No Mud, No Lotus

The first time I heard the saying no mud, no lotus I was twenty, taking a yoga class. I’d been practicing for a few months, and it was becoming my favorite part of the day. Inhale, reach up high, exhale, fold forward, inhale, lengthen your spine and look toward the horizon, exhale, step to plank. Breathe. Breathe. Stay in plank, shaking is fine. No mud, no lotus! The teacher said it casually, people around me chuckled because they’d heard it before, but that concept took hold of me right there in that moment. Or maybe I took hold of it, and kept holding on.

This idea that you could grow in mud and murkiness, your roots could be submerged at the bottom of the darkest pond or river, but it didn’t mean you were screwed? You could still emerge as something strong and beautiful, your past did not have to determine your future - that spoke to me. Maybe I’m not irreparably broken after all is basically what I thought as I walked home.

Photo by Sora Sagano on Unsplash

I’ve had a few experiences like that in my life, things that have been said as an aside that felt like mind-lightning. I was in an Al-anon meeting a couple of years before that yoga class when someone said, “Well, you don’t go to the hardware store for apples!” and everyone shrugged and nodded and I was like, Holy shit. I do that all the time. I go to the wrong people for empathy. I think if I write the perfect email, my mom will see the light. I dance like a monkey and try to earn love from people who don’t know how to do anything but hurt me. I go to the hardware store for apples a lot. Can everyone in this room see that my face is scarlet red? I didn’t realize no one in the room would shame me for something like that, and everyone had their own stuff to manage.

It’s good when things like that happen. Moments where the lights come on inside your own head and you become aware of something you need to know for your own growth and liberation, and also - let’s be real - for the relief and well-being of anyone who happens to love you. How many times have you watched someone you adore and respect make asinine choices you can’t understand? How many times have you been the person making asinine choices?

I don’t know if it’s because I struggled with my mom so mightily, though I suspect that it is, but I’ve always cherished the close female relationships in my life. My mom broke my heart cleaner than anyone, and she did it more than once, more than twice, more times than I care to think about. She’d even get my jugular on the way down, she was artful about it. I have to give her that. Then she’d call me sensitive if I showed any pain. If I distanced myself for a while, she’d feel betrayed. She really would, too, it’s not that she’d act as if she felt betrayed, she’d really feel that way.

It just so happens the most important woman in my life hurt me more than anyone, but also holds a place in my heart no one else can ever touch. She’s my mom. Also - and I don’t expect you to understand this right now because I’m not taking the time to explain it - I don’t think she meant to hurt me. I miss her every minute of the day, and I’m not a masochist. She had some amazing qualities - she was smart and funny and she could be really kind. In this world, she assumed I was going to sink or swim, so might as well teach me to swim herself. If there was going to be blood in the water, she’d be the one to do the cutting. I was hers, after all.

Maybe because of that, I’ve been careful or discerning or a slow-burn kind of person. Whatever the reason, I have ended up with the absolute best women in my life. Brilliant, honest, funny af, insightful, generous, thoughtful, interesting, brave, flawed, vulnerable friends I am so lucky to know. The kind who understand the value of hard conversations, who know how to show up, who know how to be there when things get muddy.

Definitely not the kind who invite you on vacation, tell you to let loose and hook up with the hot masseuse, and then bang him themselves when you take too long to get it on. Not the kind who get defensive when you ask wtf the next day and say they didn’t think you’d care, and you should’ve moved faster if you wanted some of that sweet action. Also not the kind to gossip behind your back, talk about your divorce, your kid, your career choices, your drinking. Jesus.

This is my way of telling you I didn’t like the Carrie Coon monologue. I love her, she’s phenomenal. Her delivery was beautiful. It’s just, that speech made no sense at the end of that week. It made no sense after the way she was treated by her “childhood besties.” If you didn’t watch White Lotus, here’s all you need to know - these three women have a very catty week together, especially two out of three of them - and then the best of the bunch delivers this monologue where she says she’s “just happy to be at the table” because they’ve known each other forever, and time is what gives her life meaning.

And the whole internet swoons like this is some great example of female friendship in your middle years, and no the fuck it is not. Get better friends and find a better table, seriously.

