Please join us on Tuesday, December 6, 2016, for a Book Signing Party in Ann Arbor for
Self-Aware: A Guide for Success in Work and Life
We will
Location: Pure Visibility, Inc., 415 N. Fifth Avenue, 2nd Floor, Ann Arbor, MI 48104 (map).
Please RSVP via Eventbrite.
I shared this story about my cat and my own experience chanting and becoming more joyful through chanting and meditation when I hosted a program earlier this month at the Siddha Yoga Meditation Center in Ann Arbor.
My cat’s name is Floyd, and the reason I want to tell you about him is that my experience with him parallels a little bit my experience in Siddha Yoga. It’s a story of purring to share increasing comfort and joy.
Close to 15 years ago, we adopted a stray cat. We were walking into the door of my apartment building, and a cat started calling to us. He came to us from across the little street, meowing the whole time. He was scrawny and bald in places where he plucked out his fur in response to flea bites. He looked ragged, and he was really hungry. He seemed sweet, not feral at all, and I brought him inside. He seemed to understand living with humans. He was hungry. He fattened up and his hair grew in and he remained a talker. He also had a very soft, very subtle purr. I recall being surprised by a cat with such a loud and demanding voice had such a tiny purr.
Well, the other day I realized in an affectionate moment, that he has a much louder purr than I remembered when we first met. His purr is more fervent now. I think that over time, as his comfort level and his trust have deepened, and so has his purr. When he purrs, he draws me in. His purr expresses happiness and prompts me to give him more affection so that he’ll continue to purr.
I did a little research on why cats purr. It was interesting. Cats purr as kittens when nursing, when receiving affection from us humans, and they purr sometimes when they are sick or scared. So, cats purr for communication, and depending how you interpret why ill cats purr, it is either for self-soothing or maybe healing. According to an article in Scientific American, the frequency of the vibration of the purring actually may help bone density and healing.
Well, you might wonder where I’m going with this. As I thought about all of this, I thought about my own experience with Siddha Yoga and how I have opened up like he has, how tuning into his purring and the practices and has helped me enjoy life so much more.
I showed up the doorstep of the Siddha Yoga Meditation Center just like that stray kitty, hungry for knowledge, hungry for peace of mind. I was restless, looking for something. I had always known I wanted to meditate. I tried a local class, and I ended up frustrated and sore from the sitting positions or asanas and no closer to the peace of mind I was seeking.
At one point, I shared this urge with my scientific mentor. It turned out she also had a meditation practice and a community, this one, and she invited me to accompany her to a satsang one Thursday night.
I arrived at the Siddha Yoga Meditation Center in Ann Arbor in late spring in 1998, right after the death of my father. That night, like most Thursday night satsangs, we chanted and sat for meditation.
It was the chanting that caught me. I was struck by how the chant started solemnly. In those slow early verses, I experienced a lot of the sadness I was carrying around. But then, something magical happened, the chant sped up, and I found myself carried along with its momentum, and the end was fast and joyful and fun. And I had the experience of going along that entire arc. And I had the sense that by giving myself to the chant that I would be soothed, met in sadness and brought to joy. And I had the sense that when I was singing solemnly, I felt solemn. When I was singing joyfully, I experienced joy. I had thought it was the other way around, but acting in those ways drew forth that experience, drew forth that same energy from the world around me.
I also found, as I still do, that the chants continued to give to me, sticking with me as melodies or words or just that lovely well being that I experience in the chant. The words or melody would popping back up in quiet moments, reminding me, reconnecting me to the experience, to joy.
So, chanting was like my purring. It was and still is a form of self soothing, but it is also a practice of expressing and of cultivating joy, and drawing it to me and sharing it with others.
I received a subscription to Bon Appetit Magazine, and the cover of the June issue was a spectacular classic sour cherry pie with lattice crust. I read the accompanying article, and I learned that Michigan produces about 75% of the tart or sour cherries in the U.S., and they’re hard to get outside of Michigan.
I love summer pies, and blueberry pie has been my favorite. I love fresh black cherries, but I particularly dislike cherry flavoring in other things. I defy family tradition by detesting black cherry ice cream, for instance. But, I was intrigued, sour cherry pie might be worth trying, because a bit of tartness really helps make a tasty pie.
So, I tore out the recipe and saved it. Today, I went to the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market with my mom and my aunt (visiting from NYC). We picked up 2 quarts of sour cherries for the pie.
The cherries brought back memories. My mom told the story of pitting cherries with a hairpin with her mom. I didn’t have a cherry pitter, so we stopped by a drugstore and got some bobby pins. And then, my mom, my aunt, and I sat on my back deck and pitted 2 quarts of cherries with 3 bobby pins. It worked great – the cherries were perfectly ripe.
My mom reminded me that my dad’s old office had a sour cherry tree behind it, and then I remembered picking cherries from it by sitting on the fence.
