sam Sheffer, who passed away last night, 8-28-21.
He was creative and outrageous, naughty and hilarious, totally irreverent yet devoted to the sacred, as philosophical as he was an absolute nutter, brilliant and mysterious. He read everything I wrote. I wish him peaceful waters, sweet dreams, and a beautiful transition.
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August 2021
All text and images, except where credited, are © Jenny Sheffer Stevens and The Regular Jenny, 2015-2021 -- All rights reserved.
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