It also comes to light that one of the friends voted for the potus. Believe me when I tell you there are better tables. The other one can’t reach her husband for days and doesn’t tell her two best friends? Let me tell you what would happen in reality. You’d tell your friends, they’d tell their partners or sisters or roommates at home, and someone would drive over to the house to make sure said husband was okay and also not holed up with someone else. If he was holed up with someone else, all hell would break loose. Whatever, these are fictional people and it doesn’t matter, but it does matter when people think this is a good example of women having each other’s backs. I have women in my life I knew in elementary school and I am happy to tell you that isn’t what it looks like, omg.

But - I do want that Stay Gold necklace Chelsea was wearing, and I feel like I should be able to find one for a lot less than 10k. Two things can be true at once, all right? I can want that necklace, and also care about important shit. The thing is - and this is why it bothered me so much - we need our friends right now, and we need to know who our friends are and what true friendship looks like. They are not the women who would talk shit about us behind our backs, or vote for people who don’t value a woman’s right to vote ffs. I don’t think too many people are looking to Mike White to teach them about female friendship, but I must say I was taken aback by the love-fest over that monologue in the context of the (again, fictional) week leading up to it. I think my tolerance for calling things amazing when they aren’t has dwindled to zero.

Maybe it’s my tolerance for the relentless onslaught of things that make no sense that’s deteriorated to nothing. I cannot fathom being a woman, and being reckless with a woman’s right to vote, for example, which is what you did if you voted for the felon in office. The SAVE Act passed the House today with the help of four Democrats, by the way. Now it heads to the Senate where it had better be dead on arrival like Chuck Schumer said. The Supreme Court unanimously decided this administration should correct their “clerical error” and bring Kilmar Abrego Garcia home, but there’s no deadline and I’m not sure who’s going to enforce this order.

I wake up with dread and panic most days, which is not like me at all. I am normally an optimistic person, pretty steady by nature. Glass half full. These are not normal times, though. I don’t even know where the glass is. I worry about my kids, everyone’s kids, my friends, this country, my neighbors, what’s going to happen next, how anyone can still be confused at this point, if I’m going to know when it’s time to go, if I’ll be able to leave if that time comes, and a million other things.

It’s not that these thoughts are racing through my head when the alarm goes off, it’s that this feeling is coursing underneath the floorboards and seeping through the walls. It’s in the air. I should take an anxious morning selfie and hashtag it:

#wokeuplikethis #nomakeup #nofilter

I need coffee is the thing. I have a routine, and if I work the routine, it works. Ish. It’s just a bumpy ride for the first twenty minutes. I have tools, it’s all fine, but if you were inside my head as I smoothed out the fluctuations of my mind, you might be reminded of that eighties PSA about your brain on drugs. Gen X is with me.

Photo by george catalina on Unsplash

This is your brain. This is your brain on anxiety.

[load toothbrush]

Think of things that need to happen today. Kids, work, appointments, emails, phone calls.

[head to kitchen, grind beans, froth oat milk]

Here comes Nancy Reagan marching through my mind, what’s that she’s saying?

Just say no to fascism and rapists in the White House, dear.

Me: Oh I did, but other people didn’t and now it’s too late! Too fuckin’ late. But hey, Nance, you should definitely have some eggs. Probably a cheese omelette with extra butter and some potatoes, too. Remember when Dan Quayle didn’t know how to spell “potato” and that was a scandal?!

Exit Nance.

I need a titer test for measles, you might, too. I read something about how we should all get one if we were born after 1968, and I was born in 1971. We need this because part of making America great is bringing back measles and the plague, apparently. Also gonorrhea I think? Or was that cholera? Anyway, we’re making things great by getting rid of due process and tanking the economy with insane tariffs. Or it might just be run-of-the-mill illegal insider trading, or both. Whatever, it’s hard to keep up. People used to get arrested for it, though.

Anyway, the anxiety is there, crackling through the air, and I have my coffee and read for a while, but not the news. Essays, poems, anything that is not the news. I let the good sentences swirl around me, and I breathe in the coffee and let the warmth and the taste of it soothe me. Sometimes I check on my girlfriends, sometimes they check on me.

How’s your heart today? You okay? Lunch this week?

