That's How the Light Gets In

On South Beach, everything is beautiful and perfect all the time. 

The world's hippest lighthouse,
South Pointe Park @
Miami Beach

Because it seems that way. The weather's so good that when it dips below 70, the weathermen react the way they do in Detroit when it snows 14 inches. And I've never been in a town where there's such an attention to design in the DNA of the city itself. You couldn't possibly build your new office as a squatty little brick building, because you'd be laughed out of town. I can take pictures that make me look like a professional photographer with no effort at all because there are vistas to do it simply everywhere, literally all the time. The beauty per capita is through the roof, you should have bought a long time ago, got in on the ground floor. The shops are beautiful, the bars with their outdoor seating that consists of big loungy pillows and wicker swings are beautiful, the water, the breeze, the cruise ships leaving port at sunset Sunday, they're all just beautiful, the long-legged Colombian, Cuban, Italian and American women are beautiful, everything is just fucking beautiful. 

Which is why Cynical Joe just wants to distrust the crap out of it.

Because it's just not the nature of the world to be that way. Beauty exists because there is a thing that we can look at and say "That is not beautiful." Nothing is this good all the time.

But... what if it is...? For us, I mean.

We live close to the touristy part of town, so we're mistaken for tourists all the time. Which I've finally come to realize, we are. We are cherry-picking what we want from a city, staying in our ~$60/night "hotel," and getting exactly what we want from this town. And the next one. And the next one. Until we don't. 

Hipster Santa: Still an Epic Fail
(But a good cartoon: gricklethings.blogspot.com)

I am nostalgic for Portland, it's true. I worked a week there recently and the danger of just being in town for a while was apparent. It's Christmas, the big tree on Pioneer Courthouse Square was making me long for Hipster Santa, and all the stuff that annoyed me about P-town (The indifferent service that is somehow viewed as a Mark of Distinction by the servers who give it to you; The long slow Chinese water torture that is a Portland winter, etc etc blah blah blah) was somehow a distant memory. That's why they tell ya don't ever live somewhere when you've only been there on vacation. 

Knowing all that, the smell of the pine trees that just hangs in the air as a part of life there just overwhelmed me. I lived there 5+ years and it never got old, never ceased to be fascinating to me to step outside and realize how close to all this primal beauty you were all the damn time, to be able to go to Mount Tabor in the cold morning air and walk around realizing to yourself "I'm on top of a goddamn volcano." I was quite ready to just start campaigning with Monica for us to go back to Portland when our lease runs out here in May. But then over drinks, one of my friends said "Yeah, it's easy to come back here, you can come back anytime and it'll be pretty much the same," and in terms of the town itself, I bought in to that. I believe it enough that in an instant, it changed my thinking about coming back immediately. And it let me relax into Miami so far and see the fun in it, in this experience, without having to be afraid that I'd somehow be carried away into another place, into somewhere I didn't want to be. I can enjoy this, now. And whatever comes next, well, that's not today and the decision will happen when it needs to.

So when they ask me "What did you learn about yourself in Miami?", the thing I'll be adding to the list is that it's a necessary part of life-- my life, anyway-- to try new things, to keep expanding my mind, my world, and at the same time, to walk my own path on deciding an outcome.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything,
That's how the light gets in.
~Leonard Cohen

It's Not a Resume' Builder (Joe)

The ability to stand emotionally naked before someone you love is a vastly underrated skill.

The Dock and The Rope (Joe)

He believed in the Confluence of Experience. He believed that you were led to places—Geographical or spiritual--- For reasons you do not comprehend. So he circled his problems, stalking them with a spear and shield, always seeing the same prey to be caught, not realizing that he was walking in different circles.


He found a woman who allowed him to take advantage of his newfound ability to challenge himself. He let her enroll them in a yoga class, that kind where they heat the room up to make sure you’ll sweat. She was a True Believer, bought in to the guru’s philosophy. He was pretty sure the heat thing was all a gimmick, the way a business will take something that people in other parts of the world have to suffer through and re-package it for Americans and have them pay for it (“Dumpster Diving! The Easy Way To Weight Loss! Buy the Online Seminar Now!”).


He eventually had to admit to himself there were poses he couldn’t do. He gave himself permission to stop, a triumph of sorts, given that his usual course of action for things he didn’t know how to do was not to go near them. When the instructor came to him after class and said “I saw how red you were getting and I was afraid something was really wrong,” he knew he was on the right track. Keep pushing yourself, but don’t go down as The Guy Who Keeled Over in Yoga Class.


He listened to the instructors saying that savasana, the corpse pose, is the hardest one because of the deep relaxation required and the need to blah blah blah blah – Never a problem. He could lay there for 90 minutes, the whole class, if he had to. So as he was laying down, listening to the movement around him, visualizing success at the stretches he couldn’t do yet, it happened.


He had his Yoga Revelation.


The instructor was having the class do a quick floor pose and then rest. It’s just a few seconds, then a quick situp and on into the next pose. At this point, the instructor claps twice, sharply and quickly, to set the pace for the coming pose. And that’s when the light went on.


He thought about how sounds and smells put you back into a certain Time And Place. Grilled onions always made him think of drawing designs in the condensation on the kitchen windows of his childhood house, because his mother always made them for his father’s steak during the crunchy-cold Ohio winters. He always kept music paramount in his life, remembering the exact layout of the tiny college radio station studio he was in during his first-ever on-air shift any time he heard “Cars” by Gary Numan, because that was the first song he ever played there.

It was the sound that provided the memory then: The clapping created an almost physical desire to want to run away. Deep in his gut, he felt…. inadequate.


It was his father.


The father used to do this thing when he wanted you to hurry up where he snapped his fingers, quickly and sharply. As the man lying in corpse pose thought about becoming a teenager, he remembered listening to what turned into a lifelong litany of reasons why some idea he had (A business to start, what college to go in, what to major in, etc) would never come to fruition, and he remembered how he began to associate the snapping fingers with his father, and with his father’s Caution-First approach to life that became the perfect way to take a young person with vision and put into his head a questioning voice that would follow him his whole life, would cause him to doubt himself at every turn, would cause him to live his life from a scarcity rather than an abundance standpoint.


The snapping fingers. The clapping hands. The recoil whenever anyone demanded something of him. The years of keeping people at bay with sarcasm and other battle swords. That’s where it all came from.


The Confluence of Experience brought him here. It could have been any yoga studio, it could have been any instructor. But it wasn’t. It was this studio in Miami Beach, Florida, where the question of “What will our lesson be in our 6 months here?” had seemingly just been answered. It was that instructor, the one with the jangling loud clapping and the edge in his voice that said “You’re not good enough” if you listened hard enough.


He wanted to cry, laying there. Then just as quickly, he wanted to laugh. Instead, he just watched a waking dream, watched the pictures in his head and saw this rope that had anchored him to the shore burning, almost instantaneously like phosphorus exposed to air, leaving him bobbing in a boat that was larger and more powerful than he remembered. It seemed as though it had been far too long since he inspected the boat and its capabilities. He thought to himself that if only he’d known the strength of the engine he could have fired it up at any time and broken free of these moorings whenever he wanted.


It could have been any time. But it wasn’t. It was December in Florida.


And there he was, young and free and in love with himself and her and the world and it could have been anyone but it wasn’t. It was him.


And he could have felt anything right then, but he didn’t. He just felt free, and he had to come to Miami Beach to get there. Right there, at the Confluence of Experience.

What Yoga is teaching me (Monica)

This morning I went to Bikram Yoga.  This is 90 minutes of Yoga in a 100+ degree, humid room. This is an official Bikram studio, and the instructors are a little like Nazi Robot Auctioneers. The prattle off exactly what you are to be doing, every second if you were performing each posture to perfection. You are to listen to your own body, challenge yourself to do more, but also pace yourself so you don’t pass out. This is not always an easy task -- finding this balance.

Yesterday I took the day off from Yoga after a stretch of 5 days in a row. I figured the day off would allow me to be stronger today, capable to complete all of the postures in a strong way. That was my intention going into class.  Yoga has taught me, physically, at the cellular level, that setting my intention is key to success. So, before class began, I lay in Savasana and thought about how I wanted this upcoming class to be the strongest class I’ve ever completed. I would fulfill all of the postures with strength and put my best effort toward them. I would be rewarded by observing my body going a little deeper into the correct postures. 

Well, about 15 minutes into class, I realized my plan wasn’t coming true. I felt dizzy and nauseous. This feeling is common with new students to Bikram, but I hadn’t felt it in several weeks. However, I did eat some oatmeal less than 1 hour before class, and I was sure that was the problem. I forgot to be careful about the rule to not eat 2 hours before class. I began to mentally beat myself up for not following this precaution. I had gotten lazy, or arrogant thinking the rule no longer applied to me now that I was feeling mostly good in class. Yoga is teaching me humility. 

So, plans don’t always go as planned... here I am in class now, with over an hour still to go, and I have a decision to make. I can leave the classroom, or I can stay and rest more than I really need to, focusing on my sick feelings, or I can try to put the nausea aside as much as possible, stay 100% in the moment, listening carefully to my body, rest when I truly need to and push myself when I can. Basically, Yoga is teaching me to be present in the moment, put forward my best effort, while also listening to my body so that I can finish the class as strong as when I started. 

Yoga is teaching me endurance is really just completing one posture at a time until the end. We do each posture 2 times. I ended up resting 1 set of a couple of the postures, laying in Savasana instead of attempting the posture. During this time, I both relaxed fully to let my body rest and my heart rate come down, and I also mentally geared up to complete the next set. I thought of my good friend who just completed her 6th or 7th Ironman race who was vomiting the last section of the marathon run. She was saying to herself then - I just need to finish. “It isn’t that hard to simply finish. You just don’t stop". Yoga is teaching me this too.  One foot in front of the other, one more posture, one more class. It feels so good when I am done that I can’t wait to go back.  

Intentions for 180 v1 (Monica)

One of the things we decided to do each 6 months, each location, is to clarify our intentions or goals for the upcoming period.  Here are mine, placed here in writing for an extra measure of accountability. 

These all have a deadline of May 16, 2012:  

1. Complete a business plan for a new business. (figure out my next career / way to make money for living). 
2. Be able to speak and understand Spanish at an intermediate conversational level.  (Hay mucho de oportunidades en Miami para practicando espanol)  
3. Lose at least ten pounds.  (this should be very do-able in Miami Beach, land of the beautiful people, healthy food, warm weather and ample opportunity to exercise.)

I really like the 6 month cycle for this vs. a year as we do with resolutions.  Things seem more urgent, and it also seems like I need to focus more, finally realizing at the age of 45 that I cannot do everything!  I had a long list of goals and wishes, but I decided to narrow it down to 3. And, #1 and #2 are related in a way as I believe I will need #2 in order to do #1. 

  

I also intend to stay in connection with friends in other places and to put myself out there a bit more than I’m naturally inclined to do to meet new friends here. There is no measurable goal here, this is just something I want to keep in mind and act on daily.

So, here we go.... 180 degrees version 1.  We’ll see how it goes, revise and repeat in 6 months.   

The Drive (Monica)

It is 2 weeks and 2 days after leaving Sacramento, and the time has flown by.  It took us 6 days to drive across the country and nearly a week to get settled into our new condo and town.  The week of getting settled in involved a combination of unpacking, errands to setup house and a good mix of exploring the neighborhood and doing a few fun things. We even did hot yoga 2x this first week.   

It seems like a long time and a short time ago that we were driving across the country.  In summary it went like this:  Day 1 (Monday November 21) leaving just after noon: Sacramento to Palm Dessert.  Day 2:  to Las Cruces New Mexico (nearly to El Paso Texas).  Day 3: to Austin, Texas -- Texas is a very wide state!  Day 4: Thanksgiving!  We decided to rest this day in Austin and check it out since it is on our list of possible cities to live in next. It was a very good decision because both Joe and I were exhausted mentally and physically from the packing and prior trips to Arcata (and work trips for him).  Day 5: Austin to Marianna Florida, Day 6: to our new home in South Beach. We were at our new condo before dark Saturday.    

Most days we drove about 10 hours and covered approximately 600 miles.  In the beginning, we diligently kept a log of every milestone event (every time 100 miles flipped on the odometer, every hour, every time we switched drivers, every time we got gas -- we logged what was happening - where we were, what song was playing, what silly thing one of us had just said).  Our diligence and excitement to log everything waned slowly over time as the trip wore on.  Perhaps it was because the silly things we were saying had waned too, as things seemed a little less exciting and more tedious.  Don’t get me wrong, we traveled well together, but it is a long trip and the country side across Hwy 10 isn’t the most interesting for the greater part of it. By Day 3 we were only logging end of day time and mileage.  

Spending this much time together in the car, with minimal space to move provided us with ample time to talk and dream about the next 6 months.  We also drafted a list of possible cities to live in over the next 2-3 years. We joked a lot, and enjoyed each other’s company. We were grateful each evening for our safety and the support of our friends and family and that we are able to do what we are doing.  

One of the things we did during the trip was to discuss and clarify our intentions for the next 6 months. This looked a lot like a new years resolution, or goal setting exercise, but it feels different because our goals are clearly time boxed with the May 16th deadline -- a little LESS than 6 months away!   

There were times of doubt, at least for me.  As we drove through Blythe California I thought about my Grandparents moving with my 2 or 3 year old mother to live in a tent and farm flax. They were setting out on an adventure seeking riches (or at least a livelihood). They did not find riches and the land eventually won the battle; sending them back to the coastal region of the state to seek more traditional work. My adventure is of a different sort. I’m seeking the ‘what’s next’, without really knowing what that might even be!  I am just trusting that it will come if I am out there and following my dream of traveling and learning more about the world. Along parts of the drive, when I was tired, I heard the voices of the people who love me but who think I’m crazy for doing this. There were times when I thought that perhaps they were right. Maybe it is stupid to go the expense in time and money to travel away from friends and family without a (traditional) meaningful reason such as a job. The feelings of doubt don’t last for me though, and if indeed this turns out to be a bad idea, we can simply call it quits, pick a city and settle down.  I know I will be richer for the experiences either way. 

The Storm Before the Calm

Lots going to storage, we're on the road to FL tomorrow or Tuesday....