Returned!

That's right, we did it.

M-A-R-R-I-E-D!!

I'm going to try not to gush too much, but this was, without question, one of the happiest days I have ever had. And I feel very, very (very) lucky.  To be married to the man I'm married to.  I am more in love with him now than I have ever been.  And that is saying something.

Everything went so beautifully...the whole week leading up to the wedding, Paul and I were both blown away by the efforts of our families and friends, we just felt love and support coming at us from all sides and it made for an incredible ceremony and reception.  I didn't want the day to end...I thought I was going to want to leave the party early, I thought I would be too exhausted to stay up until the wee hours, but it was all just too good to say goodnight to.  Eventually I just sort of collapsed onto Paul's lap and closed my eyes, and this apparently was the sign that the festivities should come to an end.  It was 4AM.

We crazily volunteered to host a brunch the next morning after the wedding, and so me and the husband (giggle), barely got any sleep before we were up again, clearing out empty bottles and figuring out how exactly we were supposed to make eggs for 70 people by 10 AM....  It happened, god knows how it happened, but it did.  Thanks again to our intrepid friends, who were busily running to the grocery store and making pancakes in back-rooms in order to make it all come together.  And after brunch there were goodbyes to be said and cleaning to be done and tables and chairs to prep for the rental company...before we knew it was 5pm, and Paul and I were loading ourselves into our jam-packed rental car and heading off to a nearby hotel to try and get some real sleep.  In the car we went over and over the details of the day before...how wonderful it all was, how beautiful, how eloquent and smart and lovely all our friends are...and by the time we got to the hotel I was too tired to even attempt a "we just got married" upgrade.  Any room would do.  As long as it had room service and a bed, which it did.

The next two days were full of unpacking from the wedding, returning all the various rental equipment, and then re-packing and preparing for the honeymoon.  There were several honeymoon details which had been flagrantly overlooked in service of wedding planning, and now we only had 48 hours to get prepared.  We barely had time to catch our breath after the wedding before we were on to figuring out what the best currency exchange rate was in Iceland.  It's a crazy transition, that wedding to honeymoon thing.

We flew all night long and arrived in Reykjavik early in the morning on a Thursday.  We arrived. Our bags, however, did not.  Our bags...containing all of our warm clothing for Iceland and all of our best clothing for the second leg of the trip in Paris.  The baggage clerk for Iceland Air told us she was sure our things would arrive late that night, but I had to fight to keep from crying all the same.

"Did you tell her it's our HONEYMOON?" I asked Paul.  As if her having that piece of information would get our bags to us any quicker.  As if they were just hiding our bags in the back room at the airport, waiting to see if we had a really goooooood reason that we needed them before they brought them out to us.

We spent the first day in Reykjavik purchasing scarves and looking up things to do and drinking so-so Icelandic beer at a local haunt:  Dillons, A Rock and Roll Bar, said the sign out front.  It wasn't very Rock and Roll at 4pm on a Thursday, but it was nice enough.

It was so gray and cold and we were so tired and everything felt so alien...especially without our bags and maybe doubly especially because the wedding now seemed like some beautiful far-away dream...how did we GET here?  On the bus ride in from the airport, looking out at the gray harbor and the still un-opened shops of Reykjavik I thought, oh...this is why people go to the beach for their honeymoon.  The idea of doing anything other than, well, nothing...seemed just too exhausting.

But the next morning, just as the baggage woman said they would be, our bags were delivered to our hotel, and it felt like the honeymoon might actually be able to begin.  Ah, to shower!  To change my socks!

We spent the next day and a half in Reykjavik, exploring what there was to explore...we went to the Blue Lagoon and treated ourselves to the "VIP Lounge", we wandered through the harbor, we ate...a lot.  The food in Iceland is amazing.  No one tells you this, but it is...it's so good.  Everything we ate, literally, no matter whether we'd gotten it at a restaurant or a bar or a coffee shop or some little sandwich stand...everything was perfectly prepared and just...delicious.  So, we partook of a lot of Icelandic cuisine.  We tried to find some theater to see, but didn't try very hard.  We walked a lot, took a lot of pictures, we even ended up at the art museum downtown just in time for the opening of a new exhibit and stood and drank the free wine while we listened to people give speeches in Icelandic.

But we realized quickly that we wanted to be deeper in to the natural beauty of the country, and so we took a tiny plane across the island to Husavik, a little fishing town way up north.  Almost as far north in Iceland as you can go.   Which is almost as far north anywhere as you can go.  Iceland is amazing because it's huge, but very sparsely populated.  There are only 330,000 residents, and nearly 85% of those residents live in Reykjavik.  This means you can drive and drive and drive in Iceland and not see another person for hours. Not even a car.  Sometimes not even a house.  But lots of sheep.  There are very fat and adorable sheep everywhere.  I think that Paul wanted to take one home...he was very taken by the sheep.

In Husavik we whale-watched, we ate, we fished in the little ponds near the cabins where we stayed, we soaked in a geo-thermal hot tub and drank more Icelandic beer, we read, we ate, we drove out to waterfalls and lava rock fields and strange martian landscapes, we drove through fog so thick you really couldn't tell whether the car was still on the ground or just floating in mid-air...it was good.  It was really, really good.

And just as we started to settle in, just as we started to get that, oh yes, okay, we're getting a handle on this place...it was time to get on a plane and fly to Paris!  (Tough life, I know).

Oh, Paris.

Oh, sweet, gorgeous, well-groomed Paris...

TO BE CONTINUED...

The Talent of Friends...

It's nearly Christmas...I'm drowning in to-do lists...I promise more yoga ramblings to come right quick, in the meantime, please enjoy the amazing things my friends have been doing lately that's been making think/weep/smile/laugh...

First, from the mind of the uber-talented Alissa Ford:




Second...from the funny bone of the lovely Michaela Watkins: (note: this one is for adult ears only)

The Creepy Hand Model: Ellen Sirot with Michaela Watkins from Michaela Watkins

Why Not Just Let Go?

Yesterday, while having lunch with a dear friend of mine, we stumbled into a conversation about "letting go", the culmination of which was a totally brilliant analogy, made by said friend, that actually resolved for me a burning inner conflict that has been bouncing around in me for years, literally...years. (I will  include genius-like analogy at the end of this post).

I housesat for this friend not too long ago, and while there took the liberty of perusing her bookshelves, upon which I found the following book. Cheesy title, I know, and the guy who wrote it is named "Guy", also cheesy, but my friend owned the book, and said friend is a voracious reader, and ivy-league educated to boot, so I trusted her judgment and set to reading.

This book begins with a story about an archeologist.  This archeologist has spent his whole life looking for this one ancient temple (full of treasure or something), which no one has ever been able to find.  And one day, after years of searching, this archeologist gets a hot tip.  This temple, it's rumored, is buried in a mountain which the archeologist is going to have to tunnel through in order to reach said temple.  And this archeologist, being the adventurous type, decides he is going to do just that.  But the tunneling is really hard. It's not a very stable environment and things keep caving in and he has to rebuild his tunnel over and over again. But he is determined to find this temple. So he digs and digs, it takes him months but he's just--he won't give up. And one day he gets to this point where he's too far in to turn back, and everything in the tunnel starts to cave in around him. All he can do is use whatever energy he has left (after months of digging) to throw himself up against the tunnel's center support beam, which stops the caving, but also means he is literally holding the tunnel together all by himself, with the force of his body. And as he's doing this, a thought occurs to him...as he's there, trying to hold the tunnel together with his bare hands, trying not to DIE...and the thought is:

"Why not just let go?"

And of course he thinks this is a crazy suicidal thought, but he can't stop thinking it...it's pretty persistent. So, deliriously tired from trying to hold this tunnel together, he does...he just...lets go. And everything starts caving in around him and he's pretty certain that he's just signed his own death warrant. But he hasn't--he doesn't die. And when the dust clears and everything settles he looks up, and there, right above him is the roof of the temple he's been looking for. He had been inside it the entire time--tunneling through the very thing he'd been searching for!

Now, I don't know if my re-telling is nearly as effective, but when I read that story I was so moved...I recognized it in a visceral way...that feeling of holding everything together, just trying to dig and manuever and keep the structure intact, while all the while there is this little voice saying, "why not just let go?" I recognized it. In my bones.

And my friend who I was lunching with and I got to talking about this book, and we had felt the same way about this opening story (she and I are similar in many ways--both of us carry a bit of the overachiever in our DNA) and so we began to talk about it--about this mysterious "letting go"...about exactly how it's done and what it means. A subject I never tire of exploring, but which always, for me, meets the same impasse.

The way I see it there are two camps, on this subject of letting go--one which says, you know, the whole DEAL is about letting go...that all of spiritual practice is really just about relaxing, and that the letting go is king. And then there's another camp which says, no no, it's all about ALIGNING--it's about lining up with "the divine" or whatever you want to call it, and that it's an active process, one of figuring out what you want and then lining up with that desire in order to find liberation. To me these things feel in contradiction, and I find myself swinging from one to the other...neither ever feeling totally comfortable. Never quite sure if I'm supposed to be doing less or doing more.

And this is where my friend's brilliant analogy comes in.

First let me say that my friend is a gifted actress and singer, and over the last several years she has become more and more devoted to her singing, practicing every single day, and so it's not surprising that right now her vocal work is the lens through which she is veiwing the world.

"Singing is the only way I can think to explain this." She said.

(Surpriiiiiiiiise, surprise).

She said that you have to have energy in order to produce sound...you can't just sit there with your mouth open and wait for music to come out...you have to engage...you have to move air from one spot in your body to another and that has to be active, and conscious. BUT, she said, you also have to relax the right parts of your anatomy in order to produce the sounds you want. If your vocal chords are tense, they aren't going to be able to vibrate, and if they can't vibrate, they won't produce clear sound. There has to be an openness, in your mouth and your head, in order for the sound to be rich.

So, she said, it's definitely not possible to produce with apathy...but you also have to relax, and the things you have to relax are usually the things that people habitually tense.  For her, she said, the letting go is really about learning to let go of the things you hold on to which get in the way.  That archeologist still had a quest...he was still actively seeking something, with energy...but what he didn't realize is that he didn't have to do ALL the work himself. And she, my dear brilliant friend, if she attempted to force the vocal chords do what they so naturally do without her input...she would never be able to produce beautiful sounds.

I don't know if I found this explanation so enlightening because she used something I don't do, singing, as the form through which to explain, but I thought it was one of the best explanations I had ever heard about this sweet-spot/middle-ground of both doing and not-doing. Doing, without over-doing.

And it made me think of yoga, and of how this play of muscularity and openness is constantly happening--how the body is constantly in dialouge--you're seeking out the pose, you're seeking out the pose and then you find it and in order to let it sing, you have to release into it--and that's the real moment of connection. Your body is lined up, but you are letting go of everything that is unnecessary...because if muscles are being recruited that aren't required, you'll feel it, and you'll feel it in the form of tension or aggravation or just plain ol' pain.

And same goes for singing.

And same goes for...everything.

It's not about just reeeeelaxing into some lump of goo on the floor, it's about doing with trust--trusting that your body knows what needs to be done (or your vocal chords or your heart or whatever it is) and that you do not have to do all the work yourself. You do not have to hold the entire tunnel together, and in fact, if you do...you're probably going to miss the exact thing you're looking for...