I have a doctor-friend. I met him at a silent meditation retreat back in 2002. We didn’t talk until it was over, obviously, kind of the point of those silent meditation retreats, but he’s one of the kindest people you could ever meet. I left that retreat with pneumonia, ended up running 104 degree-fever and went to see him when I started hallucinating. Wish I was kidding. This was in my uber-vegan, meditation-cures-everything phase, and he was like, yeah, you need massive shots of penicillin in both ass-cheeks, or I can put you in the hospital, your call. So I took the penicillin.

Haven’t seen him for years, but ran into him a few weeks ago at Thyme Cafe which is funny because I’m thinking about time a lot lately, and that didn’t occur to me until right now. He’s Persian, his wife is Indian. He’s an American citizen, he was born here - his family of origin is Persian. His wife has him carrying his passport around. “How will you prove you’re a citizen if you get stopped?” she asked him. He couldn’t answer. Every woman I know is worrying. Our minds are running scenarios all the time, and they’re always about how we keep our people safe. How we keep our daughters safe, our friends, ourselves. I’m not saying men aren’t worrying, I’m just saying she’s the reason he’s walking around with his passport.

I saw an immigration attorney post something on one of the socials this week. She said if you’re a U.S citizen and ICE detains you, you need a civil rights attorney, not an immigration attorney, and all these compassionate geniuses felon supporters underneath the post were like, why would ICE detain U.S. citizens?! I know I should stop leaving smart-ass comments on instagram. I have a business page there and I haven’t left yet. But I’m going to get myself in trouble because I see stuff like that and I can’t help myself, I respond: Have you ever walked your dog and not carried your wallet? And also not been white? That’s how.

It’s like a Fellini movie - the people who are all lalalala, time for my hike! are the ones who scare me the most, they’re like Stepford people. But my bestie Wendy isn’t like that at all, I’ve known her since high school. We went to college together, too. If we were on vacation, she would not be talking smack about me in the pool. If she had something to say, she’d say it to my face. We can say anything to each other, and I know, because we have. The point is, she’s a good friend.

She is also heartbroken and scared and resolute and trying her best, and she took my advice and got a titer test, and it turned out she needed a measles booster. She told me when we went to the protest last Saturday, and I was like oh, shit, I told you to do that? And then I remembered I told everyone to do that in an essay a few weeks ago. I just forgot to do it myself. So I sent my doctor a message in the app, she called in an order and I went today. I’ll let you know when I know.

There’s my bff Tracy, we also went to the same high school and college, she’s like my sister. I spoke to her on the way to the cardiologist earlier. My heart is solid, no worries. Turns out your heart can be healthy and broken at the same time. She said she wants to go off grid, her nervous system is shot. She wants to live off the land, but she also wants to go out dancing. These are not mutually exclusive wants, and I’m going to tell you, one of the ways I coped one of the mornings this week is by going out to my studio and blasting Say What You Want and dancing until I was sweaty, by myself.

You have to find your way and you have to keep your people close. I spent half of one day texting Kate. Probably the funniest text thread of the last six months, because we have to laugh, too. I laughed so hard I might have had tears running down my face. Today is Dani’s birthday, and the world is a better place because she’s here. Someday I’ll tell you how we met twenty years ago, it’s some kind of kismet. My friends Jessie and Jenny look the same to me as they did when we were six, I swear to you. My agent Dana is the person you’d want in your corner if the shit went down, and it always does. A year ago today, I was with Lauren, having the time of my life. Those are the people who matter, and that is the stuff that gives life meaning. It’s just really important not to call something gold if it isn’t. Especially now.

Stay gold, Ponyboy.

Nothing Gold Can Stay

By Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

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Friends, I have a very exciting announcement. Next Thursday, April 17th at 5:30pm PST, 7:30pm CDT, and 8:30pm ET, I will be launching a new series, Come As You Are Conversations, Off the Page with_______. My plan is to host these monthly conversations with writers here on the ‘stack, and if you could see the way I am grinning right now, you’d have a tiny sense of how excited I am to tell you the fantastic Paul Crenshaw has agreed to come and do this crazy thing with me first. I’ll send out a separate announcement, but wanted you to save the date! I thought we needed some good news.