My mom then told the story of how on July 4th weekend the year I was born (that would be 12 days before my birth), her father came to town. My mom’s mom had passed away years before, and my grandfather attended to my mom by working beside her. They picked buckets of cherries, sugared them, and froze them, laying in some summer sweetness for the year to come. I suppose I come by my cherry snobbery honestly.
Tonight’s pie was fantastic – the tartness of the cherries required a big dollop of vanilla ice cream as a balance. It’s as good as my favorite, blueberry pie.
But even better than the pie was feeling connected to my mom and my aunt as we sat around a table and worked together and talked, and feeling connected to those that have passed on – my grandmother with her hairpin pitter, and my grandfather offering his labor to ease my mom’s.
The 600 block of South First Street had a block party last Sunday (6/22/2008). Wendy, my across the street neighbor, organized it by gaining the signatures needed to get the permit from the city to close the street. We live on the block of First Street where it goes from 1 way to 2 way. Much of the traffic that zooms down First turns onto Madison before our block, but we are close to downtown, and we do get a fair number of cars on our block. So, when they put up the barricades to close the street, the quiet was noticeable. And then came the kids. From the corner house, from across the street, from neighboring blocks.
They came with wheeled vehicles of all sorts – bicycles with training wheels, tricycles, bicycles, scooters, and a funky skateboard with an axle in the center. But there were no cars. We pulled some tables into the middle of the closed street, and as the kids did their bicycle/tricycle/scooter laps in the street, we set up a table of snacks and drinks. The cookies and the cupcakes went first, individually taken by kids looking thrilled to be getting dessert before dinner. Each one that grabbed a cupcake seemed to be waiting for one of the adults to insist they put it down and eat their veggies.
Then the squirt guns came out, and the hoses, and the kids formed some loose teams and had a water fight. The adults only interfered when the shenanigans got too close to the adults and the food table, but otherwise the water war raged at the north end of the block. Adults of grandparental age marveled at the way the girls and boys played together – said it wasn’t like the old days. Later, after our neighbor Georgia created a geyser with Mentos and Diet Coke the gangs of kids broke into gender groups – the girls skipped rope and the boys continued to beat on the plastic 2-liter container.
We met one neighbor for the first time, and we’ve been here for almost 8 years now. And, we got to know other neighbors better, not only those on our block, but also neighbors who live on nearby blocks. What fun.
In the week since the party, I’ve been looking for people on the block, looking to say hello and continue the conversation. Looks like 8 hours of no cars and some food on the street has started to coalesce some neighbors into a neighborhood. Thanks Wendy!
So, I’ve been contemplating doing some landscape work on the backyard. The grass is dying (grubs, I think), the deck is too small for the table and the grill we have on it, and the random plantings (my fault) and the bi-level deck and backyard (inherited from the previous owners) feels like there’s too much going on in a small space. I’ve had it.
So, I called in the professionals. I am getting quotes from a couple of different landscape architecture firms to redesign our backyard. A representative of one came out today, and we discussed several things. I got excited. Finally, the backyard of my dreams was about to hatch. However, translating this to my skeptical and more financially responsible husband didn’t go so well tonight. So, I felt a bit bruised and sulky, but the two of us went to our backyard and wandered around our small downtown yard, trying to think about next steps.
I was fretting over this and that, weeding here and there, and then Dave said “is that a real moth?”. There was a huge Cecropia silkmoth, Hyalophora cecropia, just hanging out on our bee balm. It gripped the bee balm stem delicately in its full regalia -fuzzy striped russet, black, and white body, gigantic russet, brown, grey, and white wings, glorious feathered black antennae. And of course, the engineer saw it, not the biologist, cause the biologist was all bent out of shape. And it was sitting there, with grace and beauty, quietly yet quite firmly directly refuting my assertion that my backyard wasn’t terrific.
I still have a few ideas about improving the yard, but the moth drove the sulkiness away. Hard to complain about the garden when it is pulling in such lovely fans.
So, there’s this blog I read, and the author has a book with a really compelling title. I’ve enjoyed his blog posts on the topic, and I had put his book on my Amazon wish list.
In support of my intention to acquire, maintain, and store less stuff, I moved most of my Amazon wish list to a wish list (personal card catalog) at the Ann Arbor District Library. They don’t have every book I’ve ever wanted, but they have an awful lot of them. Amazing. I suppose I’m not as unique as I thought ;). I’m also storing some of the list on my anobii.com bookshelf’s wish list (edited to remove the link since I now use Goodreads).
Anyway, this blogger’s interesting sounding book with the compelling title was available from the library. I put it on hold, received the notification email, visited the library, checked it out, and then returned it the same day. Funny, flipping through the book, it seemed so tangential to my current interests and so, yes, I’ll say it, thin with huge spaces between lines, not many words on the page, not many pages. After touching the book, I no longer had any interest in its contents. Funny. Glad I didn’t buy it or get someone else to buy it for me.
Note to self – always touch books I’m going to buy or ask to be purchased for me. Online descriptions just don’t